A Day in the Life...

One thing I’ve been keen to do since setting up the blog is to write a series of posts about the writing process generally. This stems from the fact that whenever I tell people I’m a writer, I generally get asked the same questions, so I figured that people must be interested in this stuff, right?

I plan to address a bunch of these questions in future blogs – the tricky ones like ‘Where do you get your ideas?’, the more complex ones like ‘How did you go about getting published?’ and the personal ones like ‘Don’t you get lonely?’ (There’s a whole series of blogs in those questions. Watch this space).

First up, a simple one: ‘What do you do in an average day?’

This is an interesting question, because it’s often laden with meaning. It’s people wondering whether or not writing is a proper job (I often joke that it’s not, but it really is), and how someone can be motivated to stare at a screen for eight hours a day. The answer to the question varies from writer to writer, too.

Bromley House Subscription Library, Nottingham.
A safe haven for a lost Victorian writer.

I try as best as I can to keep to office hours. That’s not always possible in a purely creative process, because really you have to write, research and plan when the mood takes you. Chaining yourself to a desk 9-5 can be counter-productive in that respect. However, I try my best to do this, simply because I’m a married man with a wife who really does have a ‘proper job’, and so it’s only fair that I’m available for family time at the end of a working day. To that end, I’m at my computer at 9:00 a.m. on the dot every day, and down tools some time around 6:00 p.m. the first few hours of every day are almost always spent answering correspondence, doing the social media rounds (which is actually a real thing these days), and getting all planning and paperwork out of the way. The rest of the day is the real job of work, punctuated with frequent coffees. A couple of days a month I work at the library (I pay a subscription to a wonderful olde worlde library for just this purpose), and at least once a week I work at a coffee lounge, just so I can see some real human faces. I have a fully equipped office at home, complete with whiteboard, wall calender and many bookshelves, because only by having everything to hand can I guarantee that I won't wander off and get distracted.

I do two types of writing – there’s the creative fiction (novels, novellas and short stories), and there’s also commission work (copywriting, games design, and, to a lesser degree, editing and proofreading). The former does not respect office hours. The latter absolutely does. When I’m not doing something else with my brain, I’m thinking about books. I have approximately seven series and novel pitches on the go right now, in no concrete state, along with four ‘going concerns’ (projects that are started or almost done, and in the hands of an agent or editor). On top of that there are always side projects – those pesky things that I’ll do one day if I ever have free time. That basically means that my head is always buzzing with something.

That brings me around to the related question of motivation. The creative process is what drives me. Like many writers, I think the start and end of projects are really exciting, while the middle bits – the actual job of work – can become more of a grind. The motivation comes from the almost pathological need to create ‘new stuff’, and the knowledge that I won’t be able to do that until I finish the current project and earn some cash. The crux of it is that writing is a proper job, because it pays the bills. Much as I’d love to sit in my pants all day reading internet clickbait, or playing Skyrim, I’d very quickly discover that the mortgage lenders don’t take kindly to those sort of shenanigans. Yes, it is hard to get motivated when you’re left to your own devices, and I’m really not the most organized and process-driven chap in the world; but I’d ask the question: how does anyone get motivated to work? It helps that I love what I do, of course – that someone is willing to pay me for it never ceases to amaze me.

The old cliché of ‘Do a job you love and never work a day in your life’ is almost true of the writing life. Almost.

This Wargaming Life...

The cover of 'Waterloo', by my old pal Alex Boyd, the talented devil.

A long time ago, I had a hand in designing several historical wargames, which were published by the now-defunct historical gaming arm of Games Workshop. These games still have ongoing communities, and even though official support hasn't been forthcoming for donkeys' years, people still play them, which is a comforting thought for me. It seems almost like a past life, but 'Legends of the Old west' will probably be what a lot of people remember me for (if anything!).

I was going through some old discs recently, having a good old clearout, and I found some of the support files that I produced for those games years ago - the Frequently Asked Questions, Errata, and a few free bits of rules and so on. It occurred to me that some of these files haven't existed on t'internet for a long time indeed, and there may be still folk out there who want 'em. So, without further ado, here's everything I ever did for those old games, post-publication, in one handy place. Enjoy!

Legends of the Old West: the Card Sharp & Hangin' Judge Hired Guns

Waterloo: FAQ and Errata

Waterloo: Russia army list

Trafalgar: FAQ and Errata

Trafalgar: Fleet List for Turkey

Just for good measure, I should point out that these files are in no way affiliated with Games Workshop, can't be considered 'official' (except that it 'was me what wrote em guv'nor'), and no payment was requested or given for the work herein. Bearing all that in mind, enjoy!

Hooray and Huzzah!

Yesterday, in a flurry of tweets, the news finally broke that I have secured a three-book deal with Titan Books in the UK, which will include my début novel and two further books in the same series. More details here: http://www.thecultden.com/2014/07/book-news-titan-books-new-acquisition.html.

Time to shout it from the rooftops!

This news comes as something of a massive weight off my shoulders. Firstly, it means I can carry on doing this writing game a bit longer. Secondly, it means I don't have to keep this monumental secret any more. Huzzah indeed!

