An Out of Universe Commentary – The Cluster

The Death of the Old Gods Book One started as being simply called The Cluster, and it was something I was writing to be used as the basis for an audio adventure. That project moved on and is now something very different, and for a long time, The Cluster languished in a folder on a spare drive stacked with others in a desk drawer. Over the years I added to it, but eventually, other projects took over and The Cluster was almost forgotten.

Then on Tuesday, 14th January 2020, I posted it to my works blog. I had spoken about it in passing and a few people expressed an interest in reading it. I thought showing it to them wouldn’t do any harm, so I posted it.

The interest was considerable, with enough people emailing me asking for a continuation of the story. As I had added to it there was a little more, so I uploaded that too. When I exhausted what had been written the audience had grown and were still interested, so I began writing new chapters weekly to the story.

Three years later, the story of The Cluster was completed on Tuesday, 28th March 2023. I was amazed that the audience had stayed with it for the whole time, many of them emailing me weekly to comment on that week’s chapter. The resulting story was 131,491 words long, and when I moved it all into Scrivener (my preferred writing software) it rendered out as a print-ready paperback of 349 pages.

There are lots of things that surprised and pleased me about The Cluster. The audience engagement was wonderful, and my engagement remained consistent for the whole time I was writing it. I had never written anything longer than a few thousand words before embarking on the writing of The Cluster, and I marvelled that I had managed to weather the storm.

The resulting collected version had its issues. It had been written as an episodic story and needed some adjusting to work as a novel, and some of the earlier chapters – back when I was making it up as I went along – needed some work to bring them up to the standard of the later chapters.

The point where I had worked out a plot for the story is clear by a marked improvement in the writing. Because I didn’t have to consider what was going to happen – because I had already worked that out – I could concentrate on how it happened.

Believe it or not, this was my introduction to ‘plotting’. Before I just wrote, and the stories evolved as I worked through them. This isn’t hard to do with short stories, in fact, I still write them that way, but longer tales need more because there are more facts to follow over a longer period.

The Cluster taught me a great deal about writing, and how to adjust the tools and techniques of writing to my own needs. By the time I had finished the story, I was eager to try out what I had learned and quickly produced an outline for another tale, which I completed in a little less than seven months.
Still not fast, but considerably better than almost four years.

Meanwhile, I began rewriting The Cluster. As I write this, I am about two-thirds of the way through the chapters most in need of rewriting, and this too has taught me an important lesson.

Get it right the first time, because rewriting a long work is a nightmare.