Author Archives: Tony Ballantyne

How Writers Write is a monthly series of guest posts where established writers invite you into their workspaces, reveal their work habits and share their experience.

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I introduced myself to Chris Beckett at an Eastercon in Blackpool:  I wanted to tell him how much I’d enjoyed his short stories.  Here he tells us how they are written…

What tools do you use?

I write on my fairly aged laptop, using word. There was a time, long ago, when I found it hard to write directly onto a keyboard – which would then have been a typewriter– and liked to write by hand first, but now it’s the opposite. I’ve pretty much lost the knack of writing by hand, for anything other than short notes, and my handwriting is bad to the point of illegibility, even to me.

I do not plan things out in detail in advance. I just don’t know how to do that. I start with only the vaguest idea of a plot, and slowly batter it into shape, as characters start to come to life, and my fictional world starts to generate interesting possibilities. I do sometimes take notes on scraps of paper, usually just a list of things I don’t want to forget in that day’s writing. I also from time to time compile things like lists of minor characters as word files, so I can refer to them if I need to remind myself. When writing Dark Eden, I also used Paint to draw a couple of maps. (I had a pretty clear map in mind for the other Eden novels but found I was able to hold it in my mind.) A few times with short stories I have plotted the whole thing out, but even then they change in the writing.

I’ve just started using my phone to make voice memos when I’m walking, so as to stop myself having to endlessly rehearse ideas to prevent myself from forgetting them. That said, I am fairly relaxed about forgetting things. My son told me that Tom Waits (I think) said that he never worried about forgetting ideas because if any idea was any good it would reoccur. I agree with that.

When do you write?

I no longer have a ‘day job’, and it’s six years since I had a full-time day job. I try and write every day, for at least four or five hours, assuming that I haven’t got something else on. When something is really bubbling, and also when I am at the copyediting stage (work which is easy to pick up and put down), I’ll also write odd hours when I can fit them in.

Writing seldom comes easily to me (although editing I love), and when I sit down to it, it usually feels like the last thing I want to do, much like going for a run, or a swim, or anything that involves effort! If I waited for the spirit to move me I’d wait forever, and the only way I can make it happen, it is to make myself sit down and bang something out.

Oddly, given my reluctance to actually get on with it, I am incapable of not being a writer. There have been times in my life when I’ve thought, ‘Maybe it would be better if I gave this up and made something of the rest of my life’, but that thought simply cannot find any traction at all.

Where do you write?

I usually write at my kitchen table which is fairly well-lit and from where there is a view of the garden. We have a small study in our house but I haven’t used it since I stopped writing on a PC as opposed to a laptop many years ago.

I also quite like working in a café (no café in particular), where there is hum of background conversation. It’s company of a sort, it’s nice having someone else make the coffee, and social convention prevents you from getting up, pacing around and checking whether there is anything nice in the fridge at regular intervals. I remember I discovered the benefits of working in a place where other people were talking as a 19-year-old first year student, when I wrote my first (unpublished) novel. I started by writing in what was called the Undergraduate Reading Room (a kind of annexe of the library), but I found it suited me better to sit in the small common room there, where you could buy nasty (in a good way) black coffees from a machine and (in those days) smoke equally nasty cigarettes, while other people came and went. (I don’t smoke anymore, but I still love the hit of coffee. It is my favourite of all drugs.)

I don’t work in a cafe all that often, though, because conditions have to be optimal. I love the background white noise of people talking but if I can actually hear what they are saying I eavesdrop and that becomes distracting, particularly if I find the people irritating. Also, intrusive background music irritates me, although I can cope with something tinkly and emotionally bland like (to my ears) most jazz.

Another place I love to write is on a train. When I was working part-time in Norwich, I used to regularly have a 3-hour return train journey there, and sometimes I’d get more done in those three hours than in a whole day at home. Provided there’s space, and a table, and not too much noise and mess, I love trains. A table to myself in a train, a black coffee, the world going by outside: it doesn’t get much better as far as I’m concerned.

