This Writing Life: Building A World, Piece By Piece

It’s a well-known fact in indie publishing that it’s easier to sell books in a series. Once a reader enjoys the first book, they’re more likely to pick up the next, rather than move on to another author. The challenge I’ve always had is that I get bored easily. Three or four books with the same characters is really my maximum, and even then, each volume will usually be set in a different city or locale.

So a thirteen books series was never going to suit me – but I realised a few years ago that I could link individual books or series together, by setting them in the same world.

Enter The Eternal World, by far the most ambitious writing project I’ve ever attempted. What started as a means of connecting a few disparate series – ones which had enough in common to plausibly take place on adjacent continents, say – has expanded to encompass every single one of my high fantasy works-in-progress. To incorporate so many different settings, characters, and plots, it has continued to grow, and now covers something like fifteen thousand years of history, multiple continents, and a dozen connected realms.

It’s impossible for me to put into words how I’ve gone about this. The whole process has been remarkably organic, and started from very humble seeds. Perhaps these two books could take place in the same city – and perhaps this one is in the same country, a few hundred years before. But then what’s happening on the other side of the ocean? Where did this culture they keep mentioning spring up? Where does their magic come from?

I’ve answered questions like these, and hundreds more, repeatedly over the last few years. It’s been a monumental task to bring so many different stories into one world, without their inclusion feeling forced. Many are yet to be written, and none are yet published; I’m finding new connections between them all the time.

And that’s been the most interesting part of this whole process. My initial plans for one large world, full of stories that only tangentially overlapped, have instead become more complex. Every time I dive into another of these books, I start noticing the possible connections with other stories – characters who might appear elsewhere, histories that affect other places, intricacies of the magic or technology that have an impact on other series. Suddenly, those disconnected books have built themselves into a vast, highly connected web. There are links between them that readers might never notice, but I know they’re there.

This sounds, I know, both overwhelming and intimidating. There are times when it’s both, and I find myself drowning under the sheer weight of complexity this world has engendered. Ultimately, though, it’s been exhilarating. Each new connection inspires me to pursue a different story, or develop a different part of the world. Seeing grand arcs develop is thrilling; most of all, I’ve been continually surprised by what my brain can come up with, when pushed to put pieces together that don’t immediately seem to fit.

I’ve debated several times whether The Eternal World has reached its limits. There are books that don’t seem to have a place there, and ideas that just don’t belong. It’s the complexity and challenge of this project that keeps me coming back to it, though – and I hope to share more of both in the weeks to come.

Breaking The Ice, Redux

I started this blog in the spring of 2008. Both my life and my writing looked very different at the time; I was still a student, living in Nottingham, and self-publishing wasn’t even a dot on my horizon. In fact, for many of the years I was regularly updating this blog, I was working towards being traditionally published, and my posts at the time reflect that.

But things change. In 2014, I began self-publishing, and quickly realised that I enjoyed the process immensely. As my catalogue of fiction grew, I turned my online attention elsewhere. I started other blogs, posted frequently to Instagram, and joined the Booktube and Authortube communities making videos on YouTube.

Which meant that my time for this blog gradually faded away. I made my last post in 2017, advising anyone who stopped by to head over to YouTube and find me there. In some ways, that’s still good advice – I post new vlogs every week or two. Sometimes, though, video just doesn’t cut it…

Enter this blog, once again. I’ve faithfully maintained my website ever since 2008, but I’ve realised in recent weeks that I missed giving more casual updates. Writing progress, book reviews, photos, snippets of fiction and behind-the-scenes peeks – these things have followed me all across the Internet, but they’ve become increasingly scattered. To see all of them, you’d have to follow me in three or four different places, which is both awkward and impratical.

Hence the blog, and why I’m revisiting it now. I want to once again make this a repository for everything I’m working on, in whatever medium takes my fancy. I’m active in a number of venues, creating fiction and videos and photography, but in an ever-shifting social media landscape, it makes sense to share more of those things on a platform I control.

And yes, it does feel very strange to be returning to blogging in the year 2021 – and I definitely feel a bit rusty – but maybe some things never go out of style. And if not… Who wants to be fashionable anyway?

