S. Elliott Brandis Talks About How He Writes

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1. What are you working on?

I just published my debut novel, Irradiated. It's a dark post-apocalyptic novel set in Brisbane, Australia. Now, I'm working hard on the sequel, Degenerated. I have recently finished the first draft, and am now in the process of tweaking and refining. I'm quite a slow, deliberate writer so my first draft tends to be the bulk of the work. Degenerated is set five-years after the events of Irradiated. In my series, the environment has degraded severely and the sun's radiation has the power to mutate the genes of our children. Thousands of people live underground, in a road tunnel that runs under the Brisbane River. Irradiated focuses on the struggles of two sisters, one of them irradiated, living outside of the tunnel, scavenging to survive. With Degenerated, I wanted to explore life in the tunnels, so I've introduced a new character, Flynn, who lives in their depths. Flynn is a closet-irradiated, living with abilities he doesn't know how to explain, and in a world where difference means death. It also sees the return of Pearl from Irradiated, and her quest for a better life amongst all the wildness.

2. How does your work differ from others in its genre?

I'd define my main sub-genre as 'post-apocalyptic fiction'. When I sat down to write in this genre, I asked myself a number of questions.

• Will the fall of society be fast or slow?
• How do you think it's most likely to happen?
• If it's slow, will people in the future even know what happened?
• In Australia, is it reasonable to expect that the post-apocalyptic landscape will be filled with cars and guns?

The result? A gritty, low-technology post-apocalyptic novel. Environmental degradation has worn down the city, leaving most of it inhospitable. No petrol, no guns, no easily won resources. There is no focus on what happened. When you're struggling to survive, only the now matters. Welcome to Australia. I am also proud to feature two sisters as my protagonists. Science fiction is historically quite chauvinistic, and we've seen over the past couple of years that sexist ideas still exist. I wanted to write two characters that refused to be the victim. They're strong, gritty, and goddamn bad-ass. We should refuse to accept stereotypes, and open up fiction to the stories of all. The love the two sisters have for each other ties the whole story together, and provides a counterpoint for the harsh realities of the world. I also focus heavily on the words that I use. I want to write intelligent, literary fiction. It's all too easy to look down on us as mere 'genre' writers, but I think the best literary fiction has always been Speculative Fiction. Slaughterhouse-Five, Oryx and Crake, The Road, and now Wool. Writing style matters, and I strive to make my novels the best they can be.

3. Why do you write what you do?

I write the stories that I want to write, and the stories that I'd want to read. When I write a character, I have a few rules:

• Everybody has reasons for doing the things they do. The more extreme their actions, the more compelling the reasons.
• Nobody sees themselves as the villain. If they act in ways that we see as 'bad', that's only because their motivations compel them to. Everybody is the hero of their own story.
• But, there are no real heroes. Everybody makes mistakes and has weaknesses. Even the best of us sometimes do bad things, no matter how much we strive not to. The greater the pressure, the more we err. Fortunately, to err is human.

In this way, I want to create complex and interesting characters. I find my 'villains' as interesting as the protagonists. In fact, my favourite character in Irradiated is the worst of them all. So why do I write what I write? Because it's the type of fiction I think needs to be written. Readers are incredibly smart. We don't need easy answers, simple characters, and clear-cut Hollywood story lines. Readers deserve better than that.

4. How does your writing process work?

This is quite a simple question. I wake up at 5:15 in the morning, before the sun. I make a coffee, and sit down on the couch with my laptop. Then, I write. I'm a real person. I work a full-time job, live with my partner, and do all the things that us real people have to do. Waking early gives me the space and time I need to write my stories. Doing it every day gives me the structure I need to follow them through. My morning brain is uninhibited, creative, and a little bit twisted. All in all, it works quite well.
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Elle Chambers Talks About How She Writes

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1. What am I working on?

I have several things going at the moment. First, I need to finish one final story for a new short collection (Grindhouse, release TBD) I’ve been working on since November (!). All three stories in Grindhouse are very different from anything I’ve ever written. For starters, they’re more violent. They also have a ton of graphic language and explicit sex – it’s like a 1970s B movie in print. Or a Tarantino film. Same diff.

