Editing Lifetime Subscription: An Author’s Summer of Productive Procrastination.
I planned to spend the summer finishing the edit of Lifetime Subscription. Then summer holidays, social media and productive procrastination got in the way.
Every summer I make roughly the same mistake.
I look at the calendar, see several weeks stretching invitingly ahead and think: Excellent. I’ll get loads of writing done.
This is despite decades of evidence suggesting that the summer holidays do not, in fact, contain substantially more hours than the rest of the year.
My grand plan this summer was to finish editing Lifetime Subscription, the second book in my Red Tape and Ruin series. The manuscript exists. The story exists. Most of the difficult work has already been done.
All I had to do was edit it. Simple. Except I went to France for three weeks with the family.
Summer has an extraordinary ability to turn a perfectly sensible writing schedule into a collection of BBQs, camping, household jobs, family commitments and afternoons where you suddenly realise it is half past five and you haven’t opened the manuscript.
There were some productive days, well one productive day. There were considerably more days when I thought about being productive. Just not at editing…
The problem with editing
Writing a first draft is comparatively easy because you are allowed to make things up.
Editing means confronting what you previously made up.
It involves discovering that a character apparently knows something three chapters before anyone told them, that somebody has travelled across London in approximately four minutes, or that an important plot development depends entirely upon everybody involved temporarily becoming an idiot.
Then there are the sentences you were incredibly pleased with six months ago. Now, you wonder who wrote them. Unfortunately, the answer is you.
Lifetime Subscription is a near-future technology thriller and satire following journalist Sarah Perriam as she begins investigating something that initially seems almost laughably trivial: her smart kettle stops boiling water properly.
As Sarah puts it:
“First, the dryer goes on strike, and now the kettle won’t boil. What’s next? Will the fridge stop working unless we give it a bloody tip?”
The answer, inevitably, is considerably worse than an argumentative refrigerator.
The book explores what happens when everything becomes a service, ownership becomes conditional and corporations discover that something you have already purchased represents an exciting new opportunity to sell it to you again.
Sarah eventually describes the situation rather neatly:
“The twenty-first century has apparently given us the opportunity to lease, for a small fee, a boiling point.”
Which is hopefully absurd. The slightly uncomfortable part is that it doesn’t feel that absurd anymore.
Productive procrastination
There is another reason the editing hasn’t progressed quite as quickly as planned.
I’ve started posting on social media. Those who know me will appreciate what an unexpected sentence that is, I’m a lurker not a creator.
After around six years of being an author, I’ve finally decided that perhaps occasionally telling people that I write books might help people discover that I write books. Revolutionary marketing strategy, I know.
So I’ve been creating posts for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube Shorts, including a series of short extracts from the audiobook of Project Radiant.
The idea is simple: Day One, Day Two, Day Three… of sharing a clip from my book.
Each video contains a short section from the audiobook, narrated by Clare Saxby (you can find her on Instagram), along with an introduction, captions and visuals.
It is genuinely useful promotional work, I think. It is also an absolutely magnificent way of avoiding editing, I know.
You see, editing requires opening a manuscript and making decisions. Social media requires sitting in front of a phone, editing sound and videos and choosing fonts.
The other decisions obviously are deciding whether a clip should be 30 seconds long or a minute. Finding some background music.And wondering whether #BookTok is better than #TechThriller. These are wonderfully absorbing problems because none of them involve fixing Chapter Seventeen.
This is what I have decided to call productive procrastination. I am doing something useful. It just isn’t necessarily the useful thing I was supposed to be doing.
September has arrived
Unfortunately, summer has now finished. The schools are back. The evenings are beginning to draw in. The vague promise that I will “get properly stuck into it over the summer” has expired.
There is nowhere left to hide. Well, apart from Canva, which is a lot harder to get to grips with than it claimed on the website.
So September means getting serious about Lifetime Subscription again. There are chapters to tighten, continuity problems to fix, scenes to move and jokes that seemed considerably funnier when I first wrote them.
There is also the difficult balancing act at the heart of this particular book. It needs to work as a thriller while still being funny. The technology needs to be believable without pages of explanation. The satire needs to feel slightly ridiculous while remaining close enough to reality that readers occasionally stop and think: Hang on. Someone might actually do this.
Because underneath the jokes about kettles, subscriptions and artificial intelligence, Lifetime Subscription is really about ownership and control. If the product in your house requires somebody else’s server to keep working, do you actually own it?
And if governments eventually depend upon technology supplied using the same commercial model, what happens when somebody decides to change the subscription?
That is where Sarah’s broken kettle eventually leads. I would tell you more, but I am trying very hard not to spoil my own book before I finish editing it. So the social-media clips will continue. The posts will continue. There may even be the occasional video in which I attempt to look as though I know what I am doing.
But the manuscript is open again. The summer excuses have officially run out.
It is time to finish Lifetime Subscription.
Just as soon as I’ve finished editing this week’s TikTok.