Gatehouse Apartments was written between Monday, 26 June 2023 to Wednesday, 24 January 2024, and not counting a little uncertainty around Chapter 26 it went smoothly. My issues with Chapter 26 were not due to writer’s block or uncertainty about the story, which had all been planned out, it was just a case of uncertainty concerning tone and how far might be too far.
The book sat on my hard drive for a while after this, as I worked on other things, and then I did a rewrite in September of 2024 so I could finally draw a line under it and move on to other things.
Like most of what I write Gatehouse Apartments was originally written for the entertainment of my work colleagues and was posted on my works blog, because of this, I had to maintain certain standards or risk being removed from the platform.
I’m not talking about standards of quality here, the only standard of quality it has to meet is the readers, either they like it or they don’t, what I’m referring to are the cold “standards of practice” that most organisations have.
These are limiting, but also at times invigorating.
I can’t use excessive sex or violence to make a point or to use it as exploitative entertainment, so I have to do it in other ways. Or try to at least. This is not that I have some conviction against exploitative entertainment, one look at my movie collection would convince most I have very few standards when it comes to that, but strict standards make a writer think differently about how they approach their work.
Please note, I said differently, and not better. It certainly isn’t better.
Gatehouse Apartments was written over seven months, which seems like a long time for a relatively short novel, though it’s a lot better than my last attempt, which took me over four years to complete, so I’m not complaining.
I learned a lot from writing my first novel (a heroic fantasy story called “The Cluster”) The Cluster taught me that I could write a long-form story and complete the task. Gatehouse Apartments taught me that I could write a detailed plan and keep to it with few deviations. This is not to say that Gatehouse Apartments is exactly how I envisioned it, it isn’t, but that anything that remained in the notes was not entirely necessary for the story to unfold.
What didn’t make it to the page?
Well, I originally had about six more ghosts to introduce, and during the journey through the apartment block at the end of the story we would see their lives and deaths in more explicit detail.
I’d still like to do this, but I realise that this would make the story half again as long, and as I said earlier, sometimes you have to decide how much is too much. When I introduced certain characters and didn’t have the space to explore them as I wanted I realised it was best to reduce my range a little.
It’s a shame, as I wanted to tell you about the relationship between Chaz and Bobby Dee or go into the warped connection between Andrew Nash and Nikita, but I still have the notes, so maybe those stories will turn up in another project.
The best lesson I’ve learned is not to feel precious about a project, as there’s always another. I could spend months eliminating every error I see (or think I see) in Gatehouse Apartments, only to have people still see errors anyway. It won’t be descriptive enough for some, while others will think it overwritten. Some will hate the characters while others will think you spotlighted the wrong ones entirely, while others will see me for the hack writer I am and disregard anything I do.
I think I’ve learned that I can chase some of these potential problems, even eradicate many of them, but there is a time to stop and take what you have learned to the next project, for which I have many choices.
There are always more projects. The worlds are filled with tales…
September 2024
Worcester, UK.