Then I’m getting back to my roots with an erotic horror novella. I’ll be tackling a second zombie novella, and of course, I’m always trying to craft the best pieces I can for my Dark Tales series. eVolume Three needs to be released soon and I kind of want to mine classic horror tropes again since eVolume Two was more thriller/suspense.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I like to think my work is different, but maybe it’s not – maybe it’s incredibly derivative. I’ve been heavily influenced by film and television, oddly enough more so than books. Maybe a lot of what I put in print is something Carpenter or Craven or Argento have already done. I don’t know; I haven’t seen every film they, or their peers, have made. But I know I take inspiration from them, as do many of my peers, so I can’t claim to be a special snowflake in that regard.

I would also say my stories are darkly humorous, but again, that’s not unique to me. Stephen King does dark humor better than just about anybody. He’s the first author I can remember reading so of course some of his style would rub off on me.

When I read this back, I’m like, “Damn – I’m not original at all.” This realization would probably bother me if I didn’t know there are only something, like, seven plots in literature and they’ve all been done before. Hell, even Shakespeare cribbed things from writers who came before him.

So maybe the point isn’t to try and be original. Maybe the point is to give audiences tropes they’re familiar with, but do it in such a way that it feels fresh and new. Context is everything. If you tweak and twist a trope enough, it becomes something else entirely. Throw in interesting, vivid characters, sparkling dialogue, and a killer hook and ending, then voila! You’ll have a kickass story that nobody else has (assuming you can tell a good story to begin with). I think I do a decent job of this. I’m always striving to improve my craft, though, always pushing myself out of my comfort zone, and always trying new things.

For instance, I never thought I’d write about zombies. I love zombies as much as the next person, but I thought, “God, that’s so played. How many ways can you tell a post-apocalyptic zombie story?” Turns out, there are an endless number of ways to do it, some of which have been brilliant. Others…not so much. Still, I knew I couldn’t do it. If I was going to write about zombies, I had to do it on a more intimate level. So I wrote a novella called Good Eats and took the zombie myth back to its Haitian roots. There’s no virus, no survival camps, no bullets to the brain. It’s all hoodoo and dark magic. I wanted to write a novel about grief and loss; how those two things can drive seemingly rational people to do unspeakable things in the name of love – and the devastating consequences that occur once those wheels are set in motion.

Like most things I write, most people either love Good Eats or hate it. Some folks thought it was just “eh.” I’d never written a novella before so I thought I did a decent job of it my first time around. Plus, I love the story. It resonates with me; it’s one of the few things I’ve written where I’ve been physically moved while pounding out a scene. And the rising action all the way through to the denouement was wicked fun times.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I’ve said it once before, but it bears repeating: I love to be afraid. It’s perverse, I know, but facing Big Bads in fiction and coming through it (relatively) unscathed makes me feel I can do anything in real life. I like to think there are others who feel that way too, so I write for them as well.

4. How does my writing process work?

Okay, this is the part where things will probably be nonsensical (note: you were all warned at the top this was coming).

I don’t have a process per se. If I did, it would probably look something like this:

- turn on laptop

- stare at blank screen and flashing cursor on white page for twenty minutes

- stare at the ceiling and count how many cracks are in the old plaster

- stare out the window at all of the fancy rich people going in and out of the private club across the street from my apartment

- wish I drove an Audi or Jaguar like those fancy rich people

- go back to staring at my blank laptop screen until I go cross-eyed

- slam the laptop shut and turn on old Buffy episodes and wish I could write anything half as inventive and witty

- two hours later, weep because I’ve made zero progress on my WIP

See? This is why I dread questions like this because that’s legitimately how my actual “process” works. At some point, I’ll get hit with enough inspiration/energy/luck/whatever to get off my lazy ass and put words to page, but for the most part, the above is how I spend my evenings when I’m supposed to be writing.

Hey – maybe if I am dead, I can be reanimated as a more efficient, more disciplined version of me?!