I suppose a lot of the work of writing takes place when you are not actually sitting at a keyboard at all. I don’t have any special way of accessing inspiration, but ideas come to me when I am travelling from a to b, or running, or swimming, or out walking the dog. I live in Cambridge and one of my favourite places to walk with him is the fairly nearby Thetford Forest. For a time it became rather a magical place for me, a place where I could almost routinely expect to free myself of the mundane and connect with the world of my imagination. Magic only lasts for so long in any one place, however, and now it’s just a place for me again, even though still a very pleasant one.

The other place I go is books. I sometimes have to remind myself that reading a lot is not an indulgence but actually part of my job as a writer, just as part of an athlete’s job is to exercise and get a good diet. I mainly read non-fiction. I don’t want to make fiction out of other people’s fiction.

How do you write?

Some people write with music in the background. I couldn’t stand that. How can I make up my own world with someone else’s imagined world blaring through my head? (But then I am very easily distracted and can easily be overloaded by sensory information. Sometimes I think there is something wrong with me!)

When it is going well, then I get entirely immersed. This can be embarrassing if I am on a train or in a café because I mutter the dialogue, complete with intonation, as I try to get it right. When immersed like that interruptions are horrible. As I say, I am easily distractible so it’s hard for me to reach a state of really focussed concentration, and it just feels cruel when I have finally managed to reach such a point, to be dragged out of it by external events.

I don’t make elaborate plans in advance. I’d be very happy to if I could but it simply doesn’t work for me: the story and characters emerge as I write. In order to ensure continuity and build up a head of steam, I will always go over the previous day’s writing before writing new stuff, and not infrequently, I will go back to the beginning and work back through to where I’ve got to as the story starts to get richer and I get more ideas. That’s often where the good stuff comes in.

Questions of style

I normally write in first person. If I write in third, it will be usually be free indirect style (ie still based on the viewpoint of a particular character). I dislike omniscient narrators. Ultimately stories can only be told from a point of view.

A story includes (a) characters, (b) a world/setting, (c) themes (ideas that the book is exploring) and (d) a plot. I generally start with themes, or with a world/setting that seems thematically rich (which is to say, a subconscious theme). My Eden books, for instance, start with a dark sunless world and the Biblical story of the Fall: theme and world together, which in turn tap into lots of things I want to think about and explore.

The imagined world is dull without characters though, and once you invent characters and place them in the world, you have to allow them to interact with it as their world, rather than making them mouthpieces for your ideas. This is the moment when the story comes alive. Plot to me is the least important element, and I kind of resent its artificiality. Real life doesn’t have a plot, and only rather narrow and driven people act in real life as if they were part of a plot (the reason I guess, that so many plot-driven novels/TV shows/films have narrow obsessive characters, such as workaholic detectives with disastrous lovelifes). Plot is nevertheless very important indeed (particularly in novels) –it’s what gives a story shape and structure– and I have to keep working and reworking my material until a plot emerges from the interaction of the other three elements.

For me, most of the process is unconscious. I don’t have a set of rules, and am intensely irritated when I see courses advertised for ‘How to write a novel’ etc. By all means teach particular techniques, or explore the techniques used by others, but there’s no ‘How to write a novel’ anymore than there’s ‘How to do a painting’.

When the first draft is done

In the days of word-processing, the concept of a ‘draft’ is much more elastic and hard to pin down than it would have been in the days of handwritten or typed manuscripts. By the time I reach the end of my ‘first draft’, many of the chapters will have been revised ten or even twenty times over, large chunks of material will have been added or deleted, and characters and scenes will have been added, removed or changed throughout the book. That is to say, the nominal first draft will include passages that have already been through multiple drafts.

Thereafter I put the entire thing through many more revisions, but I do find that, without outside advice, I am prone to revise too much and redraft too little. That is to say, I tend to be too cautious after that first stage, about major changes to the structure of the book. This is where other readers come in. I like to get advice from more than one friend, because tastes differ, and if one reader thinks a certain passage could be deleted altogether, while another thinks it’s the best part of the book, that gives you a certain perspective which you wouldn’t have got by listening only to one or the other.

