Tom Pepperdine interviews author Adrian Tchaikovsky on his day-to-day writing process. Adrian discusses how his writing process changed during the pandemic versus the before times, why he associates coffee with work, and how Robin Hobb called him out on his world-building.

You can find all of Adrian's books on the following link: https://amzn.to/3GznVQz

You can find him on Twitter on the following link: https://twitter.com/aptshadow

And you can find more information on our upcoming guests on the following links:

https://twitter.com/Therealwriting1

https://www.instagram.com/realwritingpro

https://www.facebook.com/therealwritingprocesspodcast

Hello, and welcome to The Real Writing Process.

I am your host, Tom Pepperdine, and this week, our guest is Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Adrian is the multi award-winning author of Children Of Time.

As well as The Tiger And The Wolf and The Shadows Of The Apt series.

At the time of this interview, Adrian had been published for 13 years with

over 20 novels, seven novelas and a multitude of short stories to his name.

This interview took place in August, 2021.

A few months after the first book in the Final Architecture series, called

Shards Of Earth, had been released.

Good afternoon and welcome Adrian Tchaikovsky.

My first question to you will be, what are we drinking?

I am drinking coffee and it's a sort of nasty, cheap, instant coffee.

With milk, I'm normally a tea drinker, but coffee is my writing drink

for no readily explicable reason.

I'm also drinking out of a mug with a spider on it just to be able to-

Oh, on brand, perfect.

And so is coffee your writing fuel, would you say, is it what motivates

you through your writing sessions?

Yeah, and I don't think that's because it has any kind of magic asterick

style magic potion qualities, but I think it's just, I feel if I'm having coffee

I'm being a serious writer person and if I'm having tea, I'm just being me.

It's a bit like how I deal with various social media platforms, to be honest.

Did you not start drinking coffee until you had started

writing professionally?

When I had a day job, I used to drink coffee in the office and

tea at home, and I think it's that mindset that I'm carrying on with.

It's the work drink.

Okay.

Nice.

Okay.

I am, I'm joining you in solidarity.

I have coffee ironically it's in a T mug, so it has a giant T

on it, just to confuse people.

And you're in your office right now?

It's breaking the fourth wall for the audience.

We're on zoom.

We're not in the same room, but that's been the case for many

people for a few years now.

And is that where you, where I'm speaking to you now, is that where you write?

It is at the moment.

Before the whole protracted unpleasantness we're going through, I used to try and

get out of the house because it just meant fewer distractions, but since lockdown,

I've managed to translate that into writing at home perfectly successfully.

So yeah, this is my I'm right up at the top of the house and I am

basically surrounded by my library and immediately over my shoulder,

this is my own books, basically.

Oh goodness.

It pretty much everything I ever got to send a copy

of, including translations.

And Lord knows what.

If you needed a broad reminder of just how prolific you've

been having an entire bookcase dedicated to your own writing.

The top three and a half shelves are distinct books, which

is including about three different additions of Shadows of the Apt.

And then after that, it's mostly sort of translations and then short

story collections at the bottom.

And I'm also surrounded by, this is going to make for terrible radio,

but um, little guys like these.

Oh, fantastic.

A giant wasp, for the audience.

There are various Japanese companies, mostly, that

produce little articulated insect models of exquisite detail.

So I've started to collect those as a hobby thing.

Was that something that you discovered yourself or was it a

fan at a convention gave you one?

No, I think just someone on Twitter linked linked one of the

Hornet figures and I just went down a big rabbit hole and found that

because Japan has a very, a much more insect, positive viewpoint generally,

and so beetles and wasps and mantises and crabs, especially are very big.

And there were several companies doing really rather lovely models of them.

Sounds like heaven for you.

This must have been a glorious find.

I have a bit of a collector problem, once I start collecting

something, I tend to go hard in with it.

I have to set myself parameters of what I will and won't take otherwise

I would just get every damn thing.

So is it to have these as inspiration?

Or is it just like comfort or is it just aesthetically pleasing?

Oh, a bit of all of them actually.

Because they are, they're all articulated in an action figure style,

so you can faff about with them.

They're very good kind of fidget, fidget toys.

And I guess, with some of your stories actually seeing how

the movements of the animal can go, will help with the descriptions.

I have not needed it for that yet, but you never know.

Okay.

I did.

There was I very complicated fight sequence.

And one of the Shadows of the Apt books where I actually, I got a, a set of

rubber insects I bought for my son.

I ended up laying them out on the floor and planning out the battle

with them just so I could work out how it was all going to fit together.

Amazing.

I can only imagine your wife walking in and you're going, "It's research.

This is, I'm working right now.

It's playing with my son's toys."

That's amazing.

You've Had many different worlds that you've developed when you've had

an idea that you think may become a story, is there something about it

that grips you, that you go, this is something that I want to tell.

And is that like a human political aspect or discovering a certain

species that you'd go, I want to build a world around this.

Yeah.

It's usually some sort of germ and it's usually a world thing.

One of the things I've found that every writer has a different start point

for the process, that I've spoken to.

But for me, it's definitely world.

So usually I'll have an idea and I'll say I want to write a story in a world

where this is going on or where this has happened or where this kind of

fundamental aspect of life is different.

I'll usually go in hard with "oh I want to write in a world where this very

fundamental thing is different, and then I want to explore what that does."

and the characters and the plots arise out of that.

For example, with the Echoes Of The Fall series, I want to write in a

world where everyone can shape change.

It's not just, yes, there are some werewolves, there's just literally

everyone on the majority, they have an animal form, it's a basic

staple of the society they live in.

And that's, for me, it's so much more interesting than "it's the middle ages,

but this person's a werewolf," or "it's the middle ages, but they're a wizard."

The fact of magic hasn't really changed the society or the technology

or the attitudes in any way.

A thing I wanted to talk about with fantasy is, cause you've worked

both fantasy and science fiction, both very established as fantasy and

very established as science fiction.

How do you decide which genre to base your story in?

Yeah, the divide between science fiction and fantasy, different

writers tackle it in different ways.

Again to some writers it's not a thing.

For me, because I have a fairly procedural and pedantic mind, I tend to

need to know where I am on that axis.

And even where I am within science fiction or within fantasy.

There is a lot to be said for the argument that genres and sub genres are

basically bunk, but they are useful.

They're useful mental landmarks, so when I'm writing science fiction, I like to

know how hard I want my science to be.

And then that will very much affect my writing process.

And when I'm writing fantasy, it's very different to writing science fiction.

And a great deal depends really, there's a certain amount of how

much are you going to be constrained by external axioms and criteria.

I like to know how science, how much science.

Obviously the more fantastical you get, the less you need to be constrained

and the more towards that kind of notional idea of hard science fiction.

And like I say, it is by no means a universally accepted idea that hard

science fiction is even a thing.

But how much I am going to be abiding by real science.

So for example, Children Of Time is what I would think of as a hard

science story, because despite the fact that it's basically about a

civilization of gigantic spiders.

Yeah.

It's all the spiders are intended at least to be scientifically

plausible, which I think actually helps the impact of that idea from the start.

Whereas for example, in Shards Of Earth, which is the new one I got

out, which I would characterize far more as a space opera.

Yeah.

It's got faster than light travel and it's got various other

space opera standard tropes that aren't intended to be rigorously scientific.

Because, although it seems arbitrary, to a certain extent you're in a dialogue

with your readers and your readers expect a certain type of experience.

