Second Book Syndrome

I feel as if I’ve always known the phrase ‘that difficult second album’ forever: it lives in my vernacular. Mostly due to the fact that I’m married to a man who has spent his career in the music industry and knows all about troubled artists trying to create a second body of work.

Not sure those life skills helped him much when it came to me and the trauma of writing Book Two.

Him, my debut, took nine years. Obviously there were huge writing breaks in all that time but essentially from the very first page to the final rewrite was almost a decade. And in all the excitement of getting a two book publishing deal it never once crossed my mind to ask about the deadline for Book Two.

March 2018 and I’d spent a few blissful weeks researching the idea for my second novel and had roughly 20,000 words down on paper. An alarming email came in from my agent checking my deadline;  the response was immediate and harsh. August 2018 to the copy editor, not just the first, second, third draft but the final one. 

A meltdown ensued. This book which I’d been thinking about for seven years (right the way through Book One, an escape mechanism I now realise since I did exactly the same during Book Two, oh the appeal of a far off, bright shiny new idea) became all-encompassing, a marathon, the only thing in my life.

I dropped a lot of balls. Mothering ones (certainly), domestic ones (generally), friends and a social life went out of the window. I wrote and raged through a variety of emotions – boredom sometimes when I felt I didn’t know my characters well enough to care, ecstasy whenever I had a breakthrough and another piece of the story fell into place. The relentlessness of it was a new experience, instead of a 9 to 5 job it became a 6 to 11 with a few school runs and supermarket shops in between. Weekends? What were they? Self-doubt was probably the defining sentiment at this time but I wrote right through it anyway, I didn’t have a choice. 

By July I had a first, very rough draft which I managed to put away for a week. And when I came back to it, metaphorically wearing a crash helmet and fireproof overalls (is that just me?) it was actually better than I thought. I spent the next two months rewriting from start to finish and in October I sent it off to my editor – (she’d been very understanding over the deadline fiasco).

We worked on a couple of edits and it finally went off to the copyeditor at the end of the year. The strangest thing was getting the final proofs back. I was still in the throws of Second Book Syndrome, clenched with doubt and dread basically. But, I realised, I loved this story, dare I say it, even as much as my first one. I’ll admit to an indulgent final evening when I read that proof for the last time. I put on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, a significant record in the novel, I poured a glass of rosé and for the last fifty pages I wept. 

Mainly for the characters whom I’d come to love like friends and partly for the intensity of it all, for this mad, crazy eight months where I’d had no room in my head for anything else.

Mine comes out this week and I’m as proud of it as Him. And what have I learned from the trauma of Second Book Syndrome is that it doesn’t really matter how you get there. Frenetically twenty-four seven, dribs and drabs between school runs, five am starts, writing in car parks, because in the end you get there. And when you hold your finished book in your hand you remember, oh yeah, it’s the thing I love most in the world.

Mine is published in ebook and audio on 22 August http://bit.ly/mineebook

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Clare Empson is a journalist and author with a background in national newspapers. Her debut novel HIM published as paperback in April and MINE is her second novel. Set over two timelines it features the fraught reunion between a birth mother and son set against a passionate love story from the 70s

Follow her on Twitter @ClareEmpson2

Find out more about her on her website https://www.clareempson.com/

MINE

‘Who am I? Why am I here? Why did my mother give me away?’

On the surface, Luke and his girlfriend Hannah seem to have a perfect life. He’s an A&R man, she’s an arts correspondent and they are devoted to their new-born son Samuel.

But beneath the gloss Luke has always felt like an outsider. So when he finds his birth mother Alice, the instant connection with her is a little like falling in love.

When Hannah goes back to work, Luke asks Alice to look after their son. But Alice – fuelled with grief from when her baby was taken from her 27 years ago – starts to fall in love with Samuel. And Luke won’t settle for his mother pushing him aside once again…

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