The only novels of mine that have been edited by a full-time professional editor so far are my novel The Holy Machine and the three Eden books (it’s different for my short stories). Wonderfully helpful though friends have been, they are generally a bit too kind, and I have benefitted greatly from the cooler eye of a professional who has a vested interest, as I do, in the book’s success. Ultimately, though, it is my book, and I am not going to let anyone tell me it out to be about something other than I want it to be about.

What kind of writer are you?

I am equally proud of my short fiction as I am of my novels, so I would describe myself as a writer rather than as a novelist. My work hitherto has all been categorisable from a marketing point of view as SF, and I am happy with that: books have to be labelled so readers have some idea what to expect. However, I personally think of myself as a writer who happens to write SF, rather than an SF writer. By that I mean that my motivation is not to expand, develop or play with the genre of SF. My motivation is simply to take the stuff that’s in my head, get it out there in the world, and make something positive of it which I and others might find some use for. It just so happens that I’ve found the tools of SF very useful for that purpose.

Self promotion:

I have recently completed (bar proofreading) my third and final Eden novel, Daughter of Eden, which will come out in October. I’m very pleased with it. I’m pleased with the way that each of the three books is different from the others. I have also written a collection of new short stories which, unlike all my previous published shorts, could not be labelled as SF. I think this collection will come out around Christmas, though whether before or after I don’t know.

How Writers Write is a monthly series of guest posts where established writers invite you into their workspaces, reveal their work habits and share their experience.

Follow this link for a full list of previous posts

The famously camera shy M. A. Griffin aka Fletcher Moss gives us a rare behind the scenes glimpse into his workspace…

What do you use to write?

This looks chaotic, doesn’t it? But it sort of works. I start with pen and paper and cheap notebooks like the one above. (You can see there are two potential books outlined in this one, their names sellotaped to the front. One, ‘The Nightwardens’, has seen the light of day as ‘Lifers’, the other is foolishly titled ‘Let’s Be Mermaids’, so the less said about that one the better, I guess.)

I begin with free-form note-taking; character names, events and scenes, openings, lines of dialogue, chapter headings and so on. At some point – maybe a couple of weeks in – I begin tentatively working out what might happen in what order. The numbered list up there is a first attempt at sequencing a plot, for example. Each number is a chapter and each chapter, as a rough rule of thumb, will be 2000 words or so. In my copy of Stephen King’s The Green Mile, King writes about how he structures stories as he’s trying to go to sleep each night; “I tell [them] as I lie in the dark, writing them in my mind just as I would on a typewriter… Each night I start over at the beginning, getting a little further before I drop off.” That’s me too. It can take a month or so, sometimes, to straighten out enough of the start to get going. Sometimes – you can see it in the picture – I try to get fancy and type up huge tables of plot, chapter by chapter, usually to convince a publisher I know what I’m doing. But it doesn’t seem to prevent wholesale redesign half way through, so I’m trying my best to avoid it nowadays.

Once I’ve reached that hard-to-pin-down tipping point, I start typing. I use Word. (I tried Scrivener once, but it reminded me of that episode of Blackadder when Baldrick accidentally burnt Dr Johnson’s dictionary. Johnson comes round with a murderous gang to get his hand-written copy back, and Blackadder, panicking, says “You can’t have it yet. I want Baldrick to read it. Which unfortunately means teaching him to read.” I can see the huge potential in Scrivener, but I haven’t got the time to ‘teach myself to read’, as it were. I’d rather just crack on.)

When do you write?

At the moment, I have two clear writing days a week, and they’re blissful. I’ve heard a lot about creativity and the brain; it’s at its best in the morning when it’s freshest for example but thankfully it doesn’t seem to matter to me. I can get words on a page any time of day as long as I’m left alone.

Where do you write?

Anywhere, but mostly here:

I’d like to point out that I don’t need copies of my own books nearby, they’re for purposes of illustration only. That copy of Shaun Tan’s ‘Rules of Summer’ though, that’s pretty much always on the desk. I recommend checking it out if you don’t know it. For me, it tells you everything about the surreal, magical, threatening world of childhood; rocket fuel for anyone writing for or about young people. I’m not fussy about a writing in a particular place (our host Mr Ballantyne by contrast has a favourite room in a favourite library in Manchester; maybe they bring him sweetmeats and cigars while he works) by the time I’ve put the headphones on and cued up the playlist, I’m transported. I could be anywhere. I’ve always written with distractions around me so I’ve learned to use music to close them all off.

