My Writing Process 2014
Many thanks to the wonderful Ekaterine Xia for asking me to be part of this blog relay. She can be found online here.
1) What are you working on?
I've been writing in the same space opera universe since 1995, at which point I'd been planning in it for around a year: it never gets tiring. I'm working on two books and thinking about two more - vaguely prodding at a standalone novel bridging the gap between Sailor to a Siren and Rough Diamond that's coming out as a crime thriller, and working in a more serious way on one of Rough Diamond's sequels. I'm also pondering a light re-edit of Rough Diamond and a heavy re-edit of its immediate sequel, which was written as its second half before I realised I had zero chance of finding a publisher for a 200,000 word first novel in the current climate.
2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?
I'm fed up of seeing space settings that are apparently hundreds or thousands of years in the future filled with white characters - it assumes people of colour failed to get on the colony vessels in the first place or, more accurately, often points to a blind spot in the writer or publisher's mentality that assumes only white people have adventures. I have a few white, black and Asian characters but the majority are biracial. My "magic system" is predicated upon sentient magic, which is pretty rare in adult or NA fiction (it can be found occasionally in YA: not sure about the genre split reason, if any).
3) Why do you write what you do?
In terms of the story, I can't not - the longer I spend working with this world and characters the more depth I find. In terms of more abstract decisions over setting and theme, space opera gives me a lot of freedom for the story to come out exactly the way I want it to come out - I can have spaceships, magic, epic sections, thriller sections, anything. Yes, I could have taken these characters into a very different universe and still had a lot of fun with them - for a while I considered resetting Rough Diamond and its sequels as contemporary techno-thrillers - but the space setting is just somewhere I really enjoy working.
4) How does your writing process work?
I'm not one for detailed plans but I will make notes if I'm not sure where I'm going or unsure about which of two storyline decisions to make. Personally I dislike the phrase "pantsing" for writing without a detailed plan - it's rather disrespectful: I write without plans because I start out with the big picture in my head and a lot of the details are immaterial.
I write all my first drafts on paper with a fountain pen, usually in bed or while commuting - I'm a big one for feeling comfy but also for using up dead time. My first typed draft is therefore a first edit. I do at least one edit electronically in Word, at least one subsequent edit on a printout with a red pen and at least one edit via reading the "completed" version on my Kindle and noting errors: editing in a few different font styles gives me a greater chance of catching mistakes, and, in particular, experiencing the book on Kindle gives me a critical reader's eye on the work as opposed to a critical author's.
On 19th May, My Writing Process will pass on to David Craig and Alex Timperley. David is a talented Glaswegian novelist who is currently writing a historical supernatural mystery set in his home city. Alex is a sports writer: as well as writing the occasional bit of nonsense on his blog, he writes about football for fun on the weekends. He is a contributor to Sabotage Times and an editor of Typical City, "the best Manchester City blog on the internet" (according to Alex).
1) What are you working on?
I've been writing in the same space opera universe since 1995, at which point I'd been planning in it for around a year: it never gets tiring. I'm working on two books and thinking about two more - vaguely prodding at a standalone novel bridging the gap between Sailor to a Siren and Rough Diamond that's coming out as a crime thriller, and working in a more serious way on one of Rough Diamond's sequels. I'm also pondering a light re-edit of Rough Diamond and a heavy re-edit of its immediate sequel, which was written as its second half before I realised I had zero chance of finding a publisher for a 200,000 word first novel in the current climate.
2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?
I'm fed up of seeing space settings that are apparently hundreds or thousands of years in the future filled with white characters - it assumes people of colour failed to get on the colony vessels in the first place or, more accurately, often points to a blind spot in the writer or publisher's mentality that assumes only white people have adventures. I have a few white, black and Asian characters but the majority are biracial. My "magic system" is predicated upon sentient magic, which is pretty rare in adult or NA fiction (it can be found occasionally in YA: not sure about the genre split reason, if any).
3) Why do you write what you do?
In terms of the story, I can't not - the longer I spend working with this world and characters the more depth I find. In terms of more abstract decisions over setting and theme, space opera gives me a lot of freedom for the story to come out exactly the way I want it to come out - I can have spaceships, magic, epic sections, thriller sections, anything. Yes, I could have taken these characters into a very different universe and still had a lot of fun with them - for a while I considered resetting Rough Diamond and its sequels as contemporary techno-thrillers - but the space setting is just somewhere I really enjoy working.
4) How does your writing process work?
I'm not one for detailed plans but I will make notes if I'm not sure where I'm going or unsure about which of two storyline decisions to make. Personally I dislike the phrase "pantsing" for writing without a detailed plan - it's rather disrespectful: I write without plans because I start out with the big picture in my head and a lot of the details are immaterial.
I write all my first drafts on paper with a fountain pen, usually in bed or while commuting - I'm a big one for feeling comfy but also for using up dead time. My first typed draft is therefore a first edit. I do at least one edit electronically in Word, at least one subsequent edit on a printout with a red pen and at least one edit via reading the "completed" version on my Kindle and noting errors: editing in a few different font styles gives me a greater chance of catching mistakes, and, in particular, experiencing the book on Kindle gives me a critical reader's eye on the work as opposed to a critical author's.
On 19th May, My Writing Process will pass on to David Craig and Alex Timperley. David is a talented Glaswegian novelist who is currently writing a historical supernatural mystery set in his home city. Alex is a sports writer: as well as writing the occasional bit of nonsense on his blog, he writes about football for fun on the weekends. He is a contributor to Sabotage Times and an editor of Typical City, "the best Manchester City blog on the internet" (according to Alex).