Because he thought he saw something floating in those eyes. Connected to the “tree,” which was a huge mushroom. Beside a cracked stone sign that used to welcome visitors to Ambergris. Eventually, it will be a sharp-looking trade paperback with a Ben Templesmith cover.He’d gone to investigate a death. About 20,000 words of really excellent third draft, about 10,000 words of incomplete rough drafts, about 200 notecards, and another 20 to 40 torn-out pages, along with 40 pages of bullet point typed up notes and observations.

So that’s the current anatomy of my novel, Finch. I used it initially for positioning purposes, for the context of an Ambergris several hundred years after the last time period I wrote about. Here, I found my old wallet, for example…Īnd, oh my god, it’s a map of Ambergris! Something I probably won’t adhere to or use. Sometimes there are tangential benefits to re-starting a novel. I like paper that’s meant for art sometimes, especially if it means a very long page with the binding horizontal rather than vertical. On the left, you see an actual typed draft of the first few pages, which may be old now (still checking it over), and then two different yet complementary styles of notebook–the rich, swirled black velvet of an oversized one that gives me enough room to write in my left-handedness, and then to the far right torn out pages from an illustrator’s pad. “Ethan Bliss” is the name of a fellow player on my high school soccer team. Interestingly, that top notecard was originally meant for another novel entirely, but has become repurposed. Whenever whatever I’m writing on is covered in text, inside and out, I feel immersed in the novel. I like to scrawl on the insides of folders, like the contrast of black ink with green, for example. Imagine–an entire world contained in such a narrow space…Īssembled: notecards with individual fragments of dialogue, phrases, ideas more formalized bullet point character and story notes already typed up partial rough draft scenes housed in notebooks additional notes on the inside of a folder and the thick, black cover of the moleskin tome in which I tend to do more rapacious and complete rough drafts. What lurks behind those leather walls? Let’s find out…

So I went through the notes and rough draft materials for my new novel, Finch, today.

Finch by jeff vandermeer