Ah, who am I kidding? I’d come back even slower, and more brain dead, than I already am.
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Elle Chambers writes dark and erotic fiction. She currently lives in the Midwest where nothing of note happens. The mundane setting of her life inspires her (sometimes disturbing) work.

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William D. Richards Talks About How He Writes

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1. What Am I Working On?

At the foremost, I am working on Aggadeh Chronicles Book 2: Dragon. It makes sense; you start a series, people expect multiple books in the series. When you don’t, potential readers tend to hold back from reading your series because they don’t want to have to wait until your next book comes out. Even I am guilty of this. It makes me wonder how J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series would fared if she didn’t already have the first couple of books in the series written when it was introduced in the United States.

I’m also working on a hard science fiction called Privateer. It’s about a man marooned in space after his ship is destroyed by marauders trying to steal his cargo. His lifeboat detects a rescue beacon and drops out of hyperspace into a remote star system. There, he comes across a derelict spaceship that will either become his prison or his salvation.

It’s dangerous to jump genres. It is jarring for a reader to read a fantasy by an author and come across a hard science fiction written by that same author. People who love the soft organics of magic in fantasy might not like the hard technology of science fiction. There are authors who have pulled this off. I want to be one of them.

That being said, I have other book ideas that step outside the traditional definitions of science fiction and fantasy. Naturally, that statement brings us to the next question…

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Aggadeh Chronicles differs from others in the genre in that it doesn't rely on tensions between magical races. Magic is integral to how life works in the story, not the focus of the story.

I have no good or evil forms of magic in my story. There are safe types of magic and dangerous types of magic. It is the actions of the characters in the story and how they use their abilities that define anything as good or evil. There are beings that align with negative and those that align with positive. They are not pure existences of good or evil, but simply it is how they choose to approach the world.

There are differences between magic and sorcery in this world, even though they seem to accomplish the same thing. Sorcery is the dangerous type of magic, as it deals directly with the manipulation of energy in the world. Magic is less dangerous as it is more controlled and deals with guiding energy indirectly, making it the safe kind of magic. Think of it as Physics and Chemistry.

I did try to maintain some true scientific facts in this world. It helps with the believability in a story of fantasy. It shows how in a world where not everyone can use magic effectively, there must be other tools people can use to get work done. A sword or a cannon can kill just as effectively as a magic spell can. I tried to maintain realistic travel times when the characters move about in the story, even when the methods of travel are magical such as by cloudships or dragon. The horses Nem and Bors use to travel aren’t majestic quarter horses, they are smaller, stockier horses like the Icelandic Horse, not much larger than a pony. These horses have an ambling gait that allows them to travel very long distances quickly and comfortable for a rider. The Jennet was a popular small horse in Europe during Medieval period for the this purpose, used by merchants and gentry to travel long distances in a hurry. A quarter horse might be able to gallop faster for a short distance, but it can’t match one of these ambling horses for speed and distance over time.

I want my stories to be as plausible as possible for the reader. To have details in them to which the reader can easily relate and help them to take that further step in suspending their disbelief and accepting the fantastical elements of the story.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I love stories. I love telling stories. I’ve always been this way. For me, writing a story is the same process as reading only backwards. Rather than look at the words on a page and watching the scenes play out in my head, I watch the scenes play out in my head and try to keep up as I write the description of what I’m seeing.

What is most important to me is that the story be enjoyable to read.

Why I write in the genres that I do is fairly easy to explain.

I loved rocket ships and dinosaurs as a child. I saw Neil Armstrong take the first step on the moon and followed every rocket launch with rapt attention. My favorite TV shows were Lost in Space and Star Trek (a LOT scarier than Lost in Space at times). My mother always complained about us watching the Saturday afternoon monster movies with Godzilla and King Kong, that watching those movies would give us nightmares. (They did, but we watched anyway.)

I always loved the old fairy tales. I loved them even more when I discovered that there was far more to those fairy tales than children’s books reveal. There were fairy tales from other cultures that the Brothers Grimm never touched on. There were fairy tales that don’t get top billing because they weren’t exactly appropriate for children. They were such simple stories, but they spoke of complex things hidden inside that simplicity. They were simple stories that one could take and expand upon and create a new story.