Moving On Up

I haven’t had a lot of time to update this blog recently. It’s served me well over a number of years, but the simple truth is that I haven’t been able to give it the attention it deserves. I’m hoping, in the future, I’ll be able to change that, but for now it’s on hiatus.

Having said that, I’m still active in many places online. You can follow the links at the top of the sidebar to find me on various social media outlets, including Instagram and Youtube, where I can most often be found. The latter, in particular, replicates some of what I once blogged about, with videos chatting about my latest reads and writing progress. I hope you’ll join me there!

‘A Lonely War’ is Here!

We’re halfway through the summer here in the UK, even if it hasn’t felt much like summer at all. Maybe it’s a little bit more seasonal where you are, and you’re looking for something to read? Well then, this is the perfect post for you!

The third book in my steampunk/epic fantasy Flight of the Lady Firene series is now available! It’s called ‘A Lonely War’, and you can find the details below.

A Lonely War small coverHome should be where the heart is, but for Fleet Manteios it’s nothing but a place of obligations and bad memories. When she’s drawn back to Requies to attempt a reconciliation with her dying father, she finds it a changed city. Her estranged husband might still be there, but there’s a fresh sense of hope and freedom on the streets – and there’s trouble, too.

The last person Fleet expected to see has made her way to the city, and what’s followed her could put every life in danger. Fleet’s loyalties are about to be divided, between the family she abandoned, the friend who was once a foe, and the city she fled from – and which might not want to be saved.

I’m really proud of this book, both the themes that ended up running through it, and the choices Fleet makes during the story. It’s also the longest Lady Firene book to date, which wasn’t intentional, but sometimes you’ve just got to let the story go where it will.

Maybe you’d like to read it? Here are all the links:

Amazon

Nook

iTunes

Kobo (Coming as soon as I can! Kobo seems to be experiencing some publishing delays right now.)

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This Writing Life: Writing Without Purpose

I feel like a lot of the recent posts I’ve written, or haven’t yet written but plan to write, have a common theme: namely, that it’s important to know the rules of writing fiction, but also when to break them. Or, in some cases, to break them… but only temporarily.

Take this particular piece of advice: every scene in your story should have a purpose. As a reader, I can’t dispute this. Reading a meandering book, filled with descriptions or exposition that seem to do nothing but show you how skilled the writer thinks they are, is deeply frustrating. On the writing side, I think we should strive for purpose and meaning in every scene of a finished story, to improve pacing and tension, and to stop the reader getting bored. But no published story starts out as a fully formed, completed animal, and that’s where breaking the rules come in.

You see, I think there’s something to be said for not always knowing your scene’s purpose before you write it. Admittedly, not knowing for an entire novel would make writing it a very slow affair, but sometimes it can be a relief to throw caution to the winds and just write, to see where the characters take you. Not only might you surprise yourself with the twists the story takes, but there can be some truly serendipitous moments, throwing up new possibilities you’d never considered before.

If you consider yourself a pantser, i.e. you write by the seat of your pants, this is probably a feeling you get every day. I believe even staunch outliners can benefit from occasionally writing without purpose, though. It often feels to me as though some subconscious part of my brain keeps working on my stories when I’m not actively thinking about them (call it the Muse, if you will, although I don’t believe that’s something writers should rely on or even need to be able to write). When you write without any clear idea of where a scene is going, your subconscious starts throwing in the things it’s been mulling over – and quite frequently it has better ideas!

As I said before, I don’t like the idea of relying on the Muse, or writing every scene without a purpose in mind (and I think a lot of pantsers do more internal outlining than they realise), but there are times when you really don’t know what you’re going to write – and that’s okay. Simply putting your characters together and seeing what comes out might surprise you, and might even turn your whole story upside down, in the best way possible.

This Writing Life: How Not to Write a Novel

I love Pinterest. Perhaps it’s because I have a very visual brain, but I find endless inspiration in all the pretty pictures and beautiful artwork, sparking story ideas left, right and centre. In recent weeks, I’ve also found it to be a surprisingly useful repository of writing advice, sometimes in poster form, and sometimes in full articles hidden behind the pictures. There’s a problem with taking writing advice from the internet, though, particularly from a site that’s as open and lacking in curation as Pinterest. What one user finds enlightening is going to be completely useless for another… And that’s where this post comes in.

