Reading…

I recently finished reading Gareth L Powell’s The Recollection, which I’ll write about in another post. Suffice to say that it was an excellent read, and I think it’ll be the work that launches Gareth to the top of the British SF tree and beyond.

Now I’m starting on Iain M. Banks’ book Matter. My dear bro bought me this for Christmas. I’ve read a couple of Banks’ other books before – Consider Phlebas and Against A Dark Background. I didn’t really get on with them, there was something about them that I just couldn’t connect with.

At the time I was reading a lot, and I mean A LOT, of Philip K. Dick. PKD is still far and away my favourite SF author, and I’ve always preferred what would be deemed the soft SF of Dick and writers such as Thomas M. Disch, Ursula Le Guin and the like. I certainly do love my older hard SF authors such as Clarke, Asimov, Greg Bear etc. but there is something about Banks’ brand of space opera that left me cold.

I limped through Consider Phlebas, and where others found astounding adventure I found…meh. Against A Dark Background took me two attempts to finish, but I did enjoy it more at the second try.

I know people will be outraged by this, and I’m not criticising Mr. Banks’ writing, which is infinitely superior to my own efforts. I can’t even put my finger on what I didn’t like about them.

However, I’m enjoying Matter somewhat more. The Prologue and first chapter hooked me in, but I can see this is going to be a dense work; it comes with it’s own appendix for god’s sake!

I’ll see how it goes. Like most of his books, and much of modern SF, it’s a fucking great lump of a book, and may take me some time to plough through. I’m not sure why most modern SF seems to be 500-700 pages long, if it’s not part of a trilogy, and even when it is! I suspect it’s a marketing ploy by publishers, “people won’t pay £9.99 for a 200 page SF novel, but how can they resist 600 pages of it!”, and perhaps an economy of scale thing too.

Who knows.

All I know is Gareth L Powell’s The Recollection, at a tad over 300 pages proves that a great space opera, full of good ideas and complex characters, proves it can be done the good old fashioned way. About which more in another post!

The Magazine Project

I mentioned in a previous post that one of my projects is a digital SF magazine.

Although this isn’t ready as yet, it is coming together. I’ve already got an interview with awesome British science fiction author Gareth L Powell confirmed. Gareth is writing up his answers to my insightful and probing questions about his writing life. He’s also generously allowed me to re-print a recent story of his.

The launch issue will also feature a contribution from best-selling music journalist extraordinaire Joel McIver. www.joelmciver.co.uk  Joel is an all round legend in the world of music journos, having authored the best selling book on Metallica, And Justice For All…, as well as tens of other books on artists as varied as Ice Cube, Erykah Badu, Black Sabbath and Slayer. He’s also a SciFi geek and I’m really happy he’s decided to contribute to the first issue.

The magazine will be called Nexus SF and you can find the homepage HERE

This will be a free digital magazine, and is being done all for the love by me, the designer Steven and the contributing writers such as Joel. It’s not a competitor to the likes of SFX and SciFi Now, which are top quality print titles that I love, but a fanzine put together by people who love the genre in all its forms.

The magazine will also contain features on the culture and sub-culture of SciFi, so I hope it goes down well with a wide variety of SciFi fans.

I’ll post updates as things progress on the launch issue, and of course check the website www.nexus-sf.co.uk for more details. You can also follow the mag on Twitter at @nexus_sf

A Little Trick

I can’t remember where I nicked this from, but I’ve read several writers do something similar to this. When I finish my writing session I always finish in the middle of a sentence.

Why?

Because the hardest part of any writing session, for me, is the beginning. Getting the juices going isn’t always easy. By leaving a sentence unfinished it gives me a prompt, and I finish that sentence and then flow on to finish the paragraph, then the page and so on…

It’s all about building momentum!

Writing Habits

I mentioned in my previous post, down there, that I’d begun to write everyday. What I actually do is write Monday-Friday without fail and then the weekends are optional. Why not every day? Well, I do have many other things to do, and sometimes it’s nice to have a weekend just with the family, and doing some relaxing things like reading, playing my XBox, seeing friends.

I’ve found over the last few years, that writing in the evening is really hard for me. My job is quite stressful (ask anyone who’s worked in magazine publishing), and as an editor I work with words all day either writing, sub-editing or proofing. So by the time I get home, have dinner, play with my daughter, give her a bath and put her to bed it’s getting on for 8pm, and the last thing I feel like doing is sitting down to write. Also, my partner works evenings, so when she has nights off I want to spend them with her not at my laptop.

So, the only time I can realistically carve out some time for writing at the minute is the early mornings. However, I’ve never really been a morning person, just ask my poor mum who had to drag me out of bed for school for so many years. Fortunately having a baby has made me somewhat more adapted and resilient to A) Rising early and B)Functioning on less than the recommended 8 hours of sleep a night.

Because I’m trying to establish writing as a permanent habit, I decided not to blast myself with getting up too early straight away. One of my lecturers at university, Martin Goodman (www.martingoodman.com) who is a pretty damned good writer of fiction and non-fiction alike, told me that he gets up at 5AM to get at least two hours of writing in before starting the day proper! That scared the shit out of me. So I’m getting up at 6AM. My daughter tends to wake for the day between 6:45 and 7 ‘ish. That doesn’t leave a lot of time but at the moment it’s not about racking up the hours, but simply comitting to doing it each day.