How do you write?

The first draft can come pretty quickly. I’m not agonising over questions of style at this point. I’m just getting it down, telling myself the story as I’ve heard other writers say. 1500 words a day is the point at which I feel the job’s been reasonably well done but I can go for a thousand more if I’m on a roll. I don’t always go chronologically, and this helps. If you’re stuck at a particularly tricky section, skip it. If you know you’ve got a great scene coming up, start there. Sometimes, I skip to a section with a lot of dialogue which can guarantee a decent delivery of words each session. I’ve tried writing the end before I get there just so I can get my quota done – anything but stall at 300 words and stare at a blinking cursor for a dreary afternoon.

Here’s my shelf of wonder. If I’m having a particularly bad time of it, I’ll park myself next to this lot and spend a little time leafing through some of them. The titles often aren’t great, and you need to steel yourself against the evangelistic nature of some of the prose, but there’s plenty to learn once you do. The screenplay stuff is good for demystifying structure; in the case of ‘Save the Cat’ to a point where stories become formulas – not a good way to develop as a writer, but seriously reassuring if you’ve backed yourself into a corner and can’t see a way out. Donald Maas’s stuff always reminds me to raise the stakes even higher. ‘The Writer’s Journey’ has been recommended time and again; I eventually succumbed when writer/director Jon Favreau name-checked it on some podcast. John Yorke’s ‘Into the Woods’ is a great place to start, as is King’s ‘On Writing’.

If all that fails, I’ll go the graphic novels behind; you might just be able to see Joe Hill’s ‘Locke and Key’ series in the shadows there. A more majestic and inspiring source would be tough to find, I reckon.

Once the writing’s done, I go through it all again to iron out inconsistencies and fill in gaps, and that becomes version 1.0. That’s when my editor begins the work of pointing out all the things I haven’t noticed. There are often large numbers of corrections and culls. Entire sections, whole characters. I take it on the chin. She always ends up being right.

Questions of style

I’m hyper-aware of my failings. Selecting two adjectives when one will do. Reaching for onomatopoeiac verbs and paring them up in a really irritating manner. Over-doing the dialogue tags. Using the word hyper-aware. I could go on, but I’ll resist the temptation, the point is being able to ignore all that during draft one and instead trying to cull it all later.

When the first draft is done…

That’s when it goes to my wife Jo who has the unenviable task of hacking through a story that makes virtually no sense. “Why does this guy do this at this point?” she’ll say, and I’ll get stroppy and bluster, “It’s obvious isn’t it?!” Then I’ll calm down and realise it can’t be clear and it needs fixing. She’s pretty exacting which is of course what’s needed. I make corrections, go through my editor’s always extensive questions and suggestions, re-write it all again and send version 2.0 off. Five or six cycles of this, and things are starting to look considerably better.

I dream of delivering a fully-formed, ready-to-publish manuscript. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?

A little bit of self-promotion

Lifers is out in April, courtesy of Chicken House (UK, Germany). It’s out in the US towards the end of 2016. It’s a contemporary sci-fi thriller set in Manchester around about tomorrow night. There are urban explorers, missing children, insomniac kids, a secret government project, a shoestring crew of maverick scientists, and a couple of sinister devices known as Kepler Valves. Not to mention a prison called Axle 6 from which our poor protagonists have to escape…

Now Lifers is done, I’ll be continuing work on a tale about an alien beastie trapped in the hull of a shipwrecked research vessel. Not sure about a title yet. I’m thinking of calling it ‘Let’s Be Mermaids’…

How Writers Write is a monthly series of guest posts where established writers invite you into their workspaces, reveal their work habits and share their experience.

Follow this link for a full list of previous posts

I first met Tricia Sullivan on a panel at Loncon 3. A fascinating panelist and excellent writer, here she gives an insight to the creative process…

How would you describe yourself?