And if you jolt them too much, by missing the mark on how you're presenting the

science-fiction, how you're presenting the magic, then you jolted them out

of their immersion in the book and immersion in the book to me is the

most important part of the reading experience that I want to give people.

Yeah.

So you definitely have an awareness of the audience as you're writing in a genre.

Yeah, it sounds very shallow.

And I think that there is this wonderful idea of the writer in their

ivory tower kind of creating timeless art and they disdain the idea of

whether or not the reading masses shall understand their glorious work.

I mean, I was an unpublished aspiring writer for 15 years.

I always had in the back of my mind when I was writing the idea, I want

this to be read by other people.

I want other people to enjoy this stuff.

We're a social species, and it's art is to be consumed, basically.

Art is to be consumed by others, that's what it's for.

And yeah, obviously a lot of people, having said that, I will immediately

qualify by saying, a lot of people write stuff purely for their own pleasure.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But if you're writing it to be published, you're not writing it purely for your

own pleasure, you're writing it in the knowledge that someone else will read it.

Yeah, and all writers begin as readers, so you want to inspire someone

in the way that you were inspired.

Or even just entertain them, to be honest.

The fact that they're writing something that is meaningful

and inspiring and competitive.

Potentially putting your ideas into people's heads and change their opinions

and expand their minds is all good.

But at the end of it, there is also the idea you're writing something because

people can then finish that book and think, "I really enjoyed that story.

I would potentially like to read more of that."

Anything beyond that is also ideal, but that's that in itself is a worthy end for

a book is simply entertaining someone.

That is also something art can do and God knows being entertained in and

of itself can be a profoundly worthy thing given how grim the world often is.

Yeah, absolutely.

So when you're starting out with your ideas and you've got this concept

where you know, need to create a world where this element can exist

or actually already have an existing world and this will expand it.

How do you start mapping out those ideas from connecting the dots in

your head to start world-building?

So with the planning, usually things will percolate around in my head

a bit and what will frequently happen is I will have three or four kind of

secondary ideas kicking about from, just stuff I've thought of at some point, which

will gravitate towards this key idea.

So you almost get almost the creation of a little solar system of little

orbiting ideas that all fit nicely together and balance one another.

And at that point, I'll take to a word document, as simple as that.

And I will just start quite methodically world-building.

And one of the things, I come from a background of tabletop role-playing

games which also has a big world building aspect, if you are the

person creating and running the game.

Which has given me a bit of a framework of how to go about things, what sort

of things you need to think about, and Lord knows, I am constantly

being educated in extra aspects that I haven't previously written.

I was on a panel once with Robin Hobb and we were talking about

world-building and the question from the moderator was, "Is there a particular

aspect of your world that you're aware you don't tend to deal with?"

and I was foolish enough to say, "No I'm pretty sure I've got it all figured out."

And Robin Hobb turned to me and said, "what do your characters wear?"

And I just really know that's an entire area I've honestly not really

thought much about, so I'm always trying to add aspects, but usually

I'll start with the big stuff.

And again, the nature of the setting will to a certain extent

influence what the big stuff is.

So if it's a science fiction setting I'll be thinking about what can

the technology do, because that will obviously have an enormous

knock on effect on everything else.

Are there alien races?

What are the alien races?

What sort of societies have arisen?

So you start with the big stuff because the big stuff will

determine the small stuff.

And in a fantasy setting, is there magic?

What does the magic do?

What are the fantastical element?

And then it's a bit like dropping a stone into a pond., You just see

what the ripples at that point from the big thing you've just lumped in.

Yeah.

And so I guess with the big thing, that's a very much a, "what if" question

you're asking yourself and there's a lot of speculation that you're

formulating, but as you mentioned earlier with your science fiction,

you gauge how much science you follow.

So when it comes to researching for your world-building I'm really interested in

how you research for fantasy elements.

Because I feel with scientific elements there are journals, you can

see where technology is progressing, there's a lot of articles about that.

How do you research fantasy?

Okay.

Certainly with the science aspects my first axiom is very much,

there are people in the world who know these things much better.

And thankfully, usually people who know about a particular topic

are usually absolutely delighted to share that knowledge with you.

Great.

So for example, I spent a very informative day at the Natural History

Museum with their entomology department talking about the mechanical problems

of having giant insects and things.

Weirdly, also completely fixed a plot issue with Children of Time at the same

point, just because of some stuff that we were discussing about an expedition one

of that people had just come back from.

There's a chap called Nick Bradbeer, who was a submarine engineer by

trade, who helps, who is also an amateur effectively spaceship

designer and he's my go-to person.

So the water-filled spaceships in Children Of Ruin, I talked to a

number of people in there, but he and I had a very detailed discussion

of what it did, things like momentum and inertia and that kind of thing.

So how do you make that contact?

To a certain extent, if I'm stuck, I can usually go onto

social media and say, does anyone know anyone who knows about this?

And someone will turn up, but that's just certainly, I got a loud enough

voice now that I can leverage it.

But also I found, for example, Nick Bradbeer came to me.

He is a, an associate of a fellow author, Emma Newman.

He is a live role player, which is a field I've been in.

I've kind of collected a cloud of social contacts just through

having shared pastimes with them.

Okay.

That's useful.

Yeah.

it is one of those weird things.

Eventually you find that yeah, the world genuinely can turn out to be quite

small especially I think in the United Kingdom and that you're probably no

more than one person away from someone who knows the thing you want to know.

Yeah that's excellent.

And I knew about the entomology department and that kind of makes sense

that you can just contact the Natural History Museum and say, "I am an author,

is anyone willing to talk to me."

Except that the Head of the Entomology department is the brother

of a friend of mine from university.

So again, it's just this weird connection thing.

And that the thing is, I guess I'm middle-class, middle-class.

I'd never gone to posh schools, but I did go to university and I'm in

that weird sort of middle ground.

My father is a woodworker by trade, but we would definitely going

to be going up the education.

I grew up in the assumption I'd probably end up going to

uni and that kind of thing.

It's that weird.

But essentially as I shared pastimes, hobbies, random connections, you can

still pick up a remarkably wide net of very useful people to draw on.

Yeah.

Oh, absolutely.

I think networking such a naff word, really, but just being social and

engaging with people pays dividends in so many ways and it can be very

intimidating for introverted people.

I would characterize myself as an introvert and networking for its own sake

is a thing that I absolutely can't do.

And I know this because it was something that I've had to do for

work on occasion, and it was dreadful.

Going to these dire kind of business breakfast things and trying to, in

any way, maintain realistic human connections to any of the people there,

because everyone there was there to try and sell themselves in their business.

And therefore, you just felt you'd been dropped into a shark tank.

But for me the point of social connection is always that shared interest, that

shared pastime, it's role-playing games.

It's, obviously now it's just the writing in itself, and conventions

and so forth, give you a much bigger network of people that you're

at least loosely in touch with.

Absolutely.

I think anyone listening to this is automatically part of

the writing community, however on the fringe, they may feel.

One thing I will say is, I did not go to conventions or do

any writing classes or do any sort of writing stuff that touched on

other people until I was published.

And I am in a terrible way very glad that I did not, because

I am not socially adept.

And I was so phenomenally desperate to get somewhere with my writing and I think if I

had gone to a convention known somewhere, let's say somewhere in this bar is an

editor who might look at my manuscript.

