Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Some friends of mine (I hope I can call them friends) are doing this...


Blog Tour Meme

 Andrew Hickey and Lawrence Burton, did this.  I'm taking the liberty of assuming Andrew would have tagged me if technology had allowed.

This is mine:
1 What are you working on at the moment?

I'm 90% done on a version of 'the original' King In Yellow, the cursed verse play written in the 1890s.
I'm teetering between starting a kickstarter to fund the french translation component, or wading into doing it myself, and using a kickstarter to provide for nice hardback editions.  Its got a scholarly introduction, the French and English texts of the play, some afterword essays, notes on the text, and a secret behind the scenes account for those who don't want to play the 'it really existed game'.  The text is about 25,000 words at present.

I was asked a while ago to write a mash-up of the Time Machine, and Professor Moriarty for the Steampunk Holmes Project, that's about 15,000 words done, but looks like its going to come out as almost 60,000.  As there's no advance involved it keeps getting bumped by other work.

I've got a long standing project editing an anthology based around my Obituaria concept, for which a lot of talented authors wrote me stories (which I have paid for), but I keep being distracted by other things before it gets done.  I may try submitting the idea to Jonathan Cape in their 'new authors' call (1st to 30th June).

I promised Stuart Douglas I'd write an 'Unofficial Guide To Obverse Books Vol 1".

2 How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I'm not sure I can tell if it does.  A lot of people seem to think I write abstrusely, but I'm only trying to write interestingly and effectively.  I think a work of fiction should be thoughtful.

3 Why do you write what you do?

Either (a) it's something that I want to do, in which case I'll do it even if there's no market and either try to make a market or put it up for free on my blog, or for sale as an e-text on Amazon or both, or (b) someone's paying me, in which case I'll firstly try to find something that I really want to say / do in or about the universe or characters they're dealing with. If I can't I won't just write for money. I have a day job for that. [Disclaimer, offer me enough money and I'll leave the day job.]

4 How does your writing process work?

Once I have the core idea, the thing I want to say, focus on, consider (which might not be the thing the reader expects), and an outline which includes the beginning and the end (though not always the middle) I start writing the beginning and the end until the middle connects them. In the process everything is up for graps.  I write about 1,000 words an hour: but as I have a job (see above) it can take me a week to write a short story.  I'm also much slower on novels than I was at first : GHOST DEVICES took 4 months, THE BRAKESPEARE VOYAGE nearly 10 years. (Admittedly some of those were spent *not* writing it.).

I hate showing people things until they're nearly done, and then I have to because I become convinced the work is awful. Working with co-writers on recent novels has helped with this fear (a bit), because they've all been excellent.

1 comment:

Andrew Hickey said...

(that was from me, Andrew Hickey. Blogger doesn't seem to believe Google about who I am)