I’d like to
thank Toi Thomas at http://etoithomas.com/blog
for involving me in this blog tour. I’m new to this sort of thing
and sort of fell down on the job with regard to finding other writers to
participate. Honestly, I’m not all that connected, but I’m working on it.
The way this
works is I’m supposed to answer four questions about my process and work. Here
goes nothing.
1)
What am I
working on?
My current
project is The Paler World series. It’s
a series about a young man who finds himself at the center of a war for the
existence of all the magic hidden just under the world we see every day. He
must learn to see the Deeper World and use its magic in order to fight for his
life and honor his parents, but first he has to figure out what he really
believes and which side he should be on. The first book, The Flatstone Beach, is in revisions and I hope to have it
published within the year.
2)
How does my work
differ from others of its genre?
Honestly, it
beats me. Just kidding. I hate this question because to answer it you have to
be a real egotist and I already over-indulge that aspect of myself. All written
and spoken stories, going back to before written language, build on and inform
each other. I don’t write literary fiction, but I’ve read some wonderful stuff
in that genre and it inspires me in my own work and gives me an ideal to strive
for. Certainly the speculative fiction I’ve read also influences me a great
deal. I feel like we’re all, as writers, inveterate borrowers and for me to say
that my work is in some way unique or special gives short shrift to authors who
I may not even remember reading or whose stories were subsumed in the work of
another without anyone even realizing it.
I think I’ve
done a fairly well at dressing my story in a different set of borrowed clothes
than I’ve ever seen used together before. I’ve tried to avoid using many of the
terms in the lexicon of fantasy writing by imagining the practical uses of
these things in a vast and ancient magical community, and how these people might
reasonably discuss these terms and items. There is an underlying etymology and
lexicon that I’ve tried to make as reasonable and original as possible. I think
this approach of trying to break out of the fantasy shorthand that we all share
has given me some deeper insight to my characters and their world than I might
otherwise have achieved. Beyond that, the best things about the story are the
quick-paced action, the coming of age trials, the sense of wonder at a world
beyond our knowing—in other words, my own spin on all the very unoriginal
things about fantasy stories that we fantasy readers all love, expect, and keep
coming back for.
3)
Why do I write
what I do?
Because these
are the stories I would want to read. I write across several genres and
non-fiction areas because I find them interesting and want to share what I find
interesting about them. I think almost all people want to share stories. The
motivation behind me telling a story about magic, or a quantum computer, or an
alien parasite isn’t so different, at its heart, from the motivation of a guy
telling you about a great sports play or the lady who tells you about the most
recent cutest thing ever that her kid or cat did. There’s something that fills
our heart, or excites our mind, and we want to share it. I find this to be one
of the most redeeming things about the human experience because even if the
story is ugly or terrifying, it’s a reaching out for community, and often an
attempt at uplifting others with something that had an uplifting impact on ourselves
in some way. The biggest difference is that I use a laptop and keep my distance
while most story tellers trust their audience enough to engage them face to
face.
4)
How does your
writing process work?
The blog just
prior to this one goes into great detail on this subject, but in a nutshell,
once I start on a project I work on it exclusively until it is done. If I have
other ideas, I write them out and file them. When I’m done with the current project,
I go through the file to see what the next most exciting project is and start
that one. I consider revisions a separate writing project and blogs and so
forth are marketing and don’t count as writing at all.
As for the
creative process, I read, I watch documentary television a great deal, I listen
to NPR. I am just constantly on the lookout for something that interests or
moves me so I can turn it into a story, including my wife’s descriptions of her
truly unsettling nightmares. Once I have that seed, I’ll turn it over and look
at it from every viewpoint I can imagine until I see a facet that was
unexpected. I then take that idea and try to turn it into a story someone might
find interesting. Sometimes the idea comes quickly, without much reflection,
and then I’m suspicious that I didn’t examine the story enough and that it is
obvious or too derivative. In a small, but growing, number of instances the
story comes out of a dream. Sometimes the dream provides an inspiration that I
can put through my normal process of analysis, as is the case with two that are
in the file and awaiting my attention at this moment. Much less often, as in
the case of “Terrible Weight”, one of my most successful stories, the dream is
a complete, beginning-to-end narrative that I can get out of bed and
essentially transcribe into a complete work.