I would have probably got myself blacklisted from the UK publishing

industry by making that much of a wretched nuisance of myself.

Asking for someone to give you some pointers on their specialist

subject is a bit different.

But I think if I had been in a position where I could have massively annoyed,

published authors and publishers and agents and editors, and God knows

what with my demands to be noticed, I would have done that and it would have

gone very badly for me and just been a complete pain for everyone I was tapping.

I think it's mostly because I'm sufficiently socially unaware that I

would not have known where the line was.

There are people who I've absolutely seen at conventions who are there,

they're not published authors, but they are very personable and they're

very good at this sort of thing.

And they can chat like actual human beings with people.

And that's, if you can do that, then that's probably a really good

avenue for you, but I absolutely know that I was not one of those people.

And I would've got it.

Dreadfully wrong.

Yeah.

That's interesting, and I think focusing on the writing and doing that

first before meeting your peer group.

It's certainly applicable for some people and it worked out, which

is the key thing, so that's good.

So it is being able to read the room and then utilizing that is a skill that

not everyone possesses, but if you do possess it, it will get you places.

I do know people that will mostly chat and then get short story in an anthology.

Honestly, I know people currently on major awards shortlist

who have come into the the community in that way and done extremely well.

But this it's like it is a skill set.

And it's a skill set some people can do and some people

can't and God knows I can't.

I'm very much concerned with status within group, which is a profoundly

unhealthy and an unhelpful thing to be, but it's not a part of my

mind that I can do anything with.

Once I was published I at least effectively felt I am now

allowed to be in this company.

And I have a sufficient state, even if it is the new person who is only

just published that I'm permitted to be in these kind of areas.

Is it now that you have several books published, award-winning books as

well, and a publishing deal and an agent and all of these things, do you feel that

has the drive changed from when you were writing for yourself to now that you're

established and there's an audience?

The drive absolutely hasn't but the confidence genuinely has.

Certainly I think since Children Of Time started to get traction, which

was really the, just a colossal leveling up of my writing career.

I'm able to relax more into the writing and experiment more with the writing.

One of the big things is for example, I have been able to try and be funny.

One of the things about Shadow Of The Apt is very much an epic

fantasy and epic fantasy is not traditionally a funny genre.

It takes itself seriously, which obviously that's the tradition, that's

the way it works and that's fine.

So recently this year I've had out One Day All This Will Be Yours,

which is my time-travel novella from Rebellion, and it's basically a comedy.

I've experimented a bit with the lighter phrase before, but it's but I think I

would have ever, dared do anything like that earlier on in my career, purely

because it's taking a risk and I think I effectively, I feel secure enough in my

position within the industry that I can take risks, knowing that even a fairly

big misstep is probably not going to completely destroy my my writing career.

And I think there's always a certain amount of nerves even at this point.

You always feel you're being judged for your most recent book and you

always feel with the new thing you're writing, am I pushing too far this way?

Am I being too experimental?

Am I not being experimental enough?

Is this going to be panned for this or that or what, depending on besides what

sort of project you're working on, but I feel that I've got far enough now that

there's a bit of a safety net and it basically means I can be more comfortable

writing beyond my comfort zone.

Actually that's what I wanted to ask is that, so now you've taken this

risk and published a comedy novela.

How was that experience and how has it been received?

It's been received very well.

And yeah, the comedy certainly seems to have landed, which is a relief

cause frankly, I don't think I'm a particularly funny person by by nature.

I'm not a comedian first and foremost.

But yeah, the other thing is you get to a point where you're comfortable having

faith in getting an honest reaction from the various layers of people

between you and the reading public.

My agent and then my editor, and I think if I turned out something that

I felt was absolutely a rib-tickling hilarious, and absolutely wasn't, one of

those people is going to take me quietly aside and say, look, you might want

to have another, another look at this.

So is there going to be more comedy in the future, or do

you feel more confident adding elements of comedy in your writing?

This is, one of the things that this is done is my regular pro style

is less po-faced than it once was.

And so if you look, let's say Shards Of Earth, as my most recent book, there's a

certain amount of irreverence of tone and lightness of tone and in the narrative.

Especially when you're dealing with particular characters, so some of

the characters get much more serious.

But for example, the kind of the sly character having a moan gets a

lot of, wry humor at the expense of bureaucracy in his department.

And then you've got Olli, who is the drone operator who is basically just a very

sweary, irreverent and punchy character.

And so I'm more confident in writing a serious narrative that still has comedy in

the way it's written, which I think is...

it's not something I would have dared to do at the start, because I would have

been unsure where my kind of tone was.

And now I feel I'm just a bit, I think I'm a bit more secure, just moving

that kind of foundation around a bit.

Yes ,interesting hearing the words, " you wouldn't dare to."

It sounds like this was always there and that in drafts, you might write

something irreverent, but then delete it going, "No,that's not the tone

I'm going for," or is this something that you've not tried before and

you're trying and finding success?

It's, I think it's a sort of thing I could conceivably have done.

I think that I w- would have, because I would have been that twitchy

about it, I would probably have reined myself in to the extent that

I would have failed at both ends.

You see what I mean?

So it would have, yeah, it would have been your kind of solemn, epic tome,

nor would it have been remotely funny, so it just felt a bit uncomfortable.

I think it's one of the things that, my earlier writing one of my least read

writing as well as I can work out at the moment is a novel I brought out

originally as a serialized magazine piece, which is called Spiderlight,

which was then picked up and published entire by a Tor.com in the States.

That is actually my first kind of comedy piece, but the reason I felt

able to write it and give reign to that was because it was coming out

in this odd little serialized format.

So it just felt like something I could play with more.

So there is early Adrian Tchaikovsky comedy out there available?

Spiderlite is still in, it's still certainly available in e-format

at the very least from tor.com, and it's been translated into Spanish

weirdly, only in Spanish, but it's one of my very few Spanish translations.

But they clearly get your humor, that's what it is.

I think that basically, it's one of those things where it was purely a

fan inspired, the Spanish fan community is enormously enthusiastic, it's when

they get hold of a book they want to see translated, it often does happen because

they get onto the publishers and push.

Going back into more of the inception of your ideas, do you write

out a clear, structured outline or is it more, this is where I want to go.

I'm going to sit down, write a few pages and see how close I can get.

So my standard procedure is I plot to within an inch of its life.

And so literally to the extent I will have a chapter by chapter break down

and then within each chapter, there will be usually about two or three sections.

And then sometimes each section will then get anatomized into a

series of things I need to happen.

Frequently things like information that needs to be revealed to the reader or pass

between characters and things like that.

But everything then gets strung over.

So my standard process is to plan very heavily, which I think is, which is,

I'm aware, and again, some writers do this and some writers don't, and

it's not a, an either/or dichotomy.

And there's, there is a whole continuum strung between those two poles.

I'm very, definitely at one pole by my normal normal procedure.

Yeah, I think it doesn't always work.

The planning tends to be most rigorous at the beginning and the end, and

the middle can be a bit wobbly.

And also every so often I'll realize that I'll get two-thirds of the way

into the book and realized actually the plan doesn't quite work to get

me from here to where I need to be at the end, and I'll have to rejig two

or three chapters to to make it work.

Or do I add in things I realize I'm missing?

Yeah, so with initial plotting then, you're doing that before

you even attempt to first draft?

Oh God, yes.

So I I get called prolific a lot, which is a bit I've always felt as something

of a double-edged sword, when most people apply it to writers, although

possibly me being overly sensitive.

