I was recently interviewed by Stuart Clark for the Eclectic Authors blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Are your first drafts as streamlined as the novels appear to be or does a lot end up on the “cutting room floor” so to speak?

“I edit as I go along. Each time I sit down to write, I start at the beginning and read through to where I finished at the end of the last section, making changes as I go. This means that by the time the first draft is completed, it’s actually been edited many times. That said, I did cut 20,000 words from Silversands.”

Following on from that, can you talk us through your self-editing process?

“A piece of writing – whether it’s a sentence, a paragraph or a whole page – has to have some sort of rhythm and flow to it. This is doubly true for lines of dialogue. I go back through and try to find that rhythm. I cut out unnecessary words and exposition; ditch adverbs; and replace everyday words with phrases that are more direct and striking.”

You can read the whole thing here, and read Stuart’s review of The Recollection, here.

You walk into a spaceport bar, a thousand light years from home, and meet four friends. The lights are low. Cutthroats and bounty hunters lurk in the shadows. The bar serves drinks from a hundred different worlds. You can buy almost anything here. You order a round of beers and look around the table at your friends. You’re glad they’re here with you.

But who are they?

Here’s the game: select four science fictional characters that you’d like to have a drink with, and place them around the same table. It’s a variation of the old “fantasy dinner party” game, only set in a tavern at Mos Eisley.

Here’s my answers:

1. Halo Jones – Alan Moore’s reluctant interstellar heroine paced the galaxy for two decades, looking for a way out. In her time, she was a stewardess, a soldier, a renegade, and a drunk – so I figure she’ll have some pretty good stories to tell, as long as we keep the catsblood flowing.

2. John Truck – The amoral loser and archetypal spacer from M. John Harrison’s Centauri Device is a man born to frequent such establishments. He’s been all over the sky. He’s a spaceship captain because he hasn’t got the energy to be anything else. He’s too lazy to avoid getting himself into trouble, and too stubborn to back out once he’s in it.

3. Slippery Jim Di Griz – Interstellar criminal mastermind, card sharp, con man, gourmet, and connoisseur of fine wines and spirits. Life would never be dull with the Stainless Steel Rat at your table. Listen to his stories and get involved in his schemes. Just don’t play cards with him.

4. Louis Wu – The protagonist of Larry Niven’s Ringworld novels is a two hundred year old man from Earth. Every couple of decades, he tires of company and launches himself into the unknown on a “sabbatical”, all alone in a one-man starship. He’s a man of culture and sophistication, yet he’s also been a wirehead, an explorer, a hyper-intelligent “protector”, ambassador to a savage alien race, and a god. Wu would be the voice of reason at the table. He’d be able to think his way out of any situation we found ourselves in, and having explored the Ringworld, he’d also have some pretty entertaining stories to tell.

That’s my selection. Who would you choose, and why?

If you follow the link below and click on over to Dolly Garland’s blog, you’ll see that I’ve answered a few questions for her about the books that have meant a lot to me over the years.

Link.

I’m very pleased to note that The Recollection appears at number 6 in Forbidden Planet’s list of favourite books.

The Best Books of 2011

Sometimes, you just have to take a step back.

When you’re working on a story or novel, the plot can overwhelm you. You have this grand vision, but you have no idea what to write next. Your characters won’t come alive on the page, and everything you try to write feels flat and lifeless. You lack inspiration. You feel frustrated. You have writer’s block.

How do you get past it?

Step away from the keyboard. It’s no use sitting there trying to force the issue. Give your hindbrain permission to work on the problem, and then go and do something else. Take a walk. Read a book. Go swimming. Watch a trashy movie. Distract your attention away from the project you’re working on, and let your unconsciousness stew over it.

Sometimes, that’s all we need: a distraction.

I’m in the early stages of a novel, and earlier this evening I found myself stuck. I wasn’t sure where the next chapter would go, or which character it would follow. After an hour or so of sitting at the keyboard getting nowhere, I took myself off into the living room and watched I, Robot on E4. No, it’s not the best movie ever made; but what it did was distract my conscious mind from fruitlessly worrying at the problem. I had a notebook with me, and as I watched the film, ideas kept popping into my head. I had stepped out of my own way. With my attention on the big screen, my imagination had the freedom to run riot — and by the time the film finished, I found I’d written outlines for the next five chapters.

