Reginald Koettlitz was born in 1860 and died in 1916, making this month the centenary of his death. In his life he travelled on the Discovery to the Antarctic with Captain Scott, journeyed up the Amazon and explored half of Africa. He was a medical pioneer, identifying many techniques for surviving […]
Pacing in Arc 3 is proving to be a fiddly thing. In the first two arcs pacing was definitely flexible, but on the whole I stuck to the initial chapter breakdowns. With Arc 3 I’m constantly restructuring the story, adding and removing chapters and adjusting the overall pace. (more…)
Now we’re talking. All the build-up of the journey east leads to this chapter. Hopefully it was worth the wait.
I should probably talk about that opening scene. That wasn’t planned. The first line I wrote for this chapter was Kay moaning about the freighter journey, and how uneventful it had been. That then made me think it could be fun to have her wistfully imagine what might have been. I liked the idea, but decided to switch it around so that the chapter opened with the dream, presented with a straight face before the reveal. (more…)
Here we get some pretty blatant clues about where the story has been set on Earth, and the route of the freighter. In researching this I stumbled across a fascinating blog by Maya Jasanoff, who spent a month on a cargo ship from China to the UK. It’s a great read and was a big help in visualising the freighter journey in the story. (more…)
Aah, the journey east. This has been a really hard thing to pace right, and as of writing this I have no idea whether it’s worked. I wanted the journey to feel significant, but at the same time it needs to be interesting. At the same time, I didn’t want to throw in random action scenes just to spice it up. (more…)
I studied art at school and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was never a particularly brilliant artist, but the satisfaction I got from it was similar to the feeling I get when writing. Pencils, charcoal, inks. That’s my bag. I’ve loved drawing ever since I was a child, when I’d create elaborate multi-panel TRANSFORMERS and MASK comics. They were probably indecipherable squiggles but, for me, they were an early form of learning storytelling, before I had the skills to write much in the way of prose.
Then thirteen years passed. Aside from the occasional scribbled storyboard for film projects, I didn’t really do much arty stuff. Then my son was born in 2012 and I picked up a pencil again and started drawing with him. (more…)
Here I continue the new style of interludes, in which we explore what’s going on with Cal and Holt. One interesting aspect here is seeing Locque inhabitants from the point of view of an Earth human, as up until now the story has mostly been told from the perspective of Kay, with the various genotypes depicted in a deliberately mundane fashion. In Interlude #5 we open with Holt’s evident prejudice against Cal, whereby he continues to refer to Locque people as animals – it was rats back in one of the Arc 2 interludes, and now he’s calling Kay a snake and Cal a salamander. (more…)
My second ebook is out, compiling the chapters for Arc 2 of A Day of Faces. Â Arc 2 continues the story as Kay finds herself at the bottom of the rabbit hole. If you like science fiction with a somewhat anarchic twist and a sense of humour, check it out. (You can find Arc 1 here, incidentally) (more…)
Last weekend I jumped on a train and headed down to London to check out the Wattpad LondonCon. As with most things Wattpad this year it was an exercise in exploring the unknown and, much like writing A Day of Faces and taking part in the Story Fair, it was a resounding success.
The event was held on the top floor of the Foyles bookshop. Somehow in my 35 years I’d never heard of Foyles, much less visit the place. It’s six floors of book heaven which reminds you of how much we lose if we shop only through Amazon and co. They really seem to have nailed what a large, physical bookstore has to do in order to stay relevant in the 21st century. As a reader and writer, entering Foyles is less like going into a shop and more like stepping into a temple or church. (more…)
These middle chapters of Arc 3 are quite loosely defined in my plot document. I know where the arc is going, and I knew exactly how it was going to start. The mid-section is a little fuzzier and has some room to manouver.
Initially, the ‘truck ride’ was to last only a single chapter. In this chapter Kay, Marv and Furey would reach their destination. When it came to writing it, though, I decided that would make the truck journey a little too trivial and swift. I wanted it to feel uncomfortable and awkward and inconvenient, and that wasn’t really possible if it only lasted a single chapter. (more…)