I do not write more than most writers write on a day-to-day basis as far as I

can work out based on those writers who do actually report word counts and so forth.

In fact, the writers actually report their word counts, tend

to report more words than I do.

My first draft is usually at least 90% identical to my submission.

And that's my secret weapon is that, and I put that down

entirely to the fact that I plan.

Yeah, I'm a planner myself.

It does absolutely pay dividends to plan.

So how long would you say your planning process is?

From when you start getting an idea going, oh, I want to build a world around this.

How long are you spending, building that world?

And then going right now, I have a world I'm going to spend X amount

of time doing my structure outline.

It's hard to say because the first step is that percolation process where

the ideas are coming together and that can take, usually that's going on while

I'm working on something else anyway.

And it's often going on, and I've got two or three ideas slowly bubbling away.

And, I do make kind of brief notes because frequently I'll get an idea

and it'll lift you more, what if we had a world where this happened?

So I always jot these things down and then I'll come back to them and use them as and

when I I feel they've matured and it's not uncommon to find I'll have two or three

quite distinct ideas that will eventually converge and become one book between them.

It would have been something, I think at the beginning, I early on in my

career, I'd probably have resisted and just thought no, each idea is its own

book, but I've realized that actually, no, you can Frankenstein these things

together at the at the planning stage.

And then you don't see the joins when the thing is is finally written.

But that stage can take any amount of time.

I've had ideas that have been bubbling away for a year.

I've had ideas that have struck me like a flash and I've been

writing that within a few weeks.

The actual formal planning stage of me putting down the axioms of the setting

and then moving on to working out, what characters arise from that setting.

What the interesting story is that will showcase that setting, which

is how I tend to approach it.

Will usually just be a couple of weeks.

Because at that point, everything has got to the point where it's just it's

almost just a matter of picking the fruit.

The fruit has already been growing in the background.

Okay.

And when you say you've got two or three ideas percolating, once you've

written your outline and you're writing your chapters and your subsections.

When you get stuck, like you said earlier, sometimes you can get two

thirds of the way through a book and say, "oh, I might need to rewrite."

Do you step away from that job completely to let it percolate and start on one of

the other ideas that you're percolating.

Does that ever happen or is it always one book at a time?

It's always one book at a time.

I've got all of these pots in the back of my mind, but the foreground

stage is definitely, this is the thing I am working on at the moment.

And I might have a couple of things waiting in the wings, but

they'll have to wait until it's over, with the rare exception.

Occasionally if time presses, I may need to stop, get a short story done.

. And then come back to it.

But as far as full length, novella, or novel length projects,

there's only ever one on the go.

So usually my plans work, or I can at least adapt on the fly and it's always

like somewhere between the half and two thirds mark, that things go wobbly.

I think that's just because those are the bits that get the least forethought.

I've had a couple of books where things have just gone dreadfully wrong.

So the second book in The Tiger And The Wolf series, about two thirds of

the way through I realized that I had spent the entire first two thirds of

the book building up for a thing that was not actually going to happen.

And that all of the running around that the characters had been doing was

completely meaningless given the way I had intended to bring the book to a close.

So I had to stop then and effectively just rewind.

I think at least a full third of the book and then just started again and

take it all off in a different direction.

And that was a pain.

And I suspect that at that point, that's where I'm massively losing ground compared

to the people who can just write by the seat of their pants, because it's not a

skill I'm very good at, it's a bit like I've got a good sat nav, but the moment

the sat nav no longer fits the road ahead of me I cannot navigate by hand.

So the biggest road blocks for you when writing are not so

much, "I don't know what to write."

It's that, "what I am writing isn't working"?

Yeah.

It happened with The Doors Of Eden and about the same kind of point, not

quite seriously, but frequently what it comes down to is the basic story

looked absolutely fine on the page, but you realize that the actual kind

of the emotional journey you're taking the readers on or the particular

character arcs on the individual characters do not work within that story.

And therefore at that point, the story has got to be changed so

that the overall feel of the book doesn't just fall completely flat.

And I think that it's very difficult.

It's a limitation in my procedure.

It's very difficult to see that on the page when you're doing that chapter

by chapter plan, because rationally, it all looks like it should work,

but you don't necessarily know the characters well enough to realize that-

They're not going to do what you want them to do?

But also, it's more that they're not going to turn out to be the

people you think they're going to be.

And at that point, two thirds of the way through the book, those people

need to do other things to make their personal part of the stories satisfying.

So where you've had this happened a few times, what's the

quickest resolution that you've had and what's the longest resolution?

For The Bear And The Serpent it took a long time.

And what I ended up having to do was effectively just break down everything

that was going on in those chapters.

I almost went back to the start, I wrote a three or four page treatment

of how the book was supposed to go in order to try and work out what

it was that wasn't working and how I could make it all come together again.

And that was extremely difficult.

I think again, parallel is too close to actually and starting

the book entirely again.

Cause I've made very very grievous misjudgment about how the book should

go and what the story was about.

So it doesn't happen often to me, but it certainly does happen.

Because I get very invested in what I've written is very hard to suddenly

say, actually, no, I need to jump this enormous amount of stuff because I'm

used to basically being able to use pretty much everything I turn out.

With The Doors of Eden, it was a little different.

I could certainly take out the three or four chapters that weren't working and

atomize them down to this, and this, restructure everything I've got a handful

of kind of standard tools where if a scene started in a different place, tell it from

a different character's point of view.

Tell it in retrospect yeah, sometimes if it dragging, skip

it and just say it happened.

Sometimes you really do want to tell, not show.

Yeah.

Frankly, despite the the standard wisdom on the subject.

So yeah, having that structure so you can see quite quickly when you've

reached a point that's not working.

What tends to happen is it's not a sudden, oh, this isn't working.

It's the thing that will slowly creep up on you.

Frequently with me, I will manfully try and ignore this feeling because I'm

so invested in what I'm doing, and I really don't want to have to go back.

And I will usually get two or three chapters in, just laboring on with

the whole thing becoming more and more stilted, before I finally have to

say, none of this really is working.

And I've got to say, I should really learn because it's always right.

That feeling is always right.

If you've got that gut sense, the thing is working, then pushing

ahead isn't going to solve it.

But I am very stubborn when it comes down to things like that.

So I usually end up wasting even more time because of-

The feel-the feeling is consistent each book where you've had that problem?

Yeah, and it can be about different aspects, but it's definitely

that kind of, you've got a room full of yes-men and there's one person

in the corner who's just tutting and shaking their head and that's

the person you need to listen to.

Yeah, so when it's all firing on all cylinders, it's

just that there's no tutting?

Yeah.

I still have doubts.

One of the things I'm very aware of is I am not by any means

the best judge of my own work.

And so you still wonder, it is this, is it just not working on

this and I'm not realizing it?

You can go completely mad with that kind of speculation

because there's no end of it.

You, at some point you've got to also have confidence in yourself as a writer.

And again I'm lucky enough that I know there are literally people's

whose job it is to read through this stuff and tell me if it's a problem.

So if I did massively messed up hopefully one of them is going to catch it.

And has done.

That's, my agents and editors.

They all have a list of things they think will, you need to look

at this, you need to change that.

Do you need to cut out this vast swayth of world-building exposition

that you've left all in chapter four.

And there's a weird kind of at that point, the whole thing becomes

a bit of a team effort as to what people finally get to read.