I was a science fiction and fantasy fan even before I started reading. Even before I knew what those terms meant. I love stories that step a little or a lot outside the reality we know. Forcing my imagination and mind to work harder and stretch to the limits.

It’s only natural the same applies when it comes to my writing.

The subject matter of each story is a bit harder to explain.

Often, an idea of a story comes to me because of a piece of music. Something in a given passage will invoke an image or a scene and the story explaining that will evolve in my mind. I’ll have that particular scene in my mind and the next step is to explain what lead to that scene and where the story goes from there.

Other times, I will get an idea for a story from some news item I hear. An exciting new discovery, a tragedy needing a different outcome– These all lend themselves to new stories.

There are some stories that come directly from my dreams. The imagery was just so fascinating, I had to find some way to describe and explain it. The only way to do that is to write a story about it.

What I find interesting in my writing is how the written story differs from the imagined story in my head. Often what I imagine in my mind is a fluid thing. Writing down the story crystalizes it and gives it solidity. What was just a bunch of related scenes in my mind now shows where and how these scenes must be connected to give them continuity in a narrative. Sometimes the story has to change, because without that change there is no way any given two scenes can exist with each other. There are also the occasional ideas that just won’t fit in the story and get removed. I do recycle ideas and scenes that get cut. There are some ideas that can become stories in their own right. And this makes a good segway to…

4. How does my writing process work?

One thing you learn is what process works for one writer doesn’t necessarily work for another. On the other hand, another person might read how some random writer works and find a resonance with that writer’s approach. The beauty of this blog tour is being able to see how other writers work and consider how that compares to one's own approach.

Getting started is usually the hardest and the easiest part of writing. It’s hardest, because after daydreaming about writing a book, it is wholly another thing to sit down and actually produce the words for that book. It’s the easiest, because all you have to do is start writing the words of the story.

I tell people, just write down the description of the story to yourself:

“This is a story ‘bout a man named Fred,
Out-of-work engineer, barely kept his family fed.
Then one day Jed was shootin’ up some food,
When out of the ground came something really rude:
Zombies that is. Mindless undead. The House of Representa–”

By golly, the story will just start flowing as you describe it!

The first step is the germ of the story idea.

I write quick notes describing the scene or idea I imagined. It’s rather random what these notes may cover because it is whatever is in my head at that moment that made the idea so interesting. If I’m already working on another manuscript, the note is as far as it gets until I’m done with the first story or I need a break and want to write something different for a while.

When it becomes time to actually begin the manuscript writing process, this is where it gets blurry and messy. I generally write a story in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, just like reading it. Now and then, a new idea comes to me and I may go off on a tangent. This can be bad for productivity, but good for the story itself. This is where I refer to the outline to see if this idea really does fit. If it is better than what the outline set, then I'll change the outline. There are occasions where I may be stuck and decide to jump ahead to a more interesting part. Then I'll return and try and write the bridge between the the written scenes where I had gotten stuck.

To me, an outline is a skeleton rather than scaffolding. It needs to be able to move and adjust as the story evolves rather than remain rigid and unchanging. At the same time, it must hold the story to its proper form.

During all this, the story is gelled rather than crystalized. It’s soft and flexible. Easy to change and adjust. It’s in blobs and chunks and doesn’t have very strong continuity.

There are other times when I get an idea and just sit down and start writing furiously. I write and write and write and write and write until several weeks later I stop, look up, and discover I’ve just written a manuscript. Or rather, a pseudo-manuscript. My story, Music on the Wind, is just this sort of writing. It is a lot of passive description of the story, littered with actual narrative and in other places notes to myself to use this idea or that idea to cover a given part. (Yeah, MotW needs a lot of work to turn it into a readable book.)

Once I’ve declared the manuscript complete, I set aside for a couple of weeks to a month. I will go and do other things. Read some really good books. This is actually a vital part of my writing process! After reading something, I go back and read my own manuscript.