The first book in my series of Victorian science fiction, horror and mystery will be available in the UK, USA and Australia in Autumn next year.

In the meantime, I expect this blog to take a rather more productive turn as the editing and publication process kicks in. I've already started thinking about my path to publication, and how it differed from the various stories and 'advice to writers' articles I found online in the early days. I'm thinking a series of blogs about my experiences in this regard may be of interest to other new writers trying to break into trad publishing.

Thinking cap on – more to follow!

Me, Myself and I

One of the things about becoming a writer that doesn’t agree with everyone is the isolation. If you look at various writing blogs (and indeed any sort of creative freelance role, from illustration to graphic design) you’ll notice this as a common theme. It can be a lonely business. My friends sometimes rib me that I spend too much time in coffee shops, tapping away at the laptop like some kind of hipster blogger, supping mochaccinos all day. It’s not quite true of course. the reason I go to coffee shops at all these days is so I can see another human being; recharge the batteries; change the scenery.

But this post isn’t about coping with loneliness. I generally do okay with that to be honest, and my significant other gets home each evening from a ‘proper job’, so it’s not like I’m the last man on the international space station or anything. No – this blog is about the benefits of extended periods of isolation. It’s something that has only recently hit me, as it’s started to help me figure out a few things about characterisation in my work. Sounds like a leap? Read on.

Write What You Know

It’s an old cliché isn’t it? Write what you know. It’s a very limiting mantra if taken literally, but I tend not to take anything literally, which is why I do what I do. ‘Write what you know’ doesn’t mean you have to write a kitchen-sink drama set on an estate in 1980s Stoke-on-Trent (that’s a personal example, I’m sure yours will be different) – it means you can take the relationships that you had, or observed, and the feelings that you felt, and transplant them to outer space, a fantasy world, Victorian England (my favourite), or wherever/whenever.

But the point where the old cliché really helps is with characters. And this is where I start to make an actual point – isolation has helped me to understand myself, and understanding myself has helped me to write better characters.

I’ve always reacted to the world with gut feeling, rather than intellectualised, rationalised viewpoints. That’s often left me grappling for the right words to express my views on politics, religion, society, art, education – whatever. But lately I’ve been giving these things and more some serious thought, drilling down to my core beliefs and really analysing what makes me tick. This allows me to do three very important things in fiction (and in life, to an extent):

1. I can be absolutely sure that not all of my characters are me by extension. They can all contain facets of my personality, share some of my beliefs, if I want them to. But characters need to portray myriad viewpoints, and be complex individuals butting up against ideological conflict. Otherwise, I may as well write essays rather than stories – inform rather than entertain.

2. I can observe people with a writer’s eye. It sounds pretentious, but really it’s just me paying attention to my interactions with other humans, and their interactions with each other. People come from all walks of life, and believe all sorts of things – when you meet someone whose views conflict with your own, how do you react? How do they make you feel? Only by absolutely understanding myself do I gain a point of reference by which to measure others.

3. I can write situations to create conflict. By understanding my personality type (and there are lots of esoteric tests you can do if you want to get really technical), I know what situations cause me stress, or pleasure, or intellectual stimulation, or tiredness, etc. And I can rationalise how those situations would affect different types of people. This means I can put my characters in situations that elicit a particular response from them (usually stressful ones in my work, if I’m honest).

I read an article yesterday about world-building in sci-fi and fantasy. You can find it here. The bit that struck me the most was point 4 – that a common mistake in sci-fi is that every denizen of every world thinks, believes and acts the same. It’s almost as though the aliens that live on Rigel VI would never go down the pub and argue about UKIP’s political agenda – they just all vote the same way. But humans, of course, are as diverse as they come.

Another thing all this introspective navel-gazing has taught me is that it’s actually dangerous to be an author with controversial beliefs and put those beliefs into your fiction. L Ron Hubbard, for example, ended up seeding his religious ideology into his sci-fi novels (some people call that sort of thing ‘subversive’, you know. Watch out for that). I read some old Richard Laymon stories recently, and because the treatment of his female characters is pretty much universal across his books (and hard to read), it starts to raise questions about the man’s beliefs – ‘Is he accidentally expressing his core beliefs about women, or is he doing it deliberately to make a point?’ As soon as you start asking that question, suspension of disbelief is broken, and you start to wonder about the author’s agenda. Art and ideology should be considered separately to an extent – I reserve the right to write a Catholic character despite not being terribly religious, or even a well-rounded racist character, without being labelled a racist myself (though if he goes on to become a hero without learning his lesson, the work may well be labelled 'problematic', and rightly so). Then again, some writers come from the opposite angle, and make it really difficult to justify buying their books, however hard they try to hide their agenda. I digress. Let's keep it light...

Hopefully, amid that waffling and sidetracking, there’s some useful musings, based entirely off my own experience over the last 12 months. A lot of this stuff boils down to empathy – understand yourself, and empathise with others. That way, simply through day-to-day interactions, you’ll end up with an infinite bank of characters and character types that you can draw on when writing your characters.

Of course, that means you actually have to get out of the house. Ah, the writer’s curse.