What makes an author?

I filled my second planning book for Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West last week. Broaching a new notebook is a lovely feeling, isn’t it? So I’ve included a shot what my plans currently look like here – illustrating the 79th quest, the Smugglers of Appledore.

It’s hard work, frankly. I’ve reached around 1100 passages (something like 130k words in total) but normally only get one or two good writing sessions in a week. It would be great to ignore all my responsibilities and simply focus on the book, but I’d end up very hungry, with a sad wife and three crying children…

So I have to slog on! When asked by a young fan recently about the skills needed to be an author, I was able to quickly answer – patience! Determination! Self-confidence! I didn’t say anything about spelling or word choices… In fact, writing a gamebook series is a very skill-heavy task – you need a wide range of skills – but right now, it’s the ability to keep going that is of most use.

This chart shows you where I am with the draft. The big recent drop was me taking the hard decision to remove the sea… The Steam Highwayman will still be able to be a smuggler, but largely by moving things around on land and participating in one-off missions over the sea, rather than having a large sandbox sea module. I would simply have bloated the book beyond what I can be sure I’d finish.

That said, I recognise I have far more stamina for a project of this scale than I used to. I get tired after three hours of planning and writing, sure, but I know I can keep going and would be happier doing more sessions in a week. At this stage of working on my first book, I collapsed and gave in, said ‘It’s good enough!’ and prepared to publish. This time I can’t afford to do that: I want to do justice to the subject, to my readers who are expecting a really quality adventure, and to myself. I’ve got a lot better at writing mechanics and gameplay, and I want to edit and playtest this volume far more carefully than the previous ones.

So since I will be taking some time off with my family over the next months, it looks like it won’t be early in 2025 that I manage to Kickstart Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West. Patience and determination needed all round: if your PATIENCE is 14 or higher (adding 1 if you possess another open-world gamebook series), then turn to 2025…