Reading other books and seeing well-written and edited examples helps make my own errors really stand out. I fix those errors as best I can, and only then is the manuscript ready to be seen by the eyes of others.

From there, it enters the editing stage and goes out to my editors. Truth is, at this point the “book” is still a piece of crap. After the manuscript has been through a round or two of editing, I start seeding it to proofreaders. New proof-readers usually go into a panic as they read it and see errors and mistakes, or find a part in the book that is just terrible. Editors sometimes don’t catch everything. That’s why you have proofreaders.

You don’t so much write a book as you refine it. It’s a back and forth process twisting and turning the various pieces until they fit together and flow smoothly. Between the “blob” manuscript and the “release” manuscript, I may go through four or five versions.

Because I have a lot of downtime as a writer during the editing phase, I use this time to take care of the business-side of writing the book. Filing the copyrights, preparing the entries on the various distributors so that all I have to do is upload the finished manuscript in click on the “PUBLISH” button. It’s also during this phase that I turn to creating the cover art for the book. I’m a firm believer that the cover should reflect a scene from the story and not just be a generic image. The temporary cover I created for Dragon uses the painting that was the inspiration for the city of Balon in the story. I’m at the point where I’m looking for an artist to help me create the covers for the series.

I always send out the book for one last round of proof-reading before release. In my opinion, this is the most important activity of the process. This is the last shot at catching errors before I release the book for sale. I choose certain people for this because they are good at catching incongruities and small errors. When an author asks you to proofread a book, this is not a small request. It’s vital that there be no more errors. Errors can ruin a book’s chances in the market.

When I’m satisfied my team has caught what we can, then I simply construct the ebooks and send them out to the distributors.

The actual process of creating the ebook file and distributing it is outside the writing process, even though it is part of the publishing process. Generating the file is not difficult. But it is fairly technical when it comes to making sure everything is right. My blog entry here is long enough. This can be covered at another time.
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Cat Amesbury Talks About How She Writes

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1. What am I working on?

In contrast to the thousand different things going through my mind at any one time, I am very focused in my writing projects. Right now, I am working on the second book in the “Tales from the Virtue Inn” series, With Honor Intact. I am having so much fun finishing this story. It has action, deep friendships, live squid, and naked glassblowers. These are all things that are tremendously fun to write.

Besides its fluffier components, With Honor Intact deepens the mystery surrounding the Virtue Inn and its inhabitants. I love creating and solving puzzles. I have high hopes that my readers will be as fascinated as I am with the little pieces that fit together in the larger plot. Everything is well on track to the story being released at the end of June/beginning of July and I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to share it with everyone else.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I didn’t have a television or a non-work-based computer as a kid. If we wanted entertainment that didn’t come from playing “The Ground is Lava and So Are the Walls”, we had to read.

So I read.

A lot.

There are very few genres I haven’t at least touched on in my lengthy reading career and I have favourites that I read and re-read in most of them.

The thing that all of my favourite books had in common was that they made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up at some point in the story. Other things were negotiable, but that was not.

I wanted to write that.

More specifically, I wanted to write stories that drew inspiration from, as one reviewer put it, “‘The Wizard of Oz’, C.S. Lewis, Dr. Who, Harry Potter, Dr. Seuss, ‘Alice in Wonderland’, and Aesop”. I’d add to that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, T.S. Eliot, Sun Tzu, Agatha Christie, and a massive dose of world history and mythology.

In spite of what looks like a Frankenstein monster of influences, the core of my writing is very simple.

I want you to care.

I want you to care about my characters, about my world, and about the sad, funny, strange things that weave my stories together.

In the end, my stories are about people. They are about family and friends and the ways we come together and move apart.

They just have a hundred percent more sentient household objects and naked glassblowers than anything else in the genre.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I’ve partially answered this question, but I’m going to dig a little deeper here than the previous answer.

It’s no great secret if you look at my list of influences that I am a deep lover of classic children’s fantasy. One of the saddest moments for me as a grown-up was the difficulty of finding books for adults that gave me that same sense of wonder I experienced when I read good children’s fantasy.