You see, whilst browsing Pinterest images today, I came across one titled ‘How to Write a Novel’. I clicked on it, wondering what fresh nugget of inspiration I might find – only to be left dismayed. According to this image, after all, ‘writing a novel’ could be easily summarised in a few bullet points, cheerily arranged on a brightly coloured poster; not only was it painfully simplistic, but some of it was just plain wrong.

It’s fair to say that everything about this poster rubbed me the wrong way. Some of the ‘advice’, after all, was truly useless, verging on terrible. Don’t use crutch words! (Sure, but that’s a tiny detail to be worrying about when you’re just starting a book, and you won’t know what your crutches are until you’ve written it, anyway.) Do make your dialogue sound natural! (Yeah, great, except that’s MUCH HARDER THAN IT SOUNDS.) Don’t edit the novel whilst writing it, or write without knowing the ending in advance! (If that’s how you write, yes – but plenty of writers don’t work that way, and are happy with their process regardless.)

Okay, if I’m honest, the real problem with this poster wasn’t the advice itself, or its terrible English (always encouraging, given the subject). The problem, really, is with the prescriptive nature of advice like this. Not only is it impossible to break the process of writing a novel into such simple steps (write several drafts, then proofread when you’re done is the last one – so casual, as if that might not take you anywhere from a month to a decade), but it’s also impossible to so clearly define that process in a single way. Every writer works differently, and by that I mean really, REALLY differently, sometimes even from one book to the next. A few bullet points on a poster isn’t going to change that.

But this advice is aimed at new writers, you might say. In actual fact, I think that’s worse. Implying there’s One True Way to write a novel is singularly unhelpful for anyone coming to writing for the first time. There are enough worries and insecurities in being a new writer without being told you’re Doing It Wrong. And I know this might sound hypocritical of me, being someone who frequently gives out writing advice on the internet, but here’s the one thing I always come back to: everything I suggest is subjective, and it won’t work for everyone. This is simply my experience, learned by trial and error, by making endless mistakes, and by listening to – but not always heeding – the words of people who’ve been doing this longer than I have.

If you are a new writer, worrying about how to tackle your first book, here’s my biggest piece of advice. In the words of a well-known sports brand, Just Do It. Start writing, make mistakes, and learn from them. Every piece of advice you’re ever given (including this one)? Consider whether it could work for you, but don’t treat it as gospel. Every writer needs to find their own path, be that the same as their idol’s or radically different to everything that’s come before. There’s no easy road map to becoming a writer, even to writing a single story, no matter what posters on Pinterest might try to tell you – and whilst that sounds kinda scary, it’s ultimately liberating. Go out there, do your own thing, and remember: there’s no-one who knows your writing process better than you.

The Part-Time Writer: Little and Often

I am, for those who don’t know, self-employed. With my partner, I run a B&B and smallholding, taking care of the house, the guests and the animals in equal measure. It’s an enjoyable job, but like all self-employment, it comes with a few negatives. Today, for example, I realised that I really haven’t had a day off in at least a week, and won’t get one for several more days. I imagine that the idea of a fortnight without a day off from their job would horrify an awful lot of people, but it’s something that I’ve not only got used to, but actually don’t mind. Quite a few of those days, after all, aren’t a straight eight hours of work; I might work until lunchtime, or 3pm, or simply do a few chores on a day that would otherwise be free time, simply so I don’t have to do them later. It turns out, you see, that I actually quite like having a job that allows me to take this ‘little and often’ approach, and it’s the very same thing I do with my writing.

There are two main schools of thought when it comes to getting your writing done, and I’ve seen both part-time and full-time writers who fall on either side. Some are what you might call ‘binge writers’, who save up all their writing time and then hammer out 10,000 words in a day, only to not write again for two weeks. Depending on your work/life schedule, this might work well, allowing you to properly focus on your story for a defined period of time, and thus get far more work completed than you might otherwise have managed in those two weeks. Some people simply enjoy writing this way, whether it makes them more productive or not. For many writers, though, and particularly part-timers with a reasonably regular schedule, I don’t think this is the way to go – and thus we come to back ‘little and often’.

The most successful writers, it seems to me, make their writing a habit. There’s no waiting for inspiration to strike, no writing ‘when they’ve got time’ (because most make time, one way or another – more on that in a later post). Instead, these are the people who sit down each and every day, and get the work done.