Yeah, I think it's interesting that no matter how long you

write, you still have doubts.

And I know with every published writer I've spoken to has reached a point

in most of their stories, most of their novels, where they get a form of

impostor syndrome, where they wake up one morning, sit down to write and just

go, I've forgotten how to do my job.

And.

And I was just wondering, have you ever had those days, even though you've

got very strict outline structure that you're following, but either the words

don't come or you just have critical doubt over every word that you write.

I certainly have, but it's frequently because there is genuinely

a structural problem and I may not be aware of what the problem is,

but the fact that if I'm starting to labor over it, I'm finding it

hard to write then it's probably not going to be very interesting to read.

And so at that point, when I finally bring myself to accept it, I need to start

looking at, well what is the problem?

What is it that's not working.

And usually there is something, or usually I can find another way

of doing what I'm doing that feels a lot better when I'm doing it.

So then there's some subconscious part of me, which is obviously plugged into

the process in a way that I'm not.

When writing and having these struggles, have you actually, when

you've thought about it and identified it, it's not actually been anything to

do with the the outline or the structure of the story, but there's actually

something external impacting you and how did you overcome that if you did?

I think that especially given the way the world has gone, there are

certain fantasy tropes let's say, that I don't think I could write about.

There are certain kind of views on the future I don't think I could take.

Purely, because I think they'd been very poorly served by the genre in the past,

and also, frankly, often very overdone.

And because sometimes it would feel in massively bad taste.

Writing in the far future is not a problem because you're in the far future.

Anything could have happened between now and then to bring you to whatever

situation you want to write about.

If I'm writing in a book that's set within the next century, I think it would almost

be criminally negligent, not to at least acknowledge things like climate change.

For example, I think it will be insanely hard to write a book set in the year 2100,

but just assumed it was like the early 21st century only we have flying cars.

In a fantasy book, I think I would really struggle to write a book set

in it's all the Kings and Queens and princes and the promised child

of privilege going to fulfill his prophecy and defeat the Dark Lord.

Fantasy is traditionally a very conservative genre.

But even with my early stuff, even with the Shadows Of The Apt, I've

always been aware that I don't want to simply write a book about the return

of the status quo, not the band.

Obviously I know no problem with the band particularly, but a lot of fantasy

has that, has a very circular narrative where the only force for change is evil

and defeating it and returning things so that the king is back in everything as

lovely as that is the point of it all.

And I don't really buy into that kind of conservative social

orthodoxy in a way that I feel I could convincingly write about it.

Actually I think what I've identified in what you write is often

it's conflict in a clash of cultures.

Whereas, it doesn't have to be a human culture.

We're a very polarized society at the moment.

And I think in a lot of your writing there's polarization in

the societies and the conflict.

And so I was wondering, is that a conscious thing that you write as

a critique of a polarized world, or is it your attempt to try and

understand polarization in culture?

A bit of both, to be honest.

Certainly some of my more recent books have been more obviously reflecting

real life political trends than others.

And again, it's generally the ones that are set in the modern day or the

near future, because it just feels these things are big enough that you

couldn't really write a book that didn't deal with them in some way.

Weirdly the scariest one is my novella, Ironclads, which is a

really quite unpleasant sort of future dystopia military piece

of military science fiction.

Has become steadily more and more relevant since it was written than it

ever was when I was actually putting it down the page, which is not good.

But it's interesting.

This is one of those things, a lot of science fiction writers have said, you

have to be pretty damn fast getting your dystopias out there onto the shelves

because otherwise they're just there.

Yeah, it's listed under current affairs rather than dystopian fiction.

You mentioned earlier about editors and having the people who read your

work once you finished with it.

Do you ever use a beta readers before it goes to your editor?

Or is it straight from your desk to an editor.

So usually my beta readers are effectively my editor and my wife.

Both of them have, I think, a pretty good grasp on things.

And both of them will absolutely tell me if something isn't working for them.

Where a book has a particular sort of sensitive topic, I will try and

find beta readers to go over that.

For example, I've got a book coming out towards the end of

the year called, Elder Race.

One of the things it deals with a great deal is depression.

And depression is something I've dealt with myself on occasion, but I also got

hold of someone I knew who had a lot of issues with depression and especially

medicating depression, which is not something I have personal experience

of, and ran it by them so that I could make sure I wasn't making any kind

of chronic missteps by their view.

And obviously, yeah you can go through as many beta readers as you like

for that kind of sensitivity work.

And it doesn't necessarily mean you're covering all the bases because

everyone has their own take on it.

But I felt with that sort of thing that getting at least one

other person's eye on it before I submitted it was important because

you don't know what you don't know.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think there's recently been issues on Twitter where people have

written books where they've taken their personal view and not considered

the viewpoints of minorities.

The thing is I'm at some point.

I feel that's almost certainly going to be me.

There'll be something that I won't have even considered in my white male

confidence is possibly going to be a problem and I'll make that misstep.

And I think I'll then have to be extremely careful about not to react in the way that

you see some people react, which is denial and doubling down, which is which frankly

never helps, but also just looks very bad.

Yeah.

We're all flawed human beings.

We all can't consider the viewpoints of every other human being.

If someone has an issue with something that we've done, listen first, and I think

that's something it's something that I've seen as a theme in your writing as well,

is empathy with people that, or, you know, spiders, for example people that or

entities that are not generally empathized with, and I know you're on record a lot

with spiders are a fascinating species and a lot of people dislike them, but

I'm gonna show you a spider's viewpoint.

I'm going to make you empathize with a giant spider and realize that this other

life has merit and needs to be considered.

And I know that you've been fascinated with zoology from a young age.

And is that something that with your writing is always going to

be an aspect that you're going to seek out to empathize with animals.

And are there creatures that you haven't yet published about that you're really

keen to write from their viewpoint?

I think it's a big part of my writing and it's always it always is

going to be, and I'm always going to be pushing in that direction and if

nothing else, I'm certainly not the only writer in that region, but it's

not a terribly heavily populated one, which means there's a lot of space

for me to try out different takes.

I can get two books as different as the spider in Children Of Time

and the bio-engineered dogs in Dogs Of War, for example, which

are two very different stories.

But there's still this idea of putting people behind the eyes of something that

is very different and making it work.

And there are plenty of places to go.

There are animals, there are aliens, there are machines, there

are all manner of perspectives that I'm, I'm keen to have a crack at.

It's a rabbit hole because you can keep, you can think, oh, I would

have done this, but there's actually a variant on the thing that I could

also do, which tells a completely different story because just when you

change your viewpoint even slightly.

I mean if I could probably just write spider books for the end of my days and

make them all different, but I don't think people have quite that much.

But there are there are, in Children Of Time you get a lot of, quite a lot

of stuff about the ants on that same planet, but I haven't really done

a hive mind perspective story yet.

Therefore that's, there's a whole vast range of possibility that I'd

quite like to move into at some point.

Whether it's ant or whether it's an alien species that has a similar

kind of setup or something like that.

I was going to ask actually, your friend in contact at the Natural History

Museum, have you spoken to them to say, okay thank you for helping me with this.

Are there any, insects and any sort of creatures that would be

fascinating and for inspiration?

My, my friend, I there is my friend is he's a beetle specialist and

I'm sure that he would have a list of beetles, but there are so many beetles.