I thought about it for a while and I realized that my problem was that I wanted to read contemporary fantasy adventures that were, at their core, joyous. There are tragedies and trials in those classics and in my own story as well.

But there is also a breathless sense of discovery, of wonder, of determination, that I wanted to try and capture in some small part.

I don’t know if I have succeeded, but the pleasure that the writing has brought me has helped me to recapture some of that joy in my own life.

4. How does my writing process work?

I dreamed.

In my dream, a woman with a golden, mechanical bird on her shoulder and a fox in her arms stood in front of a strange-looking inn.

She looked straight at me and said, “Tell my story.”

I listened.
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Michael Patrick Hicks Talks About How He Writes

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1. What am I working on?

Since releasing CONVERGENCE in February, I've been busy working on my second novel, which is currently on track for a 2015 release, once all the much-needed edits are finished.

I'll be releasing more details on EMERGENCE in the coming months, but here's what I can tell you right now: The story picks up three years after the end of CONVERGENCE and it's filled to the brim with action, identity hijacking, conspiracies, and a trip to the seasteading nation-states. If you liked my first novel, I think you'll enjoy its follow-up just as much. It'll be a big damn page-turner!

I am also working on developing my third novel. This is a book I've spent several years thinking about, and once the finishing touches are put on EMERGENCE, I plan on devoting my full attention to this new work. While Book 3 is still very much in the early outlining stages, it will be a stand-alone novel and with a greater emphasis on the mystery/thriller elements. I'm shooting for a more traditional noir vibe with it, but we'll see what happens. I do believe it will be a much more contemporary mystery novel, though, and hopefully it won't feel too alien to the DRMR fans by the time it lands. My big hope, of course, is that it's not only a comfortable fit for those who found me via the DRMR series, but which can widen my audience. I want it to appeal to my current readers, but also bring in some of those The Wire/Veronica Mars/Dennis Lehane/Michael Connelly fans.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I think when most people think "science fiction" they focus on extraterrestrials, spaceships, alien planets, intergalactic war, first contact scenarios. Things like that.

My work has absolutely none of that.

I focus more on the Earth-bound, near-future, high-tech aspects of science fiction. While advanced technology plays a key-role, I work hard on keeping as much of the story as grounded as I can. As a product of the 1980s, one of the first TV shows I can remember obsessing about as a child is MAX HEADROOM, and to crib from him, I like to say that my book is coming at you from twenty minutes into the future. In fact, I'd say the late-80s sci-fi dystopia has played a significant role in my own work as a writer. I definitely favor the dystopic scenarios of HEADROOM, ROBOCOP, ALIEN(S), over the utopic fantasies of STAR TREK.

Publisher's Weekly called my book a "smart splice of espionage and science fiction" which is the sort of cross-genre blend that interests me. I tend to think of my work as a bit of William Gibson by way of Barry Eisler. Ultimately, I wanted to tell a thriller story that was more about deception, terrorism, a willful complicity in evil, war, kidnapping, tragedy and loss, fun stuff like that. The only thing was, I had this little technological hook about mnemonic data storage and replay and an altered geopolitical landscape that turned this thriller into a sci-fi thriller.

As a media consumer, I always like it when genre material gets elevated by meshing with something a bit different, or which allows it to strike some disparate chords that actually work well together. Like ALIEN - it's horror, but it's also sci-fi; it uses two different genre staples to elevate the work into something new and fresh that stands the test of time. Or Chuck Wendig's DOUBLE DEAD - could have been a zombie novel, or it could have been a straight-up a vampire novel, but by squishing these two often-separated tropes together you get a crazy, cool new breed.

So, that was my long-range goal with CONVERGENCE. I think the sci-fi elements actually get down-played a fair amount, and I tried to shape that world enough to let people in and make things feel natural. Enough so that when people are stealing memories and getting high on their playback, that's just a part of the overall mystery story that's simmering underneath.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Well, first and foremost, because it interests me! Although I certainly hope readers will find a lot to like in my work, I'm writing mostly to entertain myself. I'm also a bit of a tech-geek and a science junkie, and I try to stay current on what's happening in the world. CONVERGENCE grew out of technological advances over the last fifteen years or so, and has been influenced by clippings from Popular Science to DARPA research and BBC Future postings. Just a few days ago, Discovery reported that in a few weeks military researchers will unveil "new advances toward developing a brain implant that could one day restore a wounded soldier's memory." This concept sounds awfully familiar to me...

