JULY

Forthcoming Attractions

Cover Design (Work in Progress)

In July I have been working on two forthcoming projects that will both be released by Bellmason Books. One is a commission from a friend and the other is a puzzle book of my own creation.

The Man Who Started The War That Saved The Universe features a hapless hero who is good natured but extremely clumsy. He is very loosely based on me and I suppose appearing in a book is an honour, one that very few people get to experience. It's interesting to see what you're like from the perspective of other people.

Working on the book has also given me the chance to sharpen up my editing skills and to think seriously about what would be involved publishing someone else’s work, and how much I’d need to charge for my time.

The puzzle book is a collection of Logic Grid Puzzles (for adults), which I’m hoping to publish in January. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, logic grids were a fun way to pass the time on the train or during your work break before the invention of mobile phones. I was dismayed to find out that the books you used to get at W.H. Smiths are no longer available so thought I’d have a go at creating some puzzles myself, based on subjects that I’m interested in (like how to organise a heist and what really is the best composition of a party in D&D).

Both books should be available soon and anyone who is interested in hiring the services of Bellmason Books for publishing should contact me. I can provide a complete package from editing to typesetting to ebook conversion to cover design and marketing materials.

Leicester Writers’ Club

Last week I visited the Leicester Writer’s Club. The club are holding open meetings during August and so anyone interested in joining can go along and meet members of the group and see what kind of activities are available to members. On the night I went it was manuscript night, where group members can read their work out and get constructive criticism from the other authors. I was impressed by the depth and breadth of knowledge in the room, and also on the screen where other members could join via video link.

The credentials of the other group members were also impressive and many of them are published authors with experience of the publishing industry. The group is focused on helping writers of all levels to get better at writing and the criticism many members of the group was quite concise and useful.

It’s difficult to judge your own work of course and you do need someone to tell you when things aren’t making sense or coming across as you intended. You can read your work to your friends or family, but unless they are also published authors, they might only be able to tell you about the parts they’re not getting, but not how to fix them. In many cases during the evening I got the sense that everyone had experienced the problem they were pointing out in the work of others, so understood how to come up with a solution to it.

The standard of work was exceptionally high anyway, but to hear people’s advice on how to make it even better was very encouraging and I’m sure I could gain a great deal from the feedback I could get from the group. My only reservation about joining is that I am not sure how they would respond to some of my work. Sometimes people don't really get sci-fi, as it's not as accessible as other genres of fiction, though I did meet a few people who did write science-fiction.

The other thing I worried about was the fact that I tend to write for myself, rather than for the reader, which might sound stupid, but it really isn’t a choice for me. After writing for decades I've realised that I’m just not able to judge what other people will like or won’t like, and trying to chase something as ephemeral as another person’s likes and dislikes would be very unproductive I think. I've also written stories that one person hates, and another loves.

I also don’t really take criticism very well, mainly because I am already my own harshest critic. I sort of know what I’m aiming for in my work and I know when I’m hitting it, and trying to unpick the story sometimes ends in disaster as I find the whole story unravelling once I’ve made a change somewhere. It might be the artist in me that sees the thing I'm making as a 'piece' that either does or doesn't conform to the process I'm using to create it. The outcome of the process is almost secondary, and that often doesn't make sense when the piece of art you're creating just happens to be the written word.

Perhaps I am destined to write books that only I want to read, but with eight-billion people on the planet somehow I think there might ten or twenty of us into the same thing, if I could just find them.

I got into writing because I read Douglas Adams. He didn’t write like anybody else, except maybe Vonnegut. Adams showed me that writing didn’t have to be a certain way; you could do it any way you wanted. I later read Robert Benchley and William Gibson, and lately I’ve been reading Raymond Chandler, and discovered all these ways that I could write down my ideas, if were to ever get any. I also don’t think I could stop now anyway, even if I wanted to, which I do.

The conversations I had with the members of the group afterwards were also quite sobering, as I learned that even the authors who were successfully published weren’t making enough money to live on. All of them were doing their own publicity and having to constantly promote their work, which must be exhausting enough to take away some of the energy they would be putting into writing. Then there's the problem of piracy, and A.I. taking people's books and rewriting them and making a slightly different cover, so they aren't infringing copyright. There's more and more books coming out each year and fewer and fewer people to read them.

I suppose the main thing about being a writer is to just keep doing it and trying to get better. Being in a writing group is always going to improve your work and you'll be connected to a group of people who are all sparking ideas off one another.