SEETHINGS Nearly Killed Me

SEETHINGS didn’t just test my ability to write—it dismantled me, rebuilt me, and demanded persistence long after quitting felt reasonable. Eight years, three books, and one obsession later, the story finally learned how to breathe.

Now that SEETHINGS III is finally out in the world, there’s a strange stillness I didn’t expect. Relief, yes—but also something closer to aftermath. The kind you feel when the noise fades, and you’re left alone with the echo of what it took to get there.

By most measurable standards, the release has been a success. It’s the fastest uptake the series has seen so far. The narrative momentum is stronger, the arcs sharper, the characters already positioned and primed by the time book three opens its teeth. That part makes sense. You don’t spend years laying foundations without eventually learning how to walk across them without checking every step.

But what readers don’t see—and what I’ve never been particularly good at hiding—is that the story didn’t just evolve. I did. And that growth wasn’t tidy, encouraging, or inspirational. It was abrasive. It scraped. It burned time, patience, and a few pieces of myself I probably won’t get back.

When I started writing SEETHINGS, I didn’t know I was writing a novel. I wasn’t outlining a trilogy. I wasn’t constructing a universe. I was circling a discomfort, chasing a voice, following a sensation that wouldn’t leave me alone. Calling it “book one” at the time would have been laughable. It only became a book once it had already done the damage.

And when I finally realised what I’d created, the edit nearly finished me.

I wish that were an exaggeration.

The first full rewrite was brutal—not because the story was bad (though much of it was), but because I didn’t yet have the skill to rescue it without resenting myself. Every sentence felt like an accusation. Every paragraph reminded me how little I knew when I wrote it. Editing isn’t refinement; it’s confrontation. And when you confront your own work, you confront the version of yourself that put it there.

There was a moment—one I remember far too clearly—when I decided I was done. The manuscript, printed and living in a thick lever-arch file, became the stand-in for everything I’d done wrong. I picked it up, walked outside, dumped it into the general waste bin, slammed the lid, and walked away as though that gesture alone could sever the connection.

It didn’t.

There were two problems with that attempt at erasure.

The first was time. The real currency. I’d already invested too much of myself to pretend I could simply undo it. Time is adhesive. It binds you to work even when you hate it—especially when you hate it—because walking away means admitting that all of it amounted to nothing. And that is a heavier failure than imperfection.

The second problem was digital reality. The manuscript was everywhere. Hard drives. Backups. Old folders I’d forgotten existed. Throwing away the physical copy was symbolic, not effective. To truly destroy it would have taken deliberate effort—hours of hunting, deleting, checking, and confirming. I didn’t have the energy for that. Rage is impulsive. Deletion is methodical.

Still, that moment mattered.

Anger, in that instance, was necessary. It was energy that needed somewhere to go. I let the manuscript sit in the bin long enough to absorb the smell of discarded meals and unwanted packaging. It earned that indignity. Then I retrieved it, filthy and bent, and carried it back inside.

And that’s when the real work began.

Pages had been torn from the binder. Sections were out of order. Hole-punches no longer lined up. I cleaned waste residue off the paper margins just to reread my own edits. There was something almost ceremonial in that reconstruction—as if I had to physically prove I was willing to put back together what I’d been so quick to abandon.

The uncomfortable truth about editing your own work is that it will never meet your expectations. Not because the work is flawed, but because expectation has no finish line. A parent wants the best for their child—but “best” is undefined, infinite, unreachable. You never arrive. You only stop.

And while you’re editing, you keep changing.

By the time I finished the final chapter, I was hundreds of thousands of words more experienced than the person who wrote the first. That growth doesn’t politely distribute itself across the manuscript. It accumulates. The later chapters always breathe better, think more clearly, and move with more confidence. The opening pages, once rewritten countless times, still betray their age to me.

I eventually understood that this imbalance wasn’t failure—it was evidence. Proof that the process was working, even if the discomfort never stopped. The only partial solution I’ve ever found is non-linear editing: jumping chapters, disrupting sequence, revisiting earlier sections after momentum has built elsewhere. Even then, the final pass always carries more authority than the first.

You don’t fix that. You accept it.

Eight years after the first words were written, SEETHINGS was finally published. It didn’t emerge smoothly. It stumbled. It still does. I’m still teaching it how to walk. But it exists—and more importantly, it connects. It became the foundation for the two books that followed, each darker, more obsessive, more resistant to market expectations than the last.

None of these books is polite. None of them wants to reassure. They don’t offer comfort or redemption in the conventional sense. They explore adulthood as it actually is for many people: compromised, morally tangled, quietly desperate, and forced to make decisions they never imagined when they were younger and convinced life would be simpler.

This trilogy is not interested in “happily ever after.”

It’s interesting in what happens when people realise that happiness isn’t guaranteed—and decide what they’re willing to sacrifice to get something that feels close enough.

Which brings me to the final—and most important—part of the chain.

The reader.

Every book is unfinished until the right reader finds it. And SEETHINGS is absolutely not for everyone. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it because misalignment is more damaging than obscurity. These books demand patience, tolerance for discomfort, and a willingness to sit inside moral ambiguity without being told what to think.

The wrong reader will hate them. The right reader will recognise themselves in places they’d rather not admit.

Finding you—that reader—is the only reason the rest of this matters. Not mass appeal. Not algorithms. Not trends. Just resonance. One mind meeting another across pages that nearly didn’t survive their own creation.

If SEETHINGS nearly killed me, it’s because it demanded honesty I wasn’t ready for at the time. But it also forced growth I couldn’t have reached any other way. And I don’t regret that—not the anger, not the bin, not the years, not even the moments where walking away felt easier.

Some stories don’t want to be written.

They insist on it.

— Michael