I began the DRMR series simply because that's where my current attention and fascination lies. But, I've also written horror, thrillers, mysteries...all of which (with the sole exception of one piece) remain unpublished, and for very good reason. I'm planning on returning to those old stomping grounds in the future, though, and have a few ideas in the back of my head, so we'll see what happens.

Now that I've begun establishing my own series, I need to take a step back from it for a little while and experiment with some different genres. Which is why, with Book 3, I'm planning on going back to my "roots" if you will, and trying my hand at something that is more broadly a straight-up mystery/thriller. I'm particularly excited to write this book since it draws on local Detroit events over the last decade and I get to return to a sort of investigative mode of story telling. I think it'll be fun!

4. How does my writing process work?

With EMERGENCE it bordered more on ritualistic dedication and a demand to craft than anything else. By staying focused and forcing myself to carve out a thousand words every day, or more whenever possible, I was able to knock out the book in only a few months.

Writing CONVERGENCE was definitely a big learning curve and helped shaped my approach in writing its follow-up. Prior to CONVERGENCE, my previous (and again, deservedly unpublished) novels were written in the early 2000s, so getting back into author mode after a long stretch away required strict attention. The first step was to become more of a plotter. Now, in the decade-plus since I last wrote a novel, I did a good deal of freelance journalism, and the fundamentals of writing seem, to me at least, to be generally the same. You need to have a story, and you need to know what your story is about. And, what that story is about can change as more information comes in. So, you need your idea, and you need flexibility to develop that idea.

Typically, before I begin writing long-form pieces (except, obviously, these blog posts...) I have a bare bones outlines. I know the end, at any rate, and usually the beginning. If I'm really lucky, I have a midpoint objective strung up in-between that I can build toward and then work down from to reach the resolution.

Plot-wise, I think CONVERGENCE was a bit more complicated since I was going for more of a mystery/thriller pulp set-up, and there's a fair number of twists and turns and shifting loyalties. For me, having a loose outline worked and I was able to afford myself more flexibility in developing the story and the characters, and their motivations. I didn't really need a heavy outline until about the last third of the book, simply so I could figure out how to unravel and deliver the big story points.

With EMERGENCE, I set out to write more of an action/thriller and ramp up everything as far as I could, and go bigger and wilder and more chaotic and violent. While it made for quick writing, that wouldn't have been possible for me without a stronger, more rigid outline.

Before I set out on EMERGENCE, I plotted. I did an outline and got comfortable with the world I was creating (partly easy because a lot of that legwork was done in the previous work, but partly not so easy because I'm expanding it and bringing in new players and changing the game a bit), and established motivations and back-story for the big, important characters. Villains are important, but they need to have clear motivations, which means that I, as the writer, need to understand their motivations and know why they're doing what they're doing.

So, with a pretty full outline set up, but still leaving a lot of wiggle room for the story to take over, I set out to write a thousand words a day, with the goal of finishing by May. And I did that. In fact, I wrapped up the first draft early by about two weeks! #humblebrag

But, look. My writing process can be a bit screwy and nonsensical and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants method one minute, and then finely tuned the next. It's one of those YMMV things. The most important aspect of any writing process, though, is sticking to your guns and finishing what you start.

And then editing the hell out of it. Which is the next stage for EMERGENCE, and it will be, by far, the more brutal, harder aspect. It's all worth it though.
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Jason Gurley Talks About How He Writes

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1. What are you working on?

At the moment, two projects that couldn't be more different. I'm trying to finish Eleanor, the novel I've been working on since 2001. I'm still a good 30-40,000 words from the end, I think. I'm anxious to finish this story, get it to my editor, and start the hard work of getting it ready for publication.