The alarm goes off. I’m a bit bleary first thing, so I confess I do lie back in bed for a minute and allow my senses to come online. Then I haul myself out of bed, whip on some house clothes, and stumble downstairs. I stick the kettle on to make a coffee or tea, turn my laptop on, drink a glass of water then take a piss (sorry if that’s TMI). Come about 5 or 6 mins past 6 my word processor is open and I’m working.

It’s not always easy. Last week on one day all I managed was just over a page in about 45 minutes. Double spaced in Courier New 12, that is probably about 350 words or so. But another day I did about 5 pages in an hour.

So far I’ve managed it ever weekday for just over two weeks, with one session on a Saturday.

The mornings do work for me. I find that after I’m up and had a drink of water I’m surprisingly awake. My head is clear and I generally feel stress free. Even when I only manage a page I’m enjoying it and I feel I’ve accomplished something before the day has even begun. I’ve also noticed I’m more productive at work, and my desire for other projects to come to fruition is also increased.

My intention it to stick at this routine until the end of January. At this rate I’ll have at least two stories finished (1st draft). Then I’m going to get up half an hour earlier and see how that goes. Now this may be too much to ask of a self-confessed early morning zombie, but we’ll see. I’m also going to experiment with continuing to rise at 6AM for that 45-60 minute session, and working in a similar session in the evening, instead of getting up earlier.

All I know is, so far, I’m sticking to it, and for that alone I’m happy with my routine!

Projects

At the moment I’ve got a few projects on the go.

I’m currently finishing the first draft of a space opera adventure tale. This will be my first finished story in a long time, nearly two year. I’ve been getting up at 5:45am each morning for the last fortnight to squeeze in an hour or so of writing. At first it was hard going, but gradually it’s come easier. I’ll talk about my writing routine (such as it is) in another post.

I’m also working on a screenplay for a film student’s dissertation piece. He’ll be directing it, but he’s left the writing up to me. We talked about ideas, then I completed a first draft of it for him a couple of weeks before Christmas. It’s not SF’nal in nature at all, but it’s been fun to work on so far. He asked for some tweaks to the plot, which I’m doing at the moment, and he’ll begin casting and filming soon. He’s asked me to be as involved in that as I can be, which sounds fun.

Having entered the Two Short Nights Film Festival this year (www.twoshortnights.co.uk) with a couple of friends, I’m also formulating another short film with my old chum Nick Gordon (www.nickgordon.co.uk). We put in for the 48 hour film challenge, in which you have to write, film and edit a 5 minute short film in 48 hours. You’re given a loose brief, in that your film must follow a set theme (the interpretation of that theme is up to you), include a mandatory prop, and a mandatory piece of dialogue. I wrote the script, and also did a spot of voice acting (something I’ve always wanted to do. Don’t ask why, probably too much anime!).

And last, but by no means least. I’m working on a SF digital magazine! This will be a purely for the love fanzine, and I’ll release more details as it comes together. I’m doing this with Steven Jones who is a designer at my current workplace. We’re both SF geeks, and with publishing becoming more digital, we thought we’d try our hands at a little project. At the moment the homepage and Twitter etc. is due to go live any day, and I’m in the process of setting up some editorial for the launch issue.

Stay tuned for more updates on the above and more.

This writing life

I started this blog up for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I wanted to use it as a kind of motivational tool to keep me writing. Perhaps my biggest flaw as a writer (except maybe my now-and-then overuse of adjectives in first drafts) is that, like many people in many disciplines, I lack…errr…discipline. It’s not so much the sitting down that’s hard, it’s sitting down every day for two weeks to finish a short story. And of course like many aspiring writers I’ve had about four attempts at novels that got to about thirty pages or so and sputtered out. One made it to 30,000 words but I made the mistake of reading over the opening and became so disheartened that I abandoned it. I’ll revisit it one day, because I think the story is good, if not the actual writing.

Back in 2009/2010 I had a couple of short stories accepted by Aphelion, an online zine, and they were pretty well-received. I felt inspired. Then the pressures of my day job began to grind me down and slowly I abandoned my writing. I wanted to do it, but I just didn’t have the energy. So what’s changed? Well, I can’t say for sure…

Anyway, I digress. I wanted to use this blog as a way to keep my fingers going. It feels like, once some people come and start reading that I’ll have some public accountability. People who know of the blog, even if it’s just friends and family, will ask me about my writing projects, and I suppose maybe I hope this will help spur me on.

Secondly, I wanted to use this as a platform to reach out to the UK SF community. No man is an island they say, and after seeking some advice from Bristol based SF author Gareth Powell (www.garethlpowell.com) I was inspired to get more involved somehow. I’d asked Gareth for advice on markets to try for short stories, once I’d finished a couple. He offered some hints, and mentioned that some element of networking does help. Not that you get published by sucking up to editors, but that if you become involved in the scene, and people know your face, they’ll swing by your site, see what you’re up to, and maybe as initial breakthroughs happen opportunities might present themselves.

So this blog is the start of that. I suppose at some point I’ll have to get a Twitter account, maybe Facebook too. I loathe social networking sites (I don’t even have personal ones), but their influence is inescapable at the moment.

I’ve got a couple of projects to announce so come back soon.

Hello world!

The WordPress dashboard advised me to re-title this post, and insert my own blog post as soon as my blog became active. Having thought about it what better title could there be for the first post on a blog about SF, writing and general geekery than the title of the most basic computer program known to man (or this man at least).

I’ve had a blog before, but it didn’t last too long. Here’s hoping this one rides it out a little better…

Check back for updates and sage words of wisdom soon!