1. What started you Writing, and is it the same thing that still inspires you today?
I was thirteen when I started writing. My oldest friend said he was going to Write a novel and he said I should give it a go, as well.
I don’t think he lasted more than a few months at it before he drifted into other things, but I stayed with it. It gave me an outlet for my daydreaming and allowed the Love of literature I had to develop. To be truthful, that is a lot of why I still do it. I can sit on the train, or at home and just drift off in my own world for hours, and it’s nice to be in a position where that can be a career choice – not everyone is as lucky as I am there, and I still love literature, the broadness of it, the sheer scope, the things it can do. I love different things now than I did when I was thirteen, but I still love the form.
2. How many novels did you write before you got published?
The first one I finished was called Black Sheep – it was put out by an independent publisher called Prime Books in 2007. It took a long time to write, done in fits and starts, and between writing a lot of short fiction, and when it was released, it came and went without much notice, which is probably a fair assessment of it, really.
Before that, I worked on a huge fantasy series while I was in High School, but I never actually finished it. I lost it years ago, so we can all pretend that it was a masterpiece...
3. What was the first thing you did when you found out a publisher wanted to print your work?
Reread the email.
4. What books, or authors, would you say have most influenced you in the type of writer you've become?
Well, that really depends on the day you ask me, and the writer I think I am, and the people I think have influenced me – I suppose the latter two is for other people to decide, really.
But, when I was a kid, I loved Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s stuff. The Dragonlance stuff was my first big love in literature. Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories were the first real adult fantasy I read, and they left a huge impression on me. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was a hugely influential book, and Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books are a huge fav. I love the early Murakami novels like the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World. The prose of Michael Ondaatje, Lucius Shepard’s body of work, James Morrow’s novels, J.G. Ballard, Salman Rushdie...
It’s a long list. I could keep going, and it keeps growing.
5. Your latest release is The Godless, can you tell us a bit about the story and how you came up with it?
The Godless is set in a world in which the gods have died (or are dying) after a war, and their bodies have fallen onto the land, and broken the world. Their divine power is seeping into the world, and making powerful new immortals, many who are not considered to be human any more. On the top of a huge mountain range which is, in fact, a giant cairn for one of the gods, a cartographer’s apprentice, Ayae, discovers that she cannot be hurt by fire – which is all good and well, except for the army that is marching up the mountain, and which may or may not have tried to kill her already.
The book has two other main characters, including Ayae. The first is Bueralan, a saboteur who has been hired to infiltrate the approaching army, and the second is Zaifyr, a man who is covered in charms, and who the less we talk about, the better it will be for all of us, really.
The Godless is a book I began writing when I was rather disheartened about writing, where I thought I had lost what made it special to me, so I went back to all the things I loved as a kid to rediscover it. In doing that, I reread a lot of fantasy, and as I did, I had an idea, involving dead gods and immortals, and I thought, well, I'll write it and see how I am going at the end of it. Turns out, I did alright.
6. Do you consciously choose themes to explore in your work or does it 'just happen'?
It’s a mix, truthfully.
Like, in the Godless, I wanted to explore what divinity meant, what its responsibilities were, and its impact on human beings, because it tied into the central idea, which was that the gods were dead. For the most part, I did that, I think, but there was a theme of self determination that emerged from the interaction of the characters that I hadn't planned on originally – but it gelled with the original ones pretty well, so I let it slide together. I find it tends to work a lot like that.
7. What do you consider the most challenging about writing a novel, or about writing in general?
It is mostly the consistency of the act, the writing itself, the sitting there every day and doing it.
8. Do you use an outline when you write, or are you more of a discovery writer?
I think of myself more as a rewriter, really. I mean, I have certain events that I want to hit, and I move towards that. So, in the Godless, I knew that there would always be a huge siege, and that was always going to begin at a certain point in the book. But the getting there, the state characters would be in, the roles they would take – that took shape through the writing, and sometimes it would change from version to version of the writing, from the work here, or there, and sometimes the alterations would be deliberate, and at other times, more subconscious, and organic.
9. Do you ever base your characters on people you know or have known?
Nah.
Mostly, it tends to destroy the suspension of disbelief in the work for me – like, if someone I know is there, I can’t really visualise what I am doing. Real people tend to break the fantasy.
10. What is your work schedule like when you're in writer’s mode?
Wake up, get some breakfast, check email, read for a bit, and start work around ten in the morning. Go over the previous days work, edit, rewrite. Have a bit of lunch around one or so. Come back, finish the rewriting, work, and write a thousand words of a new scene. I have a daily limit I try to hit of new words, which is around a thousand and sometimes it will be better than others, but I end when the thousand is done. Usually that’s about five or six, and if its my turn to make dinner, I head off and do that.
If I'm behind in my deadline, or feeling the rush of it, at around seven I'll come back and work till ten, maybe eleven, but I try not to do that. It’s a bit unkind on my partner, that.
11. Do you ever regret being 'self employed' (self motivating) and look longingly at people with 'normal' jobs - or you still hold down a 'day job'?
What, you mean the suit, the briefcase, and the endless pointless shit that someone above you wants you to do so they feel as if they've soaked up the right amount of your life for the money they pay you?
No, man, I don’t looking longingly at those jobs.
I've been self employed, one way or another, for about eight years now. I teach and lecture on the side to pay the rent and bills, and it’d be nice if the books do well enough that I can ditch that one day, but the normal job thing isn't me, really.
12. And finally, what future novels/ideas do you have in the works? What can your readers expect next?
I have finished the second book, entitled Leviathan’s Blood, and I'll have edits for that in a month or so, I suspect (that will probably be about a months work there, give or take). So, right now, I am working on the third book of the series and, if things go well, hopefully there will be more fantasy books – I've been kinda digging this stuff. It’s like living a weird fantasy I had as a teenager, and I'm keen to keep it going, and I have a lot of things I’d like to do.
But more immediately, the third book, and maybe a novella, or novelette set in the world, but well see on that. I have the idea, but the time might be tight – but it'll be cool if it works out, so well see.