This is a method I’ve gradually settled into over my years of writing, and it’s one I suggest most writers try to adopt, to a greater or lesser extent. Creating that habit, that discipline, tends to get work finished far better than the occasional, irregular binge. It’s no exaggeration to say that slow and steady wins the race – just 500 words written every day will produce 182,500 over the course of a year, which is somewhere in the region of two average-length novels, or an awful lot of short stories.

That ‘little and often’ method can also work on a daily basis. Instead of wondering when you’re going to find time to sit down and write 1000 words, aim for just 100, or 10 minutes, or whatever you can fit in. Maybe you’ll only manage 100 words/10 minutes that day – or maybe inspiration will strike, and you’ll suddenly produce a lot more. Maybe you’ll find you can actually fit an extra 10 minutes in here, and another 10 there, and suddenly you’re not so far off that 1000 words after all.

This, in my experience, is how stories get written – and, more importantly, finished. Little snippets of time, a few words here and there, and one day you look up to find you’ve produced a book. Not only that, but if you’re a part-timer, you’ve hopefully also found time to have a job, or raise a family, or pursue other hobbies and interests along the way. You find that you don’t have to let writing consume your life if you don’t want to, but that you can still produce stories more quickly and systematically than you’d ever believed possible.

I know, for some people, this is all going to feel a bit dry and boring. What about inspiration? What about the Muse? Well, I was a bit scathing about the Muse in my last post, so I won’t repeat that here; maybe you really do need that lightning strike to help you write, and that’s fine. On the other hand, maybe you’re looking at the chaos of your life and wondering how you’re ever going to find time to produce the story that’s burning inside your head. If that’s the case, there really is nothing for it but the ‘little and often’ approach: a few stolen minutes here and there, a few sentences written whilst you’re on the bus, or on your lunchbreak – or even on the toilet, if you really feel so inclined – just to see what you’re able to create. Try it, and see what happens.

My First Readathon

[Forgive the cheesy title. It’s descriptive, if nothing else!]

In recent months, I’ve become fascinated by the world of Booktube and Bookstagram, which are – for those who find the terms as baffling as I once would have done – essentially just posts about books and reading on YouTube and Instagram. There’s something strangely hypnotic about watching someone stand in front of a camera and just review a book, or show you the paperbooks they’ve recently bought, one by one. There’s also something calming about scrolling through pictures of books (or at least there is for me, and I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one), and of course it can be a great way to find recommendations.

What I love most of all, though, is how enthusiastic all these video-makers and photographers are about books – just good old, no nonsense books – and reading, and sharing their finds. That passion is incredibly satisfying to come across when you’re a reader yourself, living in a world that so often puts more money, time and effort into every other entertainment and educational medium imaginable.

This, then, brings us to the Readathon. A readathon is, at its most basic, an organised online event, during which the participants read as many books as possible, or perhaps try to do nothing but read (particularly when the event is over a short period, like 24 hours). This last weekend saw one of the year’s two Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathons, which is a particularly popular event, and seemed to me as good a place to start as any.

It’s an interesting experience, spending 24 hours reading as much as possible, made even more interesting by the fact you’re doing it at the same time as hundreds, even thousands, of other people. There’s lots of chat about the event on social media, lots of people sharing what they’re reading, and a general sense of camaraderie similar to what I’ve found with NaNoWriMo – essentially, we’re all doing this slightly ridiculous thing, because we all share the same love! That connection is a powerful thing, and when everyone is engaged in something as simple as reading, all other boundaries cease to matter.

As a means to simply read more books, I also found it quite successful. I wasn’t particularly strict with my time, spending an hour here or there doing something else, and stopping to eat/sleep (which not everyone does!). This particular readathon also fell over two days for a UK time zone, and I was much more successful at reading during the afternoon and evening of the first day than I was the morning of the second. Even so, I read something like 220 pages of a couple of paperbacks (finishing one and starting another), plus about a third each of two ebooks. That isn’t much, perhaps, by the standards of a fast reader, but I’ve gone whole weeks in the past without turning so many pages.

