​Where is Windmills?

There’s a familiar eye roll I direct at myself every time I write the word Windmills. If you’ve known me or followed my career for a while, then I do not for a second begrudge you doing the same before closing this blog post. But it’s been a while since I spoke about Windmills in any candid, updating kind of way, and I wanted to address it again.
 
If you’re relatively new here you might be wondering what I’m on about. So, a quick recap for the next couple of paragraphs, and also an invitation for those who’ve heard it all before to skip right ahead.
 
Windmills is, in the most succinct terms possible, my dream project. I’ve been unable to let go of it since I wrote the first version as a novel in 2009. This was followed by a stage version in 2010, a novel sequel manuscript in 2011, a rewritten version that I self-published in 2012, another stage version that same year, a TV pilot screenplay adaptation that won a major award in 2015, another rewritten manuscript in 2018 and another in 2021 that very nearly got published before the plug was pulled for reasons I’ll discuss below.
 
What exactly is Windmills? The answer to that question, or lack thereof, is probably the reason I’ve been unable to produce a version that works. Windmills is the story of Leo Grey, a 17-year-old straight-A student who gets a publishing deal for his first novel. But when a single bad choice at a party jeopardises his future, Leo is forced to decide exactly how far he is willing to go to protect himself. Leo’s increasing moral decline and its consequences spiral into the post school lives of his best friend and girlfriend, whose own resultant moral dilemmas the novel subsequently explores before returning to Leo many years later. In its most complete versions Windmills has always been a sprawling story about corruption and the clash between who we think we are and who we prove to be when the gun is to our head.
 
Ever since I wrote the first version in high school I have believed in this story on an instinctive level. Somehow, despite my perpetual inability to realise it, that belief has never gone away. I still think the characters are rich, both sympathetic and reprehensible. I think it packs in devastating twists and heartbreaking moments of wounded people trying to endure. I think at its core it says something fundamental about human nature, something dark but not without compassion.
 
So why hasn’t it ever worked?
 
I think the answer to that lies in something a high school teacher pointed out about the very first draft sixteen years ago. Upon reading it, he asked me point blank ‘what is it?’ Meaning; is it a YA drama, an adult crime thriller, a literary novel about morality or an airport one full of operatic drug lords and violent murders and corrupt cops and Machiavellian but slightly implausible string pulling?
 
The only honest answer I’ve ever had to that question hasn’t satisfied anyone. Because in truth, Windmills is all of the above.
 
Which isn’t to say that I haven’t tried to compromise. One of the reasons the 2015 TV version won the Sir Peter Ustinov Award and basically kickstarted my career (still the only award I’ve ever won) is because the pilot episode adapted only the first part of the story, the high school segment, without really setting up that this narrative would follow the characters into borderline middle age. When I met with interested producers and explained the fact, said interest waned pretty fast. How are you supposed to sell something as being similar to 13 Reasons Why if it turns into Breaking Bad in episode two?
 
The novel version I wrote in 2018 tried to split the difference by keeping the same events but transplanting them all to the high school setting. Which only brought the question of genre into even sharper relief, because suddenly it was the 17-year-old versions of the characters getting caught up in drug cartel wars rather than their older, more jaded incarnations.
 
The version that came the closest to shelves was the one I wrote in 2021 for HarperCollins. This take also stuck to the high school setting but focused on just the first part of the original story, fleshing out the characters and events and leaving the later crime related material for a potential future book. I was really, really proud of that one. And indeed it went as far as editing before the same old problem became clear; it was still just too bleak and dark to get away with being a YA novel, especially given it didn’t really have a resolution because, well, it was a quarter of a story. Eventually we agreed it wasn’t working and I wrote Andromache Between Worlds instead. Not a choice I regret, given how well loved that book is.   
 
So Windmills has been in a weird limbo for a few years now. I still wholeheartedly believe in the quality of that last version even if it feels unfinished. I’ve even tried to rework it back into the first act of the bigger story, but I’ve created new problems for myself because those far more developed characters and plotlines can’t be neatly shortened the way they’d need to be to not exhaust readers before they reach the halfway point. And besides, it wouldn’t remove the persistent problem of Windmills starting in high school and thereby creating the mistaken impression that this is a book for teenagers.
 
So what would? I don’t know. I’ve tried to write prologues that indicate where the narrative will eventually go, but they feel cheap and pandering. I’ve experimented with versions that jump back and forth between timelines like The Hunted or The Caretaker did, but trying to juggle four timelines rather than two feels like a recipe for confusion. I’ve tried to rework the high school material into university, but it doesn’t feel like it makes a world of difference given that the characters still have to be young and stupid for the first part to work and uni just doesn’t feel that different to school when you’re trying to appeal to an older audience. Besides, one of my favourite parts of the book is the way that adolescent mistakes reverberate well into adulthood, the consequences getting worse the older the characters become and the more to lose they have. 
 
It’s no secret that I’ve been seeding Windmills heavily in my other fiction. Several major characters from it have been introduced in books like The Caretaker and The Consequence. I’ve been alluding to its events since The Inheritance. Windmills has been in the background of my novels since I started writing novels, the hope being that one day it will get published and my longest-term readers will be rewarded in just how many threads get paid off when the whole picture becomes clear. But that makes it all sound like more of a grand plan than it actually is. Windmills pre-dated Maggie and Jack and the Driver. It’s the biggest part of my writing life. I can’t help but pay tribute to it even if nobody (yet) can recognise said tributes.
 
Every time I have a lull between projects I return to Windmills. I toy with different versions and I write speculative outlines and I always emerge with the same two conclusions; that I don’t have a solve to the story’s problems, and that I still believe the story is worth telling.
 
The longer Windmills remains unpublished, the more a new belief begins to cohere. That maybe the only version of it that can work is the version that doesn’t compromise. The version that is exactly what it is; a sprawling epic violent saga that follows a high school mistake into an adult nightmare. Maybe what makes Windmills a hard sell is what makes it special.
 
Maybe one day I’ll write a big enough hit that I’ll have carte blanche on what I want to do next. Maybe then I can finally tell Windmills the way I want it to. Or maybe I release it in a different way. Independently, in instalments on Substack, or something. Maybe I try another TV version, or even a film screenplay. I don’t know. Nothing is off the table.
 
But after all these years I know with hard certainty that I’m never going to be totally satisfied until Windmills gets its shot. And I don’t think a compromised release will be enough. I think I need it to aim for the biggest release I can manage, to know one way or another whether it was really as good as I’ve always imagined.
 
Is that hope too ambitious? Probably. But that wouldn’t be a new problem for Windmills. 

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