About my writing
Posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2012 at 21:53
A small selection of the games I’ve played. You can see influences from all of them in the Paradox War Trilogy.
I’d always played role-playing games (like D&D) as an escapist hobby, but after the kids were born there just wasn’t the time to play anymore – besides friends who wish to brave squalling winds and slay dragons are often reticent brave squalling toddlers and smell nappies.
I needed an outlet for my world-building, genre-smashing stories and armed with an iPhone and access to Google Docs I started to write.
It was hard work, writing my novels in the spare moments when they were asleep, happily playing and hadn’t developed exciting new smells in that chemical reactor they call a ‘bewwy’, but I did it. Then as they got older and started going to school I was able to get more done. I dusted off the old laptop cranked it up and began working in earnest during the day, reworking the fragments, ideas and purple prose into something better.
I do everything to do with my books myself — Research, writing, rewriting, hunting Grammar Gremlins, editing, typesetting, designing, painting, promoting, the only things I don’t do myself are hosting and distributing the ebooks, I leave that to Amazon at the moment, but I’m going to diversify soon.
If my books sell well then I’ll start farming some of this off to trained professionals. I’d love some pro-editorial input and some representation (agents and publishers take note, right now I am ripe for the plucking), but so far I haven’t covered the cost of my web-hosting here, but one day when I have worked out who my fan-base are and how to find them and not just stumble on them, expect a whole load of professionally polished re-releases. You’ll see them, one day…
Until then I’ll continue writing what one reader described as British Cult Big-idea-fiction, which is a genre I intend to make my own. You can read one of my books (with links to the others if you like it) and stories right here on the site and even read the rules of my own Role-playing Game T13, all for free!