After several years of thinking, I finally decided to act (or more precisely, leap) back into writing novels. But in the time between my last foray and now, the publishing game had changed, and self publishing is no longer the realm of the rich and resourceful. Now, self publishing is feasible, practical and accessible.
Why write?
Good question! I am a creative by nature, and I am continually imagining people doing extraordinary things in the most mundane of environments and places, or extraordinary people living out their lives amongst the more common place and restrained, like perhaps you and I are.
I am also a story teller, with a sense of theatre and the dramatic, which goes a long way towards conjuring up the fanciful, the fictitious and the futuristic.
And then there’s the fact that writing isn’t a terribly difficult thing to do (physically), I am removed from the discomfort of dealing with the whims and fancy of clients, and finally, there is money to be made.
In the beginning
Way back when I was .. ahem, younger than I am now, just after starting college, I had this idea for a novel, the principle theme of which was time travel, a subject that I find endlessly fascinating. And, having starting writing the novel Perditions End during the middle of the nineteen nineties, by the turn of the millennia, I had a first draft. While this draft is most likely to be scrapped and re-written, a crucial seed of inspiration had been sewn in my mind, one of a trilogy (or what now looks more like a tetralogy) about a lineage of unique people with singular abilities.
On the in between
Of course, I have been over-run by circumstance, which arrived in the form of several huge movie franchises, such as The Matrix, X-Men and Inception to name but a few, all of which touched upon many of the themes and ideas I would be exploring. That said, the ideas I have in mind are still very much original and worth exploring further.
I am an unabashed science fiction fanatic, but I am also a pragmatist and a practical thinker. I’ve been writing about science and technology for years now, over on Blah, Blah! Technology, which allows me to take the “What if?” and ground those ideas in the cement of reality. And so, here I am, writing about science fiction that will, to the best of my knowledge and abilities, be as grounded in scientific and technological fact as is practicably possible.
In the here and now
More recently, I’ve written Ascending Angels, which is the sequel to Perditions End. But this this is all part of a much bigger longer term project. I need to first write something I can sacrifice to the monkey gods of self publishing, and this is where Earth Day comes in. Earth Day is an eighty page short story that follows a woman living in rural Cumbria, in the north of England, in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
Unlike movies such as Independence Day, the fact is, we simply wouldn’t stand a chance against any alien species, should they wish to invade Earth. Instead, I deal with the aforementioned practicalities of what such an invasion might entail and what purpose it would serve, with shades of The Day The Earth Stood Still, in so far as the way the alien emissary Klaatu, played by Keanu Reeves, articulates the concerns of those he represents.
Anyway, that’s the book I’ve chosen to go with first, so all that remains is publishing, right? Wrong. And that’s where I’ll be picking up next time, offering a glimpse into the various processes and stages I went through, to actually write a novel and then to prepare for publishing.
