Catmachine

Worldbuilding can be tricky if you're writing science fiction or fantasy. There's so much to do—the readers are unfamiliar with the background, social mores and customs of the novel's environment and as such are at a disadvantage when it comes to working out what's going on. The characters themselves are no help. They know all this stuff anyway, so there's no way they are going to be able to remind each other of what they've known for years without sounding unrealistic. One solution is to use an omniscient narrator but then if you're not careful there's a temptation to fall into the "telling not showing" trap... Convincing worldbuilding is a skill that it can take years to master. However there is a way around this if you're in a hurry. If you set the novel in the real world you can take the background as read— everyone knows all this stuff right? —and concentrate on the actual story. Interestingly there is an added bonus of using this me...

It's unlikely that anyone is really thinking this—I don't for a second imagine that there's anyone hanging on my every online word—but it may have occurred to some people that I haven't written a blog entry for a while. What has caused this gap in the torrent of words pouring forth from my brain into this arena since 2006? Laziness? Writer's Block? It's neither (not that I don't suffer from both on a regular basis). I have actually been writing elsewhere. Last summer I was lucky enough to have my novel Comeback accepted by a publisher called Unbound . However this didn't mean it was all over bar the editing. Unbound have an unusual business model in that they crowdfund for their production costs before a book can be published. This means that—unlike more traditional publishers in today's understandably risk averse market—they can take chances on books, which is good news for someone like me. At this point I think it is important to clarify a...

Whilst I realise that the frequency of my blog entries is not what it once was, November 2012 turned out to be the first month for several years that I didn't write a single entry whatsoever. This wasn't due to my laziness or me spending too much time partying hard to be able to put finger to keyboard. Quite the opposite. Despite the lack of blogs, it's quite possible that I wrote more in November 2012 than I ever have in any single month in my life. I am talking about NaNoWriMo . NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and is an annual affair. It's basically a challenge - write a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and 30. When I first heard of it back in 2009 (when the project was already ten years old) my first thought was that it was impossible. An absurd thing to hope to achieve in one month whilst still trying to hold down a day job and live a normal life. This year I felt differently. Not only had I got into the habit of daily writing via the si...

Books actually have a lot more in common with radio than they do with TV or film but are probably the hardest work out of all media. They also offer the greatest rewards. No spoilers here, but there was a point in China Mieville 's The City and the City which had me thinking "No! You can't possibly do that!" The author's world building skills were so strong that I felt the shock of the moment just as strongly as the book's characters did. I don't think you could get that in a film; by its very nature a book gets more into your head. Language defines our consciousness, so books become us whilst films are only experienced. The only thing more pleasurable than reading a book is writing one, but that's even harder work. One of the tricky parts is deciding which narrative mode to use. There is more to this than meets the eye; it's not just a case of deciding between first-person ("I said") or third-person ("she said"). There are ...

Now that I'm only writing weekly, I think by definition these entries are going to be a little metatextual at first, talking about what I've done and how things are going. Whilst this is in no way a bad thing - after all that's probably a description of a large proportion of the blogosphere - I hope I can get back to picking reality apart in short order. In general I think I can report that this past week's experiment with the diversion of my creative juices has been a moderate success. On what would have been the designated blogging days I did manage to write short sections of my novel, perhaps comparable in length to the unwritten blog entries from those days. It's still not enough. Even though I've now managed to drag my protagonists Genie and Wendi from the night club to the beach and finally to the hotel, it's been one of those hard going passages, a sequence in which I already know the destination so there are fewer surprises in store than normal and...