I Am a Polar Bear

I notice that a lot of people on the internet have two things. YouTubers with a hugely successful profitable Instagram. Bloggers who start a YouTube channel or a podcast. Instagrammers who create makeup pallets. And some people have multiple things – they call them revenue streams if they’re managing to make a living out of them – but I think most people have their one main format that they regard as their primary thing.

I’m a blogger. I’d really like to start a YouTube channel but as I freeze up as soon as a camera is pointed at me, I think you can expect the first real video the day after an icicle grows off the end of Satan’s nose. But I do have a second thing, and my second thing is that I write books. Well, I’ve written a book, singular, and this blog is the moaning and groaning about my attempts to write a second.

In 2019, I self-published my first book. Because I like to keep the very widest gulf between my internet life and my “brickspace” life, I made two versions, one with my legal name on for people who know me at home and at work and one version with Juliet Frost on it, the name I use here on this blog. The “internet edition” is called Minus Twelve: An Arctic Adventure (and it’s available here if you’d like to buy a copy!). I sold about fifteen copies of the brickspace edition, including two through Amazon for which I earned two British pennies between them. Thanks for the generosity, Jeff. And I sold zero copies of Minus Twelve.

I didn’t write it to be rich and famous or to sell a zillion copies. I wrote it because so many people at work said “You should write a book!” and I’d always kind of liked the idea of writing my very own book and so I did. It sits on the shelf at the end of my desk and by the end of the year, it’s going to have a little brother or sister. Hopefully.

The first book was so easy. It flowed, it made sense, it had a certain magic to it. It took a couple of versions to get everything written but after that, it was just neatening up and nitpicking. I love my first book.

The second one feels a bit like trying to give birth to a planet. It just won’t come out, no matter how hard I push. I don’t hate it – I can feel wonderful pastel pink love for it oozing out of me at some point in the future but it’s not there yet. This could – will – be a book I like a lot and be proud of but the first draft took two and a half years & seven false starts and it still feels dry and wooden and unmagical. I kind of want to throw the whole thing away and start again. I’m not going to! I figured it would be ok once it was all in one piece. Once there’s something in existence to improve, you can start improving it. You need the foundations there to build something great. It doesn’t matter that this first draft is terrible. Its only purpose is to exist and once it exists, I can make it good.

(A little note on the first draft: it’s called v2 because v1 was a collection of attempts to begin. I figured I’d put them together and then go through with a purple pen and try to turn those seven beginnings into one acceptable beginning and printing it was the easiest way to do that.)

But you know, one of the major stumbling blocks in forcing out the first draft was getting everything in the right order. Given that it’s a road trip around Iceland’s Ring Road, you’d think the order would be pretty obvious. Well, it wasn’t. If the first draft has accomplished one single thing so far, it’s that it’s made me realise where certain chapters should go. And it’s also made me realise where I need to cut bits out. There are places I’ve visited that I can – and should – just leave out. So I guess the first draft has achieved something.

I’ve gone through my poor lifeless first draft and edited and tidied up what’s there, I’ve had realisations about the fundamental structure of the book and I’m adding new stuff. But I think I’m doing some of it for the sake of working on it because there’s absolutely no point in editing and tidying when what it really needs is entire sections rewriting. This is a road movie through a long light summer. I want some of that magic and sparkle. I want something of the feeling of an 11pm low sun, sitting outside the tent with a tin mug, tinkly guitary music in the car as I drive through an alien landscape. And I want more lava. That’s maybe where the problem is – lava isn’t “sonically cohesive” with the festival-esque atmosphere of the summer.

This isn’t really a post so much as a stream of consciousness about writing my difficult second book. So I’ll leave you with ten eleven things people don’t know about writing a book.

1. A book is never finished. You will always want to make changes, you’ll always squirm and see things you don’t like but at some point, you have to leave it alone and let it out into the world. The very next time you read it, you’ll want to make a lot of dramatic changes again and you can’t.
2. Every stage is the worst. Writing it is the worst. Editing it is the worst. Rewriting it is the worst. Reading it is the worst.
3. I don’t think it’s implausible to work on two books simultaneously. I’m not doing it at the moment but I did have The Russia Book as an alternative to take my mind off the Iceland Book or between prints. I wrote the first chapter but it’s not coming out any easier than this one so I decided not to stress-write two at once.
4. No one appreciates the work that actually goes into writing a book. They don’t see years of “why won’t it come out?!” and ten or twenty drafts or entire pens run dry of ink as you scribble on it and they wouldn’t understand if they did.
5. The easiest way of editing is to get the book printed in book form and take a coloured pen to it. Half the price of printing it on 100 sheets of A4 and much more portable and manageable. That’s why I have eight or nine versions of my first book (for your own sake, number the versions!). Get used to scribbling in books – I know it feels sacrilegious but that’s why you’ve had it printed.
6. You’re not getting a travel book published traditionally unless you can guarantee an audience in this day and age. That’s why they’re all by celebrities and journalists and why I self-publish.
7. There’s a reason an entire publishing industry exists. While I like the control of self-publishing, I don’t like that I have to be the cover designer and blurb-writer and proofreader – or, indeed, the editor. The actual writing is only one part of the process, it’s the bit I like and on this book, I don’t even like that bit.
8. It feels amazing to swear at your second book and then see your angelic first book that didn’t cause you any problems on the shelf next to you. One day you’ll have a whole shelf of your own books and you’ll look back on them all as paper angels. But all of them will be horrible demons in the early days.
9. How hard it is to get people to read your book. Even the ones who told you “You should write a book!” They don’t want to read it. They might – might – buy a copy but they won’t actually read it.
10. I tell myself I don’t care if no one reads my book. And I do now write just because I want my book to exist. Been there, been stung. But it does hurt when people show no interest. I have a shelf of my own books. They’re good books. It’s everyone else’s loss if they haven’t read them.
11. It feels ridiculous and embarrassing when people do show an interest. Yes, you can’t win with your reaction to my book. How can I be signing my own self-published book? Stop waving it at your friends. Don’t tell me I’ve achieved something wonderful. Please try to forget I wrote a book, don’t praise it!

You know what? I’m going to have a launch party for this book. I’m going to have cake and champagne red Fanta and dress up as a real author and I’m going to wave the actual books for a picture on Facebook, not just link to the printer with a broken image attached to the link. All the people who ignored that ugly link last time will notice this time and then I’ll be rich and famous from the ten copies of each that I’ll sell.