I’ve been a science fiction novelist for twenty years. More recently I’m an astrophysics student and mother of three, and I work part-time doing other bits and pieces.

Where do you write?

Right now I’m standing in the hall window at my laptop. Behind me is a wall with two big flip charts covered with the multi-coloured scribbles that pass for structural work on my new SF novel This is the Sea, which is midway through its first draft. The laptop lives here when I’m working on the Plot Wall.

 

I had a much bigger and more complicated Plot Wall for Occupy Me. With three flip charts studded with multi-coloured post-its, a corkboard covered in index cards, and about seventeen different colours, it was a thing of madness. I took a photo of it to show a workshop of young writers just how many unseen gears and levers there may be lurking behind the sentences of a novel. But I’ve lost it. The new Plot Wall is not as funky (yet).

But do you actually write standing in a hallway?

No, but I do most of my thinking on my feet, away from the computer. I guess it’s a bit of a cliché by now that many writers, especially novelists, are keen walkers. I also run, but I find that if I’m going at any sort of speed at all I can’t really think about anything except, you know, not dying. Walking is much better for thinking.

I go out in all weathers, for as long as time permits. I’m lucky to live in a beautiful, rural area.

I like to take in the detail of my surroundings. I’m fascinated with the way the shape and the meaning of a thing can change depending on scale and perspective. I like to look at things that are very small from very, very close up and imagine what it would be like if they were gigantic in relation to me. Science fiction is well-known for painting on the broadest of possible canvases. The thing is, though, there is ‘plenty of room at the bottom’, too .

One of really big ideas in Occupy Me came from looking closely at the structure of wood and seeing termite holes. It sparked something. I was all like Mike Myers going, ‘Yo, let’s have Space Termites! And dude, they can time-travel!’ (kidding)(sort of).

Yes, but what about actually putting words down?

Oh, words. I do most of my drafting on a laptop in our sitting room, in the beanbags or on the rocking chair, which is no longer used for nursing babies but if you want to sit there you have to depose the cat. The beanbags look kind of like Jabba the Hut, don’t they? They’re super-comfy.

What about process?

I keep lots of notebooks, of course. I start the serious writing in Word and keep a ‘daily work’ file for every writing session because I skip all over the place—I never write a first draft in linear order. It’s a giant pain, but it’s my way.

At some point I put all this mess into Scrivener in the form of scenes. I arrange these and then add to them and cut lots and add and cut lots more. I may colour-code plot strands a bit because I like the illusion of control this gives me. I’ll work and cut and rework and rearrange a few more times in between stints at the Plot Wall and jags of crying and sending whining e-mails to my writer friends. Very occasionally there’s Drink. Chocolate figures prominently in my methods.

I use headphones and specific music for each book, both to drown out household noise and to kick the brain into gear. Occupy Me was mainly written to Heavy Horses, Steve Roach’s Dream Tracker, and All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun by Jeff Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser. So far This is the Sea is being written to the eponymous Waterboys album and Enya.

Upcoming work?

Occupy Me is out 21 January from Gollancz. It’s designed to break your brain and rebuild it in fun ways. I also have a story in Improbable Botany, which is a new anthology celebrating the tenth anniversary of Wayward Plants, a very cool urban green project based in London.

How Writers Write is monthly series of guest posts where established writers invite you into their workspaces, reveal their work habits and share their experience.

Follow this link for a full list of previous posts

I was introduced to Mike Cobley at the first ever convention I went to, in Glasgow in 2000.  A great conversationalist, it’s always interesting to hear his thoughts…

What do you use to write?

It all begins with seeds of ideas, notions, and images, and sometimes the seeds need to be planted and left to put down questing roots and extrude sprigs of possibility…for a time. Or sometimes not. Notes and idea fragments get scribbled in notebooks, a kind of ur-narrative mulch out of which jump-off points for the story emerge – or sometimes I’ll have the opening scene firmly in mind, even before most of the rest of the plot, which is what happened with Shadowkings, that moment  with Byrnak and Keren by the campfire in the lee of ancient ruins – that was clearly in mind right from the start.