So, next time you’re stuck with a story that just won’t gel, take a bath; go for a walk; or take a long drive in the country. Swim a few lengths of your local pool. Do something that relaxes you. Take your mind off your troubles, and the solution to your story may just pop into your head.

Sometimes, I think I’m used to the weirdness that comes with being a writer; and other times it hits me afresh, all over again. Take the other day, for instance. I walked into my local branch of Waterstones and saw that they had a couple of copies of my novel, The Recollection, on their shelves. The books were sandwiched between books by Frederik Pohl and Terry Pratchett. I picked one up and opened it. There on the page were words that I had written; familiar words that I’d poured out of my head onto the page during late night writing sessions in my office at the back of the house. And now here they were, on public display in the city centre, where anyone could see them. It was a weird feeling. Cool, but weird.

You can now buy The Recollection as an ebook, direct from the publisher.

The Rebellion Publishing Ebook Store features most of the titles published by Rebellion’s imprints, Solaris and Abaddon, available to download in both ePub and mobi formats.

You can find The Recollection here.

The StarShipSofa Stories Volume 3 anthology is now available, featuring contributions from a host of writers, including Lavie Tidhar, Joe Haldeman, Catherynne M. Valente, Paul Cornell, Michael Swanwick, David Brin, Jack McDevitt, Aliette de Bodard, Mercurio D. Rivera, James Patrick Kelly, and many more.

The book features a reprint of my short story, Sunsets and Hamburgers, with an illustration by Bradley W. Schenck.

There’s also an “extras” section at the end of the book, where each of the authors has provided a photograph of their writing area, and pictures of other things that either inspire or interest them, or have sentimental value – such as handwritten manuscripts, convention name tags, holiday snaps, and so on.

You can buy the anthology here.

Jonathan Howard, author of the Johannes Cabal novels, posted a link to the following video on Twitter, saying: “Saw this and found myself thinking of the Recollection from the @garethlpowell novel of the same name.”

He has a point. This stuff moves in much the same way I envisioned the Recollection moving. Enjoy:

F L U X from candas sisman on Vimeo.

This is a guest post from publisher and fellow Solaris author Keith Brooke:

I’m never quite sure how I end up volunteering myself for these things. You know… those idle ideas that lead to you publishing a weekly genre fiction showcase for, oh, ten years, featuring most of the leading contemporary authors and a host of new talent. That kind of thing.

Back in 1997 that’s exactly what happened. In my day job I’d been on a course to learn how to write HTML and I decided to put it to good use to support my writing career by setting up a website. This was just the time when authors were becoming aware of the web but most weren’t using it regularly, much less using it to publish and publicise their work.

It occurred to me that it might be good to make the site a collective showcase rather than just a Keith Brooke website, and this idea was met with enthusiasm by the fellow writers I mentioned it to. I published the site in August of that year and sat back, job done.

That’s when I realised that there are some important differences between publishing on the web and in print. In print, you really can say “job done”, but on the web, things could be updated, added to, expanded. And so that’s what I did: after the site went up with stories from me, Eric Brown, Mike Cobley and Steve Baxter, other writers became interested and so I added their work too. When I started to get emails from people like Kit Reed and Terry Bisson I realised that infinity plus, as I had called the site, had picked up a quite astonishing momentum. Before long, the site had become the equivalent of a weekly magazine, with hundreds of thousands of regular visitors. In its ten year lifespan the site published over two million words of fiction, a thousand book reviews, a hundred interviews and a variety of other material. The site’s still available at www.infinityplus.co.uk as a static archive.

Last year, a similar thing happened. Chatting online with friends, I realised that this whole ebook thing was starting to take off and I really should get involved. Rather tentatively, I put out five collections of my own stories under the infinity plus banner, plus a new collection of Eric Brown’s stories, The Angels of Life and Death. And it started to happen again: I mentioned it to a few friends, and suddenly I had an ebook imprint on my hands. Recently we passed twenty full-length titles, including the free anthology infinities, which has been the UK’s number one free anthology for several weeks now.

Continue reading “Infinity Plus Singles: a new line of standalone short story ebooks”