Writer of science fiction, fantasy and dark fiction
The things I write and why I write them
It’s here. The cover for my forthcoming time-travellin’, love-trianglin’, history-muddlin’ novel Fifty-One has now been unveiled. And I don’t know about you, but I love it.
Many thanks to Kate Cowan of Broken Arrow Designs, for visualizing it better than the writer did!
All right, I confess. When I was writing the novel that became Fifty-One, the cover was not front of my mind.
Big issues bothered me, like whether the time travel paradoxes in the story might sink it under the weight of mind-bending puzzlement (they don’t, honest!). And so did small issues, like what had the weather been like on a specific day in July 1944.
In my idler moments, I even indulged fantasies of which actors might play Jake and Amy, my time-tossed, star-crossed lovers, if ever there was a movie version of the book.
I didn’t think about the cover. Maybe I’m just not a visual thinker.
Someone once said that there are no great writers, only great rewriters. I am – to misquote Bob Dylan – “learning it these days.”
I wrote in the summer about the chastening (but valuable) experience of the first edits of my forthcoming novel, Fifty-One.
This first round of editing addressed the content of the story, and helped me iron out plot problems and flaws in the storytelling.
The next stage was line-editing.
Continue reading “Living the Author Dream – Fifty-One, Editing Stage Two”
Half a mile from my home is Lewisham High Street. There’s nothing special about it – shabby, even by London standards: a street market, people getting on and off buses, phone shops and chain stores. It’s seen better days.
One day that definitely was not better – indeed, it was probably the street’s worst – was Friday July 28th, 1944.
I will confess: I’ve been trying to get a story in Interzone for ages, but they kept turning me down. The editor, Andy Cox, is rightly a demanding man. Anyway, you know the old saying: if at first you don’t succeed, make a bloody nuisance of yourself!
The story is probably my ‘hardest’ SF yet; set on Saturn’s moon, Titan, and featuring some fragile but peskily well-organised alien lifeforms. (There’s still a ghost in it, though, which I guess means that as SF goes, it isn’t that hard!)
You can buy Interzone here. If you subscribe – which you really should – you can even get this issue free.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to be at the launch, which took place at midnight on Saturday 10th June, in the atmospheric St George’s Church, Cullercoats. But I am pleased and honoured to have a story in the book.
It’s a short and sad tale, called How to be invisible.
I don’t write many of them these days, but I’ve always had a soft spot for ghost stories. I remember a job interview once, when the panel picked up on the fact that I wrote fiction in my spare time. When I said I wrote ghost stories, I was very pointedly asked why. As if this quirk made me unsuitable for responsible employment.
I think I rambled. It didn’t seem sufficient to say, ‘It’s what I like’. I distinctly remember at one point advancing the thesis that ghost stories were a metaphor for the way in which the present is shaped by the past. So they were a perfectly logical pursuit for someone with a history degree. * I don’t think I had ever thought about that before the words tumbled from my nervous lips, but even now I think it’s mostly true.
Most of what I write falls into two broad categories: ghost stories or science fiction. And I think the two genres are fuzzy mirror images.
In most ghost stories, events in the past reach into the present. Nothing can ever be said to be finally over and gone, especially where powerful emotions and bad deeds are involved. So, when you write a ghost story set in the present, you are inevitably also writing about the past.
Science fiction is a bigger and woollier beast, given the range and diversity of its settings. But I think it is generally recognised that the most powerful SF stories are metaphors for issues in our own times. So, while SF may be set in the future (or sometimes in the past, or a parallel timeline), it resonates when it is really about the present.
When Ursula Le Guin wrote about the fantasy city of Omelas, with its happiness dependent on the misery of a single unfortunate child, she was saying something about inequality and injustice in our own world. When Samuel Delany wrote about sexless spacers in Aye and Gomorrah, does anyone think he wasn’t really writing about sexuality in the 1960s?
Perhaps this begs the question of why I don’t just write about the past or the present, if that’s what I mean. I’ll have to think about that.
Having said all that, I’m not entirely sure How to be Invisible is actually a ghost story. But don’t tell Iron Press! You can in any case read plenty of proper ghost stories, with a modern twist, in the book, which is well worth your time.
If you want to buy a copy (and you should!), Cold Iron is available here
[*I got the job!]