Eventually the plot will start to firm up, with the larger overview  becoming clear before the lower level details – and all the time I’m working on A4 lined paper pads (graduating from small notebooks and the occasional hastily grabbed envelope on which a neat idea can be captured before it flits away) The outline will go through several stages, usually ending up in one long continuous page made up from several A4 pages taped together, and sometimes with additional material tacked or stapled to the side. Of course, editors would much rather have something a bit more formal so at some point all this has to be boiled down to The Synopsis, and committed to computer file. The Synopsis is always the handy anchor, but the organic, handwritten version usually has all the messy details and side thoughts.

By then I’ve usually begun the first draft, which I write in long-hand – yes, on lined A4 pad paper. I used to use quite narrow feint lined paper but I switched to the wider feint when I started to need more room for corrections etc. In the early stage I would have had the opening chapters typed in and printed out, and at some point – perhaps at the halfway mark or later – I might start typing up to try and cut down the typing up required at the end. But then I’ll be on the approach to the finale and all my efforts are devoted to that. There have been times when I hardly typed out any of the MS so that when I finished the draft, I was faced with the mountainous task of typing it all up (usually about 140K words – uh huh).

I write on my PC, using Word for Windows – I’ve seen recommendations by other writers for sophisticated packages which can acommodate all kinds of subnotes and indexing etc, but usually they are the kind of lucky writers who can create straight onto the keyboard, which for them is a natural, near transparent word conduit. Not so for me. In 1998 I started working in a call centre, full time as a directory enquiry operator; at that point I had actually been making myself create straight onto the keyboard, but after I’d been at the call centre for a while I found that the last thing I wanted to do after 8 hours banging out numbers on a keyboard at work was to come home and sit down to try and be creative….at a keyboard. I finally packed in the call centre work in 2004, but found my longhand working habit fairly ingrained by then. I can do revision on the screen, but the origination process finds it to be a barrier of sorts so guess I’m a paper-scratcher till I die!

When do I write?

I’m quite a slow writer, aiming at 400+ words a day minimum, so I have to put in the hourse every day. Usually up in the morning, along with my partner who heads off to her work, and the next coupla hours is a steady scaling of the mountain of wakefulness till I hit roughly 11.30am when the not-writing guilt starts to kick in. I pick up the thread of where I’d reached the previous evening, do any spot-revisions that seem obvious, and press on – with tea/coffee breaks – till about 4.30pm when I go to get the evening meal together. Then I put in another stint in the evening, about 6.30 to 9pm, then gather in the study for cigars and brandy…. sorry, in the downstairs lounge for some episodes of current TV faves.

Where do I write?

Amid a rambunctious mess of books, cds and dvds! I have two desks now – one has the computer (the wordsmith workstation or, alternatively, the Gateway to Procrastination Hell). Recently as September the local council decided that our house was next up for a full rewiring, which entailed us having to pack all the books and cds and dvds crowding the shelves and storing them in a container I had to hire to park outside the front of the house – it was that or use a town-centre facility, meaning countless car journeys and all the attached aggravation. Anyway, the rewiring took place without too much obvious destruction, but it turned the house into a purgatory of dust, fine dust which hung in the air for days afterwards, ultimately kicking off a hellish sequence of sinus-related allergies and coughs. Dont want to tell you more than you need to know, but it was only by mid-December when my health crawled back to something like it was back in early September. Fun times, it wasn’t.

Er….yes, I have 2 desks 😉 the computer-tasked one and another a full stride and a half away against the other wall, flanked by book cases, burdened by the same, the place where the serious longhand drafts are created, conjured up from the dazed aether of my mind (cue swirly-delic music). I like the general room lighting to be a bit dim, a bit low, and to have a lamp focussed on the work in progress. For as long as I have been writing, I’ve always lived in close proximity to other people, whether it was in bedsits or flatsharing, or in this house with other family members doing their thang, so music has always been a necessary element of the writing process. In fact, it has always been a necessary element of my life in general, a comfort in times of bleakness, an energising roar of joy (usually while at gigs), a soothing background to relaxing moments, or even a complimentary aural texture to whatever I’m working on. Oh, and a barrier to the sounds that other make, as well, natch. Some music has been directly inspirational, some less than I thought would be – and in fact, I have been at gigs, drenched in the wall of sound coming off the stage, when some unforeseen combination of lyrics and visuals unites in the shadows of the backbrain and presents some fragment of plot or scene….and suddenly I’m fumbling for my pen and notepad and madly scribbling….