Would I, then, recommend readathons to other readers out there? If you either want an excuse to really focus on reading for a set period, or to meet other readers, it’s a definite ‘yes’. I realise the 24 hour structure of this particular event won’t work for everyone (I just got lucky that it didn’t coincide with work hours), but there are a whole range of other readathons discussed online. Some last a day, others a week, but all share the purpose of getting people to read more books, and bringing passionate readers together – and with aims like that, you’ll hear very little complaint from me!

This Writing Life: Should You Stick to One Series at Once?

I’ve titled this post with a question, and before I begin, I’m going to be completely honest: I’m not sure it’s a question I can answer. This, you see, is a topic I’m currently wrestling with, and all I can do is summarise my train of thought, with the pros and cons that have occurred to me. And really, there are both, whether you choose to write a single series from start to finish, or jump about between books.

A little background: I currently have one unfinished series, with two books published, a prequel available to my newsletter subscribers, and another novel on the way. It’s a series that’s very dear to my heart, and I intend to write at least a couple more books (and I have tentative ideas for more after that). The problem is, I’m something of a magpie brain when it comes to writing — whilst I’m usually able to get to the end of a first draft without being distracted, as soon as that’s done, I want to be off and working on the new shiny thing, which isn’t usually the next book in the series, at least not right away.

What’s the problem with that? From a writing perspective, there isn’t one. You might struggle to get back into a story’s world when you return to it, having written something else in between, but the same can be said of taking time off to edit, or having a writing break for another reason. I tend to find instead that jumping around between projects give me a fresh sense of enthusiasm when I return to one, as I’ve had time to develop exciting new ideas and view previous books in a more balanced light. No, the cons, in this case, come from the publishing side.

Conventional wisdom, you see, suggests that it’s easiest to gain an audience (whether you’re self- or traditionally published) by a) writing a series, and b) producing the books in that series at regular intervals. There are plenty of exceptions to that rule, of course — George R.R. Martin, I’m looking at you — but it’s wisdom that holds true for the majority of writers. That means taking the time to write other books is suddenly off the agenda, particularly if you’re a slow writer, because it’s more important to continue the series you’re already in the middle of.

But oh, the lure of the new shiny story…! And so the circle goes. This is exactly why I don’t have any answers: because every time I come to start a new book, I go through this same dance. I want to write this new idea I’ve just come up with! Ah, but it’s about time I published a book in my current series — except it’s just not as exciting

Well, okay, it turns out I do have something of an answer, and it goes like this: do the work. For me, writing first drafts is easy. Editing is harder, and committing to a single series is harder still. Wherever you are in your writing career, though, sitting down and working every day (or at least on a regular schedule) is the most important thing. For new writers, that might mean hammering away until they finish their first book. For me, doing the work means making sure I keep up with at least one series — and if there’s time to write something else, that’s fine, but what I’ve started has to come first.

Sometimes, that just isn’t what you want to hear. It’s quite frequently not what I want to hear, which is exactly why I wrote this post. We all have to remind ourselves, from time to time, that commitments have to come before distractions; that whilst writing what you love is important, there’s a reason you started that series, or book, or short story in the first place, and that’s probably got more to do with love than the idea you only came up with two days ago. Whether we have waiting readers or not, we have to stay true to our own vision of what we’re creating — and if that’s a series, then we owe it to ourselves, as much as anyone, to do the work and finish what we’ve started.

Introducing Words Are Hard

Bannerfinal1It’s not something I’ve talked about much on this blog, but I’m a massive fan of writing-related podcasts and have been for a few years now. I’ve also, in the past, thought about starting a podcast of my own, but could never quite summon the nerve. Just sitting alone, talking into a microphone, is somehow a lot more intense than chatting to a group of friends, so I always tended to confine my personal writing thoughts to this blog.

Well, no longer! After being brought together by the Guild Wars 2 fan-site Chronicles of Tyria, a group of us intrepid writers have dived into the podcast pool. Every two weeks, we’ll be chatting about writing topics — fan-fiction and character creation have been our first two episodes — as well as including the occasional review/story chat of a game, book or film.

Essentially then, if you want to hear me talk about writing in far more detail than I usually do on this blog, or you just like podcasts in general, you should head on over to Words Are Hard, and listen to our first episodes. You’ll also be able to find us on iTunes soon.