Write on time: How I wrote my book, Chaos Theory in 45 minutes (every day for 4 years).
Timing is everything when it comes to publishing. But writing is often a slow, painstaking process. Debut author Sylvia Leatham writes about making the most of limited time to work on her first book, Chaos Theory.
My debut novel, Chaos Theory, has just been published by Storm Publishing. It’s a workplace comedy that follows the adventures – in career and in love – of Maeve McGettigan, a jaded Irish tourism executive charged with temporarily ‘babysitting’ a cutting-edge AI robot called Kobi. Chaos quickly erupts due to Kobi’s well-meaning but ill-judged attempts to improve efficiency and fit in with his coworkers. Maeve is also busy navigating a messy ‘situationship’ with her colleague Shane, while finding herself increasingly drawn to Josh, a good-looking, slightly mysterious robot engineer (and human).
While the tone of the book is charming, cosy and uplifting, bubbling away under the surface are contemporary issues such as the ethics of generative AI, the need for responsible research, and the economic and existential threat posed by artificial intelligence. But I didn’t set out to write a topical book, and I don’t believe it’s possible to do so, unless you’re an especially fast writer. When I started Chaos Theory, in many ways my timing was terrible – I was a novice writer with almost no time to write.
Chaos Theory: Getting Started
I put the first words down in January 2021, in response to a writing prompt issued by Marian Keyes during a series of tutorials she generously shared on YouTube in Covid times. (The tutorials are still available and well worth watching.) The prompt was: “The donuts had failed to de-escalate the situation.” A whole world of possibilities was contained within those eight words, and it was Kobi’s voice that emerged when I sat down to write my 500-word response.
Many people took up new hobbies in the Covid era. In theory, I had no time for a new interest. I had a full-time job, a child too young for homeschooling, and I was in the middle of an extremely complicated house purchase/sale that was perpetually on the brink of collapse. (My solicitor said the entire process was “jinxed”. When a legal person uses a term like that, you know you’re in trouble!)
Back in 2021, nobody knew when the pandemic would end. I needed something to stop me spiralling into anxious negativity. Writing became my escape into an alternate universe, one I could understand and control.
‘The dead hour’
I’d always wanted to write a book. But aside from a general fear of failure, a major reason I could never get started was due to the myth of having to be an early riser. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard people say “Oh, I get up at 5am” or “Just get up before your kids”. For a night owl like me, you might as well be asking me to arise from the grave as arise early from the leaba. But all that changed when I discovered ‘the dead hour’.
People are fond of saying that children disrupt your life. But I found the opposite: Kids turn your messy, chaotic life into a highly structured, rigid routine. Every weekday is the same, over and over: work, dinner, tidy up, put kids to bed, maybe some TV, then sleep.
After seven months of legal wrangling, our house purchase finally went through, and in spring 2021 we moved from a tiny maisonette with a galley kitchen into a decent-sized house. For the first time in my life, I was living in a house with a dishwasher. It’s not an exaggeration to say that dishwasher transformed my life.
The post-dinner tidy-up was now taking just a few minutes. During this time, my daughter would be watching TV, winding down before bedtime. That’s when it hit me: This was a time when nobody needed me. My husband could hang out with my daughter in the living room, and I could sneak away upstairs for 45 minutes or sometimes a little more. ‘The dead hour’ was time I could resurrect for myself.
Maximising time
Forty-five minutes is not a long time by itself. But after 45 minutes a day, every day for two years, I had a good first draft of a book. I spent the next two years editing and querying the book (a process that really should have been done sequentially, but I made the mistake of doing simultaneously!).
I am by nature quite a slow writer. But I discovered a trick to maximise my precious time at the keyboard. During any walking time, I made long voice recordings, brainstorming aloud everything from plot to character development to backstory. Often I simply asked myself: “What’s happening in the next chapter?”
So when I got to my laptop each evening, I always had a recording to listen to, and I never had to face a blank screen. A huge amount of writing takes place in your mind, not on the page. Writing is thinking.
When it comes to getting the words down, the key is to find a time and a process that works for you.
(c) Sylvia Leatham
https://linktr.ee/SylviaLeatham
Author photograph (c) Ger Holland
About Chaos Theory by Sylvia Leatham:
Sometimes the future arrives whether you’re ready for it or not. A charmingly quirky, feel-good Irish comedy about accidentally finding yourself.
Maeve McGettigan has just landed a job as Dublin’s least prepared robot babysitter. One minute she’s coasting through her boring marketing job; the next, she’s responsible for Kobi: a well-meaning robot assistant with zero filter and a knack for publicly humiliating her. As chaos erupts around her, Maeve finds herself unexpectedly caught between two very different men: Shane – her on-again, off-again messy situationship – and Josh, Kobi’s nerdy-in-a-hot-way creator who makes her question everything she thought she wanted for her life.
But then Maeve and Kobi’s story takes a truly shocking twist, and it’s suddenly time for her to decide: what – and who – is she really fighting for?
A wonderfully heartwarming read about finding your people and embracing the unexpected, even when it’s a mischievous robot. After all, sometimes the most chaotic situations lead you to exactly where you belong.
Chaos Theory by Sylvia Leatham is out now with Storm Publishing. Order your copy of Chaos Theory online here.
Read more Meet the Author articles on Writing.ie here.
