A Visit From The QWC Blog Tour

When I was asked by QWC to take part in the Queensland Writers Centre Blog Tour, I leapt at the chance. Anything I can do to help QWC, I will, since QWC changed my life. I also think the Australian Writers Marketplace Online is a fantastic tool that writers the world over should subscribe to. So a big welcome to followers of the tour. I hope you’ve been enjoying the journey as much as I have. And for my regular readers, you can catch up on the rest of the tour at the QWC blog (details at the bottom of this post.)

They asked me the following questions:

Where do your words come from?

This probably sounds a bit weird but my characters write my books. My part in it is to create a world – I’m extremely meticulous about world-building – invent some interesting characters to go in it and an interesting predicament for them to find themselves in. After that, I just need to follow them through the story and let them say and do what their natures and the situation inevitably lead them to say and do. Not that I don’t work out the plot and the pacing, the key moments I need to hit, and the themes of the book, but even that is done by letting the characters’ actions unfold within the constraints of their world.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I grew up in the city of Hull in Yorkshire, a poor town in the North of England. I lived on a gigantic council estate, part of a big, extended family, half of which was on the dole on any particular day. Yet, thanks entirely to the amazing, generous, socialist policies of the times, I got a first class schooling, and went to excellent universities, for free.

Now, after a long career in software R&D and user interface design, that has taken me all over the world, I have settled in the beautiful hills of Southern Queensland in an area they call the Granite Belt. My house is on a peak at about 1000m, I’m surrounded by native bush and wild animals. It’s quiet, peaceful, and very beautiful.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

My first novel, TimeSplash, starts with the following:

“The music thundered. So loud it was hard to breathe. The way the dancing crowd heaved in time to the beat made Patty feel nauseous.

Or was that just fear?

There had been lots of splashparties. Since she became Sniper’s bitch that’s all they’d done, going from one to another right across Europe. But she’d never seen a party from up here before. Not from inside the cage.”

As you might suppose, it’s a thriller. It’s set in Europe about forty years from now and it took most of last year to write. It’s due for release on 15th February 2010.

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

I should probably say ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘The Da Vinci Code’ if I had any sense. At least then I’d be rich. But I obviously don’t because the kinds of books that come to mind are the ones that leave me gasping in admiration, awed by the skill, intelligence and sensitivity of the writer. Books like; ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ by Ursula le Guin, ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut, and ‘Fahrenheit 451′ by Ray Bradbury, to name but a tiny few of them. And that’s just the sci-fi novels. Don’t get me started on Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Kipling, Wilfred Owen… And, oh, to think of writing Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’!

What are you currently working towards?

That’s easy. I’m working toward building a career as a writer. As I say, my first novel, TimeSplash, is about to be published. I really need that to be a success if I’m ever to be given the chance to publish another. These days, as a new author, that means publicising the book myself, using whatever resources I have to drive sales. A writer today is very much an entrepreneur. Writing the books is only half the job. I’m not one of life’s salesmen. It doesn’t come easy. But I’m more than willing to do it because I am one of life’s writers, and I’ll do whatever I have to to ensure that I can keep writing and keep getting published.

Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…

…electronic. My novel, TimeSplash, is being published as an ebook only. There will not be a print edition. This is a bit of a gamble at the moment but you will see this more and more over the next few years. These days, the mainstream publishers are still trying to work out what electronic publishing is all about. My own publisher, Lyrical Press Inc., has specialised in electronic publishing for some years already. While the big publishers are tentatively publishing electronic editions in parallel with print editions, the electronic publishers are branching out into more and more genres, and print-on-demand. I think it’s inevitable that print will slowly decline until it is a niche luxury product. In the end, the economics of electronic publishing will drive out print.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.