The other project is a short story that's very different from my usual work. It's told from the point-of-view of a post-apocalyptic baddie – it is, I think, a rare examination of what goes on inside of those guys' heads. You know the guys I mean – every movie or story about the end of the world has them. They run around in battered leather outfits, usually wearing some kind of threatening mask, carrying knives, raping and murdering for no good reason. I think they all shop at the same store – Post-Urban Outfitters or something. But I can't recall ever seeing a story that made these fellows more than two-dimensional threats, so that's what I'm attempting here. It is, however, the single most violent story I've written, and it's full of misogynistic characters who I'm not sure are redeemable in any way, and I'm not sure it's the kind of thing I'll ever publish. I'm still searching for the ending. It may never come. I may just put this one aside and work on something else instead.

Oh – and I'm also taking part in a new anthology, one about time travel. I'm thinking of resurrecting a failed comic script that deals with this very topic. That script was originally called My Father Who Travels Through Time. I don't know if the title will survive or not, but the story just needs a bit of work. It's got real potential, I think. It's delightfully weird.

2. How does your work differ from others in its genre?

I don't often think about this sort of thing, really. I do read a lot of science fiction, and historically I read a lot of horror, though most was Stephen King, and I do find myself accidentally writing horror stories sometimes – but I don't think I often try to hold true to the tropes of the genres I write in. I sometimes think of the stories I write as simple human experiences that take place in a genre environment. The Man Who Ended the World is a story about a deeply flawed man and his simple desire for solitude, just blown up on a grand, terrible scale. The Settlers and The Colonists try to answer questions about what mankind's second and third and fourth acts would look like – how do we change when we leave our home world behind? – but they try to answer them in small, personal ways, using intimacy of characters who exist in a bigger, changed world. Those stories aren't always about the people doing the changing (though sometimes they are).

And Eleanor, may I finish it soon, is one of the more difficult-to-classify things I've ever written. It has elements of the fantastic, elements of science fiction, elements of fable and fairy tale... but it's all woven through a fundamentally sad tale of loss and lost love.

I suppose I just like to write about people, and sometimes they happen to be involved in some pretty strange and mysterious things.

3. Why do you write what you do?

I love to ask questions, and most of my work begins with a question. What would it be like if a closed society fell under the sway of a religious cult? How would a family respond to losing one of its own? What happens when we push our planet past the red line?

For years I wrote novels about human people living human lives right here on a human Earth. My first novel was about a young kid who found success as a published author. (No wish-fulfillment there, right?) My second was a long flashback about the '60s, told by a man who has just set his life on fire. My third was about the penalty for lies, about a boy who ran from his problems and only created more for himself. You might have classified all of those as literary fiction.

Eleanor arose from a very confusing period of my life, one in which I was asking questions about my own choices that I didn't have answers to. That story became a sort of vehicle for me to answer those questions, and because they were big questions for me, they became big questions for the book... and the story became very big to answer them. Over time it transformed into something entirely different – especially as I no longer needed to answer these questions for myself – and so it became my first book that took a small, human story and played it out in a magical way. It was my first real genre story, other than some scattered Twilight Zone-esque short stories I'd written over the years. That shift really informed my work, and taught me that it was okay not to try to write BIg, Important, Great American Novels every time I sat down at the laptop. It was okay to tell a story for the sake of telling a good story.

4. How does your writing process work?

I used to be fairly persnickety about writing. Everything had to be just so – the right light, the right amount of quiet, etc. A person's cough, or the sound of a lawnmower down the block, could tragically end the session. In those days I lived alone, and I wrote whenever I felt moved to do so.

But I think I've grown up as a writer. My life has changed in big ways – I have a wonderful family, a talented and beautiful wife and a smart and funny daughter, and our house is full of light and boisterousness almost around the clock. I've learned to steal any moments I find for writing. I can write without silence, and without solitude. These days, if I have fifteen minutes, I can jam out a couple of thousand words. I write fast out of necessity, and I think it's made me a stronger writer than before.

I'm also less insufferable. I think about the way I approached writing all those years ago, and I was quite a snot about it.
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