How I Arrived Here

For those who don’t know me, here is a brief summary of my journey towards published work so far.

2013

Until 2013, I’d been mostly a composer and musician (and occasional photographer). My writing consisted of a handful of short stories (and poetry, some of which was cathartic). And then, I suffered a bout of temporary deafness.

After a medical appointment I knew it was only a build-up of earwax, and arranged to deal with the problem. But the loss of most of my hearing sensitivity had sobered me. My musical work, particularly as I had placed myself in the role of producer and engineer as well as composer, relied heavily on being able to hear nuances in the mix, and I began to imagine what would happen if, some day, I had permanent hearing difficulties of some sort. If you’re not a music producer yourself, you might find it hard to appreciate how upsetting this thought was. It made me step back and assess my creative hobbies, looking for alternatives… and that’s when I remembered that I really enjoyed writing. I resolved to begin writing again regularly.

I started to listen to podcasts on the subject, including notably Mur Lafferty‘s I Should Be Writing. Mur has an honest and open style of podcasting, and I felt I was being let into a little gathering of aspiring writers, sharing their hopes, dreams and woes, through her voice. I wrote a few short stories, and I got very much bitten by the bug again. It was in this year that I purchased a Macbook AIR laptop, realising that its portability and fast SSD made it ideal for writing. I also got into using Scrivener, which I continue to use to this day.

I joined a local writers’ group, which was quite small at the time but has since increased in size. I’m now the Treasurer, and I’ve found the sense of belonging and support very useful. It feels very much like a second family to me. A good writers’ group is a precious thing! If you find one, don’t ever abandon it.

I also joined the Magic Spreadsheet, a Google Sheet on which writers can log their daily word counts to ‘gamify’ their progress and pit their persistence against that of others in friendly competition. That got me really fired up, and led to what happened next.

2014

I finished my first draft (160k words) of a contemporary fantasy with a love story at its core. Yes, I wrote a love story. What happened was that I got obsessed with something, which is usually what leads people to do things they never planned to do. In this case it was a single writing prompt that came to me after hearing a song. I made a short story out of it, and then made that into my first novel. I’ll be honest: it sucks – well, a lot of it does, anyway. The story itself is inspiring in concept, but it was my first book, and inevitably my craft was not up to scratch. The main reason I left it on the shelf and never edited it is very simple: it was a rather unwieldy and complicated mess. In fact, it was such a mess that I’d need some serious experience under my belt before I could edit it – and I didn’t yet have that. And so Tabitha’s Gift is currently gathering dust, patiently awaiting the day when I might deign to get my head out of the technological future and think about magic again. It’s a bit sad – but I think we all need a little sadness in our lives. It’s like rain: the landscape glistens all the more after its visit, and would be flat without it, however bright it might be.

2016/7

I got part-way through a new science fiction book, which opens with an interstellar courier delivering a package to a planet of scary posthumans. The reason I stopped (after 40,000 words) was a frustrating one. It dawned on me that the political history of humanity in this book, up to the point at which the story opens, was too interesting to be mere back story. At that point, I understood that I was writing volume two of a trilogy. I felt that I had to write volume one first, so work ground to a halt while I attempted to switch my head to a version of my world that was time-shifted back a generation or two. Of course, any experienced writer could have told me that was ill-advised. My heart was still in the first story, about the courier. He couldn’t appear in volume one, and I missed him too much. Though I did my best to build up some momentum, it wasn’t happening. And so I lost interest for a while, and spent some time writing short stories and enjoying other genres. Which brings us to…

2018/9

I have been working on a book with an unusual structure. It presents itself as a collection of short stories in various genres, including sci fi, folk tale fantasy, cyberpunk, urban fantasy, and even a near-future sci fi courtroom drama. The stories appear to have no connection to each other until the tenth chapter, in which the nine main characters from the other stories (in a shameless homage to The Twilight Zone) find themselves in a room together and have no idea why they are there. This chapter ends bizarrely, and in the next one the deeper connection between the stories is revealed, and the book enters the final act.

This book has grabbed me firmly and pulled me into it, in a way nothing has since my love story epic. I feel as if the characters are real, and that if one of them knocked at my door I would accept their presence in our world for several seconds before thinking anything was awry. One of the odd aspects of writing in this unusual structure is that the Room Chapter needs the characters to be very well-defined before they are thrown together. This implies that the preceding stories that spawned them must be polished and edited. So I’ve put off drafting most of the last part of the book until the first nine chapters are edited. This goes against the usual recommendation, of course, because one isn’t supposed to edit until the draft is done – but I never was one for doing things the standard way!