And, again, I think I probably haven't done a beetle specific book yet,

but there's again, you could write beetles until you run out of years

and you'd still not have scratched the surface of how many beetles there are

and how many bizarre things they do.

Of the ideas that percolating at the moment without wanting to

divulge too much, is there a specific creature or world that you're really

keen to start, but haven't yet?

Oh God, there's a whole list of them.

I'm in a position at the moment where actually I've got quite

a lot I need to plan for.

So I probably don't want to start throwing away around ideas that

are still half formed in my head.

But I'm working on a fantasy novel for the first time in quite a long

time which brings together a couple of ideas I've had kicking around

for oh a good couple of years.

But beyond that I'm looking at a whole new set of novellas.

So novellas are an interesting writing experience.

I actually really love writing to the novella length, despite the fact I'm

very much known for enormous doorstop books, because one of the things you

do with the novella, especially a science fiction novella is you can get

one idea very satisfactorily explored without necessarily needing to pad

it out with a lot of other stuff.

If I'd been asked for we would like to contract you for half a dozen

new novellas, that's half a dozen completely separate ideas I need.

So you said you had a series of novellas that you're

currently fleshing out or planning.

We're just inking the contract , but I've already

started pulling together ideas.

And ideally organizing them so that there is at least like linking themes

between some of them and things like that.

Can we have a number on how many novelas or is that still being negotiated?

Um, half a dozen.

Okay,

so ideally two sets of three thematically linked,

but that's purely for my own-

And those are all science fiction?

Probably, but again, the slider on how much science there is in

science fiction can vary quite a bit.

Okay.

And the fancy that you're working on at the moment, is that still in the world

building stage or is that at the outline?

One thing that I try to do is I don't, I try and stay

clear of any kind of writing ruts.

And so I try and at least do something new in each project.

Whether it is writing about a particular concept or in a particular way.

And then this way, what I'm doing is rather than planning everything out

rigorously in advance, I've done the world building, but now I'm just sitting down

and writing about the people in the world and seeing if, basically after a few weeks

of this, I'll I've given myself a deadline by which I'll see, I'll take stock.

I will either have a kind of an emergence narrative.

It's going to be a bit of a weirdly structured book is going to be a bit of

a mosaic kind of novel rather than having this kind of strong, heroic fantasy

throughpoint that I would normally have gone for, so either I'll have that, or

I'll at least just have a large amount of fairly formless writing that at

least fleshes the world out for me and I can sit down and plan from that point,

but I will see how I do with just this just sitting down and writing stuff.

So this is brand new for you.

This is not-

Yeah, so far I've got, I think, four section roughly chapterly sections.

Seems to be all right, the problem is, like I say, you get very twitchy, I'm

doing something experimental on the writing, on the structure of the book.

And I will not be in a position to really say whether it works

or not, I'll have to wait until someone else gets their eyes on it.

As part of the historic record in August, 2021, there was this attempt.

Whether it sees the light of day, we'll see.

But no that's fascinating.

So that is you writing just putting a few characters in a situation and

then just seeing how that fleshes out?

what I'm trying to do is actually I'm trying to avoid, I'm trying to

avoid a lot of the tropes of fantasy, whether it's like traditional sort of

seventies, eighties fantasy or nineties norm with more sort of gritty fantasy,

but I'm trying to write about the world and the people, rather than here is

the great things that great people do.

I'm trying to write about effectively about a cast of characters who

are just trying to avoid being in a fantasy novel or avoid being in

a fantasy novel's plot at least.

And with those characters, are you exploring them purely through

these scenes that you're writing or are there any kind of character

sheet bios that you've established before you've written the scene?

The the characters I'm conjuring up, I've got like a whole page worth

of just little one-line descriptions of, there is this character and he

does this and that kind of thing.

And then that's the germ that I, I start with and then just run

with it and see where it goes.

And like I said, whether any of this will get the stage where anyone else

ever even reads it, I have no idea, but yeah it's just I am sufficiently ahead

I feel I can devote three or four weeks to just experimenting like this and see

whether it actually produces anything.

And actually that's just something that just occurred to me.

Cause we didn't really talk about character much before, but you did

say what can unstick you in writing a plot is that you've worked

through it and then the characters aren't who you thought they were.

And have you ever established a character quite strongly in your

mind before you start, or do they always form as you progress the plot?

I generally know them before the start because they arise

organically out of the setting.

One of the big kind of advantages I take out of starting with the world is

that both the plot and the characters should fit that world very well.

I know who the people are, who live there.

I know what their concerns are, what their sort of interrelationships are,

what their opinions are of different groups, what their histories are,

which means that the characters can spring quite full formed onto the page

and I already know them pretty well.

What tends to happen though, is that the things that they go through then start

to change who they are, because obviously that's just how life and fiction work.

To the extent that you get a character who you knew had a particular arc and

trajectory and they were obviously going to end up like this, and then halfway

through the second book you realize actually, they are no longer that person

and their arc isn't that arc anymore.

And if you kind of railroaded them into it, it will be, it will strike

a really wrong note for the reader.

that's not the kind of the ending or the key moment or the the

contribution to the plot that character needs to make any more.

And it's that slow shift over time that gets me rather

than a misstep at the start.

Is there any particular story that you've had where the characters

ended up in an emotional or physical state that was completely unexpected

to what you originally had for them.

Okay, so here's the thing about my planning.

The one thing I do not plan, the one big question mark, is the

final denouement of the book.

So my planning will take me all the way.

I will generally know who is going to be there.

What the face-off is which, who are the sides?

What, where the battle lines are, but how that will turn out I leave to the

momentum of the book at that point.

So in a sense, that's always a mystery and that, although I've had absolute

looks of horror from other authors when I've described this, because I

think that's one thing that a lot of authors who don't plan a lot, do plan.

They know how the book will end, but with me, I plan everything else.

And then I let the natural sort of impetus of what has happened and

where the characters had gotten themselves tell me how things will go.

And frankly, the biggest example of this is Children of Time where

the final resolution between how it goes with the humans and the spine

was completely on the fly and I did not know how it was going to go.

And frankly, it's very obvious looking at the opposite that it could have done a lot

worse for pretty much everyone concerned.

That must give you a real drive to finish a project, because if you don't

know you want to find out, I'm guessing there's a certain level of curiosity

just motivating you to finish your book.

Yeah.

It's very much it's the capstone it's extremely satisfying to

get to that final end point.

Oh, that's how it turns out because it thus far touch wood, it has always

worked that I've got to that end point and it has been absolutely obvious

at that point how things are going to go, but it's not in any way that I

necessarily would have envisaged if I'd started off and tried to nail it down.

If in fact if I decided at the beginning of the book or the end of the book

would have been that end of the book, would it be much more predictable.

I think it's leaving that open generally gives you room for that extra twist,

that moment of extra character, that you wouldn't necessarily have

anticipated and planned for at the start.

So when you're nearing the ending of a book, do you feel, what your emotional

state as you're nearing the finish line?

So the pacing of writing, I tend to be quite quick at the beginning.

And then when you get about a third of the way in there is this very, very long

slow slog through the middle, but you get to a point and it varies from book

to book where you just feel that tilt as if you've got all the way up the hill.

And suddenly there is nothing but a downhill slope and everything

starts accelerating and I write a lot more in each session.

It all falls into place very quickly and very naturally.

So it is, it's a bit like a toboggan run at that point or the

final approach of an aircraft.

