I wasn’t looking to write a novel.

What I was trying to do, yet again, was to escape a job that was systematically pulverising my soul. The idea was simple and elegant: in partnership with an old chum, I would turn my odd doodles into greetings cards. There was a niche, I felt sure, for lovers of the bizarre, grotesque and usually offensive.

Like all my entrepreneurial efforts, this one died quietly in its infancy. My friend was working non-stop at his regular job and we couldn’t agree on which direction to go next. Project shelved. More soul-pulverising years.

Then I became friends with a young web designer, and we talked – amongst many other ideas – about the cards. We speculated that they could be animated. We’d put the animations on the internet and start a subscription service and collect advertising revenue and get rich and buy Ferraris.

While Young Web Guy started researching the tech side, I picked six cards and wrote short vignettes around them. Four featured the tiny flying men I’d been doodling since my teenage years, with oversized heads and shrunken bodies.

One featured a small flying man talking to a cyclopean robin, wearing a crown. Another featured a tramp strangling another for an apple core. A third showed a flying man armed with a stick of celery and a megaphone, facing a swarm of enemies.

Initially, I recorded myself reading out the vignettes. They were scribbled on scraps of paper, and each lasted about a minute.

Then two things happened, only one of which was expected.

The expected thing, or rather half-expected, was that the animation idea petered out. Too expensive, at a time when I was really struggling financially. It was fine: I had form on failed entrepreneurship, and I knew I wasn’t really cut out for a Ferrari. I could hardly drive my Fiat Panda.

The unexpected thing was that the vignettes started growing and linking up. I’m deliberately using the passive voice , because it didn’t feel like I was doing it. I’d wake up with a bit more back story, and extra connections, and scribble it all down. The next day there would be more. Unlikely names were parachuting in left, right and centre: Hefftengott, Munder, Colin Breadwagon, Crowboy, the Lenderfen Kop, Join Your Sump, Lemon Cayman, Needy Jack the Highwayman.

Then things went completely bonkers. I couldn’t stop the stories flooding into my head. Over that summer, I spent all of my free time writing, often stopping up into the wee hours. It consumed all of my holiday. Yet no matter how much I wrote, there was more. I watched astonished as webs of ideas appeared. In went gods, Biblical references, tramp societies, songs, logic puzzles, a death goddess opening a gift shop, a mysterious kettle that no one could lift, science versus magic, talking hounds, even a parody of Coleridge writing Kubla Khan. And it was all littered with words of my own coinage.

It was the most blissful time I’d ever experienced. It was the most satisfying thing I’d ever done. It was delirious, joyful, and as easy as pie.

I took weeks to come down from that high and survey what I’d written. I couldn’t have been prouder. It was magnificent and mad as a box of frogs. And, I realised, it was completely incomprehensible to anyone other than me.

Furthermore, I didn’t know how to fix it. I’d had some useful feedback from friends, but I needed something far more comprehensive. I needed professional help.

There were two reasons why this was difficult. The first was acknowledging that I needed help. Taking it felt like an admission of failure. The second was feeling that getting help was somehow cheating. In retrospect, these were both stupid objections. Most writers don’t work in noble isolation. There are classes or writer’s groups, editors or literary minded friends.

When I finally took the plunge, I got ten thousand words of the comprehensive, fair-minded, insightful criticism that I could imagine. One of the nice things was the validation. Before I sent the manuscript, I begged my editor to give me the truth: could I write, or was I wasting my time? So I was delighted to find that my editor had been moved and excited and sometimes terrified by what I’d written. The work contained some most original ideas she’d ever encountered. My prose was good.

Not that she was reticent in pointing out the book’s many problems. It was all over the shop. There was enough in there to fill ten novels. Memorably, she told me, “Everything about this book is too long, even the title.”

It was back to the drawing board, equipped with a new and painful lesson about writing: sometimes, when you think all the hard work on a novel is behind you, you’re just getting started.

I spent a year completely revising my monster manuscript. The new book, still called By the Cark and Cath of the Moon, comprised the first third of the original, now reworked and expanded.

I’d got so much out of the first editor/advisor that I went back for a second round. More immensely helpful, constructive advice. Then back to rewriting. Three sentences for you, hundreds of hours for me.

By the end of it, I had something immeasurably tauter and more structured than I’d begun with. With hope and trepidation, I picked out six literary agents, sweated over accompanying letters, and posted it off.

And then…

And then, nothing. Polite but definite rejections.

This is a much harder lesson about writing than the first one: no matter how much you believe in your work, others may not like it. This sounds obvious, but from an author’s point of view, it really isn’t. To write something, you have to fall head-over-heels in love with it. And at some primal level, one that’s way deeper than reason, we expect others to love what we do.

But the cold fact is that if success in writing is measured by publication, then it’s statistically likely that yours will end in failure. Very few works end in publication. This is not just a matter of writing talent. It’s to do with what’s trending, what’s in the zeitgeist, what’s seen as old-hat, what the market is saturated with. And maybe, dare I suggest it, author marketability.

I’m not blaming agents and publishers. Like insurance companies, they’re in the probability business. Each author they support is a gamble, one on which they could lose time, money, or both. They need to play the odds. And I’m not making excuses for my failure. If my writing was fresh enough, distinctive enough, compelling enough, it would bulldoze through any other barriers.

Whatever. I stepped onto the stage, waiting for the World’s applause, or even a smattering of claps. After all that work, I just couldn’t take that roaring silence.

Yes, of course I shouldn’t have given up. Of course I should have tried again. But I’m wet, thin-skinned, and the second lesson was too hard, and I didn’t.

By the Cark and Cath of the Moon was quietly returned to the drawer and the hard drive. Like the sleeping Arthur, it’s waiting there until the world calls for it.

This post was supposed to enthuse you about a forthcoming work, and instead I’ve told you about its disappointing history. How did that happen? I’ll probably do another more straightforward post.

Anyway, I was looking at it a few days ago and felt a real conviction that there’s an audience out there for it, if only I could reach them.

In the many years since then, I’ve learned a lot about writing. I’m starting to see a path forward.

By the Cark and Cath of the Moon is coming.

Was it a bolt from the blue, or an idea that gradually came into focus? Did you set out with a plan, or did you hold onto your hat and ride the wind? Drop me a line, or let me know in the comments.