Plans, Notes and Style

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In the pre-plot stage I’m usually imagining details of background, history, society, conflict, whatever technical level or types of technology the story requires. And often I find that much of that gets left behind, either discarded or distilled to whatever function they may serve for the story. I stick to the notion that having a wealth of imagined background detail is better than having too little. Nothing gets thrown out at any stage, not until the final edited and corrected proof has been reached – then I tend to more lose track of various notes and ancillary scraps, which my agent thinks I should hold onto.

As for style – in the early years, I was more adventurous about POV and tense etc. 1st, second and third person narratives have appeared in my short stories, while my novels have been in the third person, with the boundaries between viewpoint characters clearly delineated – I know that some writers have a kind of floating omniscient viewpoint, usually from a godlike narrator, which dips in and out of this or that character. This is a technique I’m wary of attempting, probably because I’ve seen it done messily and have no wish to risk inflicting similar unformed narrative monsters on any reader….but then…..until I actually take a swing at it I wont know if I can manage the technique or not. Hmmm.

Back to style – in the short story period, mainly up to 2001, my writing style was a bit more purple than it is now, which I insist is no bad thing – I admire writers who put in the effort to actually describe worlds and environments which are their own creation, rather than Alien World 9B wheeled up from the back lot. Now, some readers  find an abundance of description a barrier, as if the plot is being clogged or dragged down by treacly adjectives, which I can understand – nowadays, I try to choose the telling details rather than a boxful, but also include what William Gibson called ‘the gratuitous move’, something not necessary to plot or character or background, but something necessary to the writer’s actual enjoyment.

Drafts and redrafts

Working in long hand, I feel I’ve got a more organic connection to the words as they issue forth from my pen (a black Bic pen, medium ball tip) – not to say that keyboarders dont feel the same, its just my own personal conceit. I tend to correct as I work, so my first draft is really more like a draft and a half. Then there’s typing up stage, which allows a further opportunity to correct as I go (and always I find myself grappling with sentences and/or paragraphs which seem baffling, leaving me wondering what was in my head when I originally wrote them). The first typed draft counts as V 1.0 (the longhand draft was, of course, the beta), and subsequent drafts I name up, V 2.0/3.0 etc. V 1.0 goes to my editor, and possibly to a couple of close trusted readers if they have time available in their schedules to give it the eyeball. And the impressions, good and bad, come back and once I come to terms with sometimes unexpected problems, I get down to the first  revisions. Rinse and repeat, though only with my editor and proofreader.

What’s Hot Off The Press & What’s Taking Shape On The Drawing Board:

Well, my newest brain-baby, Ancestral Machines, has just ventured forth, courtesy of Orbit UK (& US), published in various formats between Jan 12-14th, and there is a discernible thrill this time round as this is my first hardback. Feels like a kinda quiet graduation and, damn, it is a fine object to behold! Ancestral Machines is a stand-alone novel set in the universe of the Humanity’s Fire trilogy, featuring an ancient and mobile artificial solar system, a smuggler captain and his crew of rascals and vagabonds, and a nonstop series of deranged events and thrilling heriocs. Is this really your homage to Firefly? some people have said (after hearing me say that it’s a bit of a homage to Firefly) to which I can only state, ‘You could very well say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment’ (wink wink).

Next up, that nonstop barrel of laughs known as Dealing With The Tax Return. But in parallel with  that, finishing the submission material for a follow-on book starring my smuggler captain & crew, set again in the HFire universe – I have a working title but I’m keeping it to myself just now, but rest assured that it will be stuffed full of assorted grotesqueries and demented derring-do. Also, I have a coupla short stories that need attending to, and the possibility of maybe, perhaps doing a steampunk novella…or even a couple, if I can get a handle on writing at that length.

• Michael Cobley’s Website
• Ancestral Machines: A Humanity’s Fire novel