And you just, at that point, you all, you're whooshing down towards that

final scene with an inexorable momentum.

So certainly for me, that's very much, that was very much what it

feels like if I've done my job.

And if not, it's usually at about that point where you'd expected to

tip that you realize it's not working.

So once it's actually finished.

It sounds like there's a massive cathartic release, that it's just

you've landed, you've stuck the landing

Yeah.

It's one of the, there is that standard kind of writing thing about having writing

and having written than the relative values of both, but then the fact of

actually having a completed first draft, even though I know I'll have to go back

to it before it's submitted, and then I'll go back to it with my editor, my

agent's comments, and then three different goes around with the editors and at each

point, the whole thing more and more of a chore until the final galley proofs where

you're just slogging through correcting punctuation and things like that.

But yeah, the simple fact of right, that is now completed and it's been

six months or nine months work.

And now the final thing, and it is at least halfway satisfactory and

I'll go back and cut a couple of thousand words and change a couple

of things that didn't quite work.

But in general, because as I said, my first draft and my submission

draft were pretty similar.

It feels done at that point and anything else is mainly just

printing it up on the plate.

Yeah.

So at that point do you feel any form of need to celebrate

your first draft completion?

Or is it simply write, save, go to bed, come back tomorrow, start redrafting.

Usually the thing, or the first thing I previously would have

taken it physically to a coffee shop in town or these days, or over the

last year I've just been ordering online, but just getting a paper copy.

Because one of the things I have learned is I don't see things

on the screen, errors wise.

I see them on the paper copy in much more detail.

So that's become the ritual is once I've got that paper copy

ordered or printed or whatever, that kind of feel that's done now.

Especially if I'm ordering it from somewhere else,

it'll take a week to turn up.

And that means I've got a week where I don't need to think

about it, I've done the thing.

But I, part of the writer's malady with me as I have a very limited

amount of time I can go without actually creating new stuff.

And so usually by then, I will give myself a few days after which I

generally back on with the next project, because I get very twitchy when I'm

not doing, I'm not making something.

And all of the parts of the writing trade, like edits and so forth, do not

tick the same boxes inside of my head.

So how do you structure a writing session, is it the same time every day?

Is it for the same length of time every day?

Since I quit the day job I used to be, I used to be a late evenings writer.

Since I quit the day job I've actually started writing in the morning and getting

my major chunk then, and then frequently I'll be doing edits or something

writing adjacent in the afternoons.

And then, as I get towards the end of the book, I'll probably start fitting

an extra like evening and weekend and extra sessions because I've got that,

that force behind me driving me on.

As far as how I just keep going on it, especially during that long

uphill slog in the middle, there's a lot to be said for force of habit.

The idea of just writing something every day is very deeply ingrained by now.

Because it was 15 years before it got published and it's been getting on for 15

years now since, insanely enough good god.

But beyond that my other kind of my other secret weapon in a way

is I always, when I'm not writing, there's a part of my mind, which is

always working on what happens next.

And it's something that will generally be turning over when

I'm going to sleep at night.

To a certain extent, there is a bit like winding up an elastic band.

There's always something that's wound up and ready to go in me for when I sit down.

I don't spend a long time, I don't sit down and just stare at the page.

I know at least the first paragraph of what comes next is there.

And hopefully that will then lead to the next paragraph and the next.

It's just having that ready to go, I think is a bit of a godsend.

And it's, it means that even in the slowest bits, at

least I get that foothold.

I get their foot in the door.

Each writing session.

And once that's there, I can generally just keep going.

Now that you're writing in the mornings, , has it replaced the day job?

Is it a nine o'clock start or is it just as soon as you wake up?

Usually I'm up to see my son off to school or whatever.

Frankly I'm not naturally a morning person, but that in

forcibly turns me into one.

So at that point I'll usually be up, I'll have a cup of tea.

I try and set aside a session where I'm just reading

whatever I'm currently reading.

And then I guess it usually is about sort of nine o'clock

or thereabouts and I'll start.

And the morning, will then just be given over to me working through.

I try and get a distinct section of the book done, , not , meaning not

an entire chapter, but a distinct sequence of events that would then

usually end with with an asterisk or whatever to go onto another one.

And that can be a longer or shorter thing, but I try and I tend to get

particular bits like that done whole in a in a single session if I can.

There's some writing advice which is leave it mid sentence,

or if you've finished a chapter, write the first line of the next

chapter, you don't subscribe to that.

You're very much I do this section and then once it's done, I'm done for the day.

Yeah.

Although having heard that, I think there's an awful

lot of good sense in that.

Though, I think my inner mental process of just effectively rehearsing that

first paragraph in my head fulfills the same function, but I absolutely

can see the sense of doing that.

It's just not something that I, for whatever reason,

particularly clicks with me.

And your quite regimented in working just Monday to Friday.

Cause you said like when you're nearing the end of the project,

you add weekends and evenings.

So I'm guessing it's more of a Monday to Friday.

You're doing it as a job.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's basically how it's worked out.

I think it varies also weekends can also be for edits and things like that.

So it doesn't necessarily mean I'm not working.

It's just, I'm not necessarily writing, but certainly since going full-time

as a writer, it's fallen out that way.

And I don't know if that's just me being fairly slavishly chained to

the idea of a working week, which is a bit of an artificial construct.

I think like you were saying before, that the writing habit

and making it habitual, having a structure and structuring time off,

structuring time with the family, structure in time to see friends.

So it doesn't consume you and lead to burnout.

If I gave myself twice as long in the day to write, I

wouldn't write twice as much.

And if I force myself to write twice as much, it will be dire.

Because I think when I've written a chunk, my brain then needs to regenerate

something to be ready for the next bit, I can't just burn through something

for 16 hours straight in a day.

As some writers can.

You hear of some writers who's just blitzing a book in a couple of weeks,

which I find incredible, but certainly I have a certain amount of writing

stamina that needs to replenish.

And one thing I did find, I think it was probably very useful, although

I'm not doing it now to be out of the house and writing elsewhere.

To find somewhere, a library or a coffee shop or somewhere that

you can put some headphones on and write without home distractions.

I think that certainly when I was making the transition from part-time

to full-time, that really helped.

Cause it's really easy to get stuck at home and ending up doing

lots and lots of other stuff.

It's a weird transition, the idea, just reminding yourself that even though you're

at home, you're actually also working.

I think this is one reason why a lot of writers get a shed or something like that.

You have a particular place and when you are there, you are working,

you're a writer and you're not constantly going off and doing

things around the house or getting distracted on social media or whatever.

As things start to open up again, I might well revert to going into

town at least some of the time.

I think traveling around a bit helps, getting out of the house

gives you a new mental space.

One of the things I've found I frequently have interesting ideas traveling to,

and from, I write very well on trains.

God, the most of the plot of Bear Head came to me, incredibly enough,

in a dream at a uh, EasterCon, which I've got to say that's never happened

since, but it's just sometimes a change of landscape actually helps.

Just get general generic inspiration going in the head.

Yeah, I think having a dedicated space or having a place that you can

commute to, rather than just going upstairs, it triggers the alpha

waves, once you're moving and that, that can be massively beneficial.

Moving on to writing adjacent things, you mentioned conventions there, but

also social media connecting with your peers, connecting with other writers.

Would you consider yourself as part of a writing peer group?

Do you have people that you bounce ideas off?

Oh yeah, very definitely.

