Here’s a snippet of an interview I gave yesterday to Ann Wilkes at Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys:

“I grew up at a time when the Cold War seemed likely to turn hot at any moment. We were shown “Protect and Survive” films at school, and I remember that the local doctor’s surgery had leaflets about nuclear fallout and guidelines for the disposal of relatives who’d succumbed to radiation sickness. As a teenager, it was a scary time. It was hard enough dealing with all the emotional stuff teenagers have to go through normally, without the added worry that the world was about to end. I guess a lot of that fear worked its way into my psyche. Part of me still expects society to fall apart at any given moment, and so those stories are to a certain extent an exploration and exorcism of that fear – a way of confronting my personal demons.”

You can read the full interview here: Interview with Gareth L Powell

Tonight I passed the ten thousand word mark on the new novel. This is a tenth of the way to my target of a hundred thousand words, and something of a personal milestone, as it means this work-in-progress is now longer than any individual story I have ever written, aside from my first novel, Silversands, which I expect it to soon overtake.

It’s always fun to set stories in your hometown, because you can use locations you know intimately and that familiarity can add an extra authenticity to your writing. You don’t have to imagine a setting because you can visit it and walk around in it. You can see the stage on which your characters will play out their scenes.

However, doing so can also cause problems. You can fall into the trap of assuming too much knowledge on behalf of your readers. If you set a story against a local landmark and they’ve never visited it, they might not get the significance you assume it’s bringing to your story. They might miss the details you take for granted. In your mind’s eye, you might be constructing the most dramatic scene you’ve ever imagined – but if the reader doesn’t know enough about the locale to picture it in their own mind, if you’re not describing it properly, all your hard work will be wasted. You have to take a step back and ensure you’re being fair to them, that you’re avoiding in-jokes and describing the scene the same way you would if you were describing one on Mars or Jupiter, and not letting your familiarity with the scene blind you to the reader’s needs.

On the other hand, it can be just as difficult to set stories in exotic or imaginary locales. You still have the same duty to describe the scene vividly, whether it’s Buenos Aires, Tokyo or the dark side of Moon.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about the SF genre is the way it can transport you to some other time or place and fire your imagination so you feel you’ve been there and experienced something above and beyond your everyday routine. What you have to do as a writer is make sure you treat your local environment the same way – because it may well be exotic and mysterious to some of your readers.

For instance, I recently co-wrote a short story with another writer, set in Paris, a city I’ve visited only twice in my life, but one in which the other writer has lived for many years. While she felt at home writing about the streets and boulevards, I had to use Google Earth to obtain detailed aerial photographs of the locations and routes we were using in the story, to give me the insight I needed to produce credible descriptions of the scenery the characters found themselves passing through.

Get Your Cyborg Name

My short story Memory Dust scores a respectable 4 out of 5 in Blue Tyson’s review of Interzone 220.

The Future Bristol anthology is now available to download as an e-book from the Fictionwise site.

“A bargain at $3.49, the book contains nine short stories by leading (local) British authors including BSFA and Philip K. Dick Award-nominee Liz Williams, Interzone Poll-winner Gareth L Powell, novelist and editor Colin Harvey, Stephanie Burgis, Jim Mortimore, Joanne Hall, Nick Walters, John Hawkes-Reed and Christina Lake.”

http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook87221.htm?cache

There’s no question about it: bringing up children is hard work. It takes love, devotion and lots and lots of time. As a writer, it can put a serious dent in the number of daily hours you have in which to write, and reduce your lifetime output from a hundred books to ten – especially if you also need a full-time day job in order to support your family.

But listen to this:

Before I became a father, I didn’t really understand what people meant when they talked of unconditional love. Now I know. Being a father’s changed everything. It’s made me vulnerable again. It’s given me moments of true happiness, fear, helplessness, and pride. It’s put me in touch with my emotions and given me new perspectives and empathy, and insights into my own childhood. And while it means I have to sacrifice sleep in order to find the time to write, it’s unquestionably been worth it.

Yes, parenting takes a lot of time and energy – but my life’s so much richer for it. And so is my writing.

Keri Honea reviews the Future Bristol anthology for Suite101:

The story with the most original and intriguing name is one of the biggest highlights of the collection. “What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done?” by Gareth L Powell ends the entire world through a freak accident with nanotech computer builders and random chance saves one man from Bristol to decide who will repopulate the earth with him. The tie in to Nicolas Cage’s movie, It Could Happen to You, was both unexpected and brilliantly played out.

Most writers need a day job to keep them financially afloat. But the advent of social media sites has changed the way we look for work. Below are a few things I have learned during my search for a new job:

1. Before a job interview, you can look your interviewer(s) up on LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook to get an idea of their professional background, their likes and dislikes, etc.
2. They’ll be checking you out too, so make sure you set your privacy settings on Facebook, so that only your friends can see your embarrassing pictures.
3. Unless you protect your feed, *anyone* can read what you write on Twitter. So use some common sense and don’t post anything that could offend or discourage a potential employer.
4. LinkedIn is very useful as an online CV but beware how much personal information you put there. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to identity thieves.
5. Beware when signing up to multiple email job alerts that the same vacancy may be advertised by several compteting agencies, and you may therefore end up unwittingly applying for the same role two or three times.

Are you an author with a day job? How do you balance work and writing? Do you take an undemanding job in order to save your energy for writing, or do you look for stimulating work to give you ideas and experiences to write about?

I’m happy to see I already have 84 fans on my new Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gareth-L-Powell/72882407614?ref=mf