One of the weird things that actually arisen out of the current situation is I

am interacting with other writers more now than I would have done previously, purely

because there are the zoom calls and there are various other things like that.

There's a weekly online get together, a fellow writer has organized,

which has been an absolute godsend.

And it also, it's a space where a bunch of writers can just talk

about aspects of the trade really in a kind of a confidential setting.

And that's been enormously useful on a mental health front and

just on a general social plan.

But even before that is, yes, I have to stop myself thinking of myself as

the new guy still, which I think will be a bit rich given the number of

books and the number of years involved.

But I think it's the thing that a lot of writers still have that you

still think of yourself as the up and coming new author, even if you've been

on the scene for a decade or more.

But there is definitely a UK writing community and I'm definitely a part

of it and, crossed fingers, at some point in the future, we'll be back

doing conventions and I'll get to meet all those people again, in the flesh.

You mentioned that, it's good for mental health, which completely makes

sense because it's such an isolating job, and for the social aspect.

Do you feel that your writing has benefited?

Can you think of anything specific from these weekly meetings where it's informing

on the writing or is it just more wider aspects of the industry and just how you

positioning yourself within the industry?

Certainly some people have thrown open actual structural

writing issues there, but for me, the writing part is still quite

private and personal and a thing that happens very much inside my head.

But talking about the aspect of publishing with other writers is useful.

Even things like, I have a very long history of not getting my

working titles from books accepted.

I would say at least a third of my published books are not out under the

titles that I used to submit them.

And sometimes you get to the point where you just go right,

this is what the book's about.

I really need a title for this in about a week, otherwise they're going to drop

this one on me, which I really don't like.

I know that you're on record with Bear Head was originally Bear With Me.

Yes it was.

And I have no regrets, except not being able to use it.

There's a very bizarre history to Doors Of Eden.

Doors Of Eden was written as a book called The Brain Garden, which they

really didn't like, because they said it sounded like a zombie novel,

which I guess it actually does.

And so we were quite late stage thing what on earth are we're going to call this if

you're not calling it The Brain Garden, which they were very adamant we weren't.

Prior to that, I had been writing a book called Doors Of Eden, which and

this doesn't happen to me often, but it happened to me in this case, I got seven

chapters in and it stalled completely.

It's a completely, utterly different book to the actual,

currently published Doors of Eden.

And there was just a world building element I had overlooked, which completely

undercut the entire book concept.

And this is something that it happened a lot before I was published, I went

through a whole series of projects where I got to about literally chapter seven

every time, and this is not working, I'm going to go onto something else.

But it hadn't happened to me for years and that was a blow, but I got that

far and unfortunately I got as far as mentioning that there was this book Doors

Of Eden to my publisher and somehow that ended up on Amazon as upcoming book.

Oh!

So I had to go, I'm not writing that book anymore.

I'm writing a different book.

I'm writing this book, The Brain Garden.

And then they said we don't want The Brain Garden.

And I had a bit of a think I think actually, the title Doors

of Eden really fits this book.

And so let's just resolve this time paradox that we appear to have.

Yeah.

So that, that was a thing.

An awful lot of my books have gone out with not the title

they were originally written.

And that's just the thing that happens.

With socializing with other authors, I'm going to talk about the dreaded

poisoned chalice that is social media.

In our current age in 2021, do you think it essential in any way or is it just

mildly beneficial or is it a tightrope that should sometimes be avoided?

I don't know.

So I am not very good at social media.

My social, my kind of platform of choice is Twitter.

I'm on Facebook, but it's really as a personal thing.

So I generally, I do not particularly interact with

people as a writer on Facebook.

It's only as a holdover from when that was the platform and various

people I only know on there, and in real life, as it were.

I have seen writers who are extremely good at social media and

it helps them an enormous amount.

So I think it's a lot like that thing about going to conventions.

When you're, uh, you're pre-published, if you are good at it, it's really handy.

And if you're not good at it it's no damn use at all.

And if you try and use it and you make a nuisance of yourself, it's

going to come back and bite you.

It's very much like that only, probably not quite as immediate as you being in a

room with people you're annoying rather than just being this great void that

is Twitter or whatever you're using.

Lord knows you can build a very strong following.

And one keeps hearing about the writer who is asked by their publisher

before the contract is signed how many followers do you have?

What is your social media presence with the assumption that if you

don't have some sort of established base of people you can market to

you are not going to get published.

I don't know if that's a thing or not, because thank God I

got in the door before that sort of thing was a consideration.

But I'm not terribly good with it myself.

I would like to believe that you didn't need a social media

presence in order to be an author.

But honestly, I don't know, because I was already established

before that sort of thing came in.

If someone did want to ask me a question or get hold of me and then,

just tagging me in a tweet in Twitter, it will usually do it unless I'm

completely snowed under with stuff.

Just to sum up, the last few questions, so it's my belief that

writers grow and develop with writing every story that you write.

With the last thing that you wrote and completed, do you

feel that you learnt anything?

Was there something that you experimented on, on your very last

piece and what did you learn?

The last thing I completed was the third and last book of the Final

Architecture series, first book of which Shards Of Earth has just come out.

And to start with that's really my first actual purpose written science

fiction series is my first space opera.

It's dealing with a number of parts of the genre that I personally

haven't really dealt with before.

It's managing a great big kind of galaxy scale story, even though the focus is

very much on a small ship full of people.

It's a long time since I've actually sat down and written a book, which was

specifically intended to be a series.

Children Of Time has a sequel, but Children Of Time was written as

a book on its own, for example.

And so I was rediscovering a lot of that and also I think just advancing

my ability to juggle multiple characters and multiple viewpoints.

There are quite a lot of characters and stage managing it so that

everyone gets their spotlight moment it's a challenge in and of itself.

It's one of the things actually that's I ended up deviating considerably from

my own plan in the last few chapters, because I suddenly actually these

characters aren't getting their due, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.

This is how all the things that they'd been doing up to this point can pay off

in a way that I hadn't originally planned.

So I think also just a certain amount of editing on the fly in

an entirely controlled way, rather than just frantically trying to

pick up broken pieces is something that I've made to do on this book

that I haven't really done before.

Yeah.

So it sounds like it's quite validating in that certain aspects of it is

like having a planned trilogy you've done before, you'd had series before

as you said the on the fly editing

I wasn't sure how the final result was going to look essentially,

and looking back on it, I'm genuinely pretty, pretty happy with the way

it's turned out, which is good.

That is good.

One last thing, is that any piece of writing advice you

find yourself returning to?

The thing I need to keep reminding myself of is the idea that

you need to listen to the voice.

Whether it's the voice of your beta reader or whether it's the voice of

your an editor or an agent, or whether it's simply the voice inside you that

I was referring to that's saying, this isn't working, this isn't right,

because that voice is usually right.

And the more the more you don't want to hear it, the

more right it is likely to be.

Excellent.

That's a perfect time, I think to wrap up the interview, so I just

have to say thank you very much.

Thank you very much for having me on the show.

Absolutely.

And all the best, have a lovely evening

And to you.

And that was the real writing process of Adrian Tchaikovsky.

If you'd like to learn more about Adrian, you can find all his details

on his website, shadowoftheapt.com.

He's also very active on Twitter under the handle @aptshadow.

And if you'd like this interview, please consider leaving a review.

I'm currently a team of one and the more positive reviews I get, the more

authors are likely to want to come on the show and share that process with you.

Thank you all for listening.