Tom Pepperdine interviews RJ Barker about his writing process. RJ discusses the benefit of a brilliant editor, the joy of Vimto, and why research can be over-rated.

You can find all of RJ's information here: https://www.rjbarker.com/home.html

And I do recommend you become his Twitter follower here: https://twitter.com/dedbutdrmng

You can also support this podcast here: https://ko-fi.com/therealwritingprocess

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'm your host, Tom Pepperdine.

And this episode, my guest is the writer, RJ Barker.

For those that don't know RJ, he's the award-winning author of The Bone Ships.

The first book in the Tide Child trilogy.

That has taken me so many takes to say the Tide Child trilogy.

It just doesn't roll off the tongue for me.

Uh, I call it The Bone Ships Trilogy.

The books are called The Bone Ships, Call of the Bone Ships and the Bone Ships Wake.

It's The Bone Ships trilogy.

Yes, Tide Child does make sense when you read the books, but

it's just, it's hard to say.

And it, you know, it hard to find in a bookshop when you're just

looking for The Bone Ships Trilogy.

But I know RJ now.

I've spoken to him.

I think he just likes to fuck with people.

And, certainly with his debut trilogy, the wounded kingdom trilogy.

They're Assassin books.

It's the Age of Assassins, Blood of Assassins, King of Assassins.

It's the Assassins trilogy.

But yeah, he writes fantasy.

They're full of dragons, assassins, and bird wizards.

He doesn't always write fantasy.

He, some people actually know him as the crime writer RJ Dark.

He's written a book called A Numbers Game.

So we have a bit of a chat about pseudonyms.

Um, he's an odd guy.

I don't think that's a criticism.

I think that's he'd be quite proud of that.

It's a great chat.

He's possibly one of the funniest people I've interviewed.

And I think you'll really like this episode.

Uh, I know some people will definitely like this episode because

RJ was actually requested to be a guest by my Twitter followers.

So thank you followers on Twitter.

If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, it's @therealwriting1.

Just because the real writing process is too long for Uh, Twitter, unfortunately.

So, yeah, so he was requested.

I got him on.

We had a lovely chat.

And this is the very first interview I did for season two.

This was right back at the beginning of January, 2022.

In fact season one was still going out and I make reference to that in

this interview, it's very strange.

Uh, a lot has happened since then.

Anyway, uh, that's the intro.

I'll play jingle.

You'll listen to the interview and there'll be a bit of chat at the end.

Okay.

Talk to you later.

Hello and today my guest, I'm very pleased to say, is

the author, RJ Barker, RJ.

Hello.

Hello.

Pleased to be here.

Great.

And my first question as always, what are we drinking?

Well, I'm actually, I'm betraying my Northern heritage because we're

drinking a Mancunian drink, which is, people expect me to say Boddingtons.

I bet everyone else turns up with beers, but Vimto, which I'm obsessed with.

I've got a SodaStream.

Fizzy Vimto.

That takes me back.

Yeah well, I'm fancy.

I don't drink.

Okay.

And so with Vimto, how long have you been a Vimto drinker?

I've been a Vimto drinker all my life.

On and off.

And then it was a friend in Manchester, it was freezing cold and

they said, you want some hot Vimto?

And I was like what's this madness, you talk?

Hot Vimto?

No, summer drink, ice in it.

That's Vimto.

And then he went, no, no you're wrong.

And they made me hot Vimto, and it's just astounding.

If you've got a bit of a cold or something it's is absolutely just amazing.

It's the perfect drink.

It used to be hot Ribena, now hot Vimto if I'm feeling a bit ill.

There's definitely.

Yeah, there's definitely a difference.

You can't substitute.

Absolutely.

I used to date a Mancunian and again, it was that cold sort of thing.

As a southerner myself, it was always Lucozade.

When you get cold and have Lucozade.

Manchester is hot Vimto.

I was like, hello.

It has all the nice bits of cough medicine without any of the horrible bits.

Yeah, that's a really good way of describing it.

So that's what's always appealed to me.

And it looks like it looks at wine as well.

Cause I don't drink for any sort of exciting great story.

It'd be good if I had a really good story about having problems or being

a tortured artist, but I don't.

I, I got really ill and I stopped drinking because I was ill and I realized

that I was drinking for confidence.

I don't actually need it, I'm quite confident.

And then I realized that I don't like hangovers.

And when you don't drink, suddenly you don't think about

what did I say last night?

And that's all kind of gone.

So now if I say something really stupid or awful, it's entirely my

own fault, can't blame anything.

And I've just never got back into the habit, but I do kind

of miss having a glass of wine.

I like it.

Yeah, I think there's definitely cultural aspects to what you said, the

tortured artist and the alcoholic writer.

But I think Vimto is a fine substitute.

Is this, would you drink Vimto through a writing session or is it more

of a reward once you've finished?

No, no, no.

I'd have a glass of Vimto, I might go crazy, I might have a Coca Cola

if I'm feeling particularly spicy.

Yeah.

But I'm trying to cut down on the amount of sugar cause I've got

Crohn's disease, which means I can't eat basically anything healthy.

I've got a doctor's note that says I have to live off sweets and like me cause

my body can't process stuff properly.

But I think at some point they're just going to turn up and go look

RJ you've got diabetes, but I can't abide sugar-free drinks.

Yeah, it's so noticeable now.

I think with the sugar tax and they've bought in all the

sugar-free things that when you do get sugar it's oh, here's a kick.

And some people, I don't think, I think they can't taste

the, the sweeteners, but I can.

My other half, she can't tell the difference.

She has to go which of these is diet.

You know when you get drinks and you don't know which is diet.

Wow.

So I taste cause she cannot tell the difference, but I was just

like, oh yeah, I know what that is.

For me, it's almost like a texture.

I think that a good sugary drink, it feels slightly thicker in my mouth

because it says more substance to it.

Yeah, it's just better.

We're children of the nineties.

We know sugar is good for us.

Yes, despite, despite science.

(laughs)

Exactly.

Yeah.

We're still alive.

So it must be fine.

(laughs) And so you're in Leeds at the moment.

And can you describe where you are uh, to our listeners?

So the room you're in at the moment where are you?

Oh, see, I'm not in the good room.

Cause I've been kicked out by my family because they're, it's Christmas.

It's not it's after Christmas.

It's the first, second day of 2002?

22!

It's the third.

I'm in our bedroom, which is a room in a 17th century mansion that was once owned

by the family of Scott of the Antarctic.

That's my claim to fame.

It was their coach house.

And it's usually my wife's office, so there's all her stuff.

And she's she's also very creative.

She's arty.

She's a designer.

And her creative process is a lot more messier than mine.

So it's not my, I couldn't work in this area, but it works for her, but I've been

kicked out of where I would work, which is our front room, which is massive and

it's covered in dead animals everywhere.

Very old ones we don't have them killed especially for us.

Recycled death.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We, we kind of, we ended up with a lot of taxidermy that has been in

museums, which they don't have a place for, cause it's a bit rubbish

now and it's gone a bit mankey.

And there's a writer called John Courtney Grimwood, who's absolutely brilliant.

And he'd put on his Facebook that he had a leopard skin rug that

was like a family heirloom and he said, but it's got holes in it.

It's not very nice, but I don't want to throw it out.

Cause he, he was raised with it.

And there were let's say a hundred people underneath

saying you should give it to RJ.

He'll take it.

And he did and it lives on the back of our sofa now.

And he's he's got a pirate hat and a patch.

No, he's got a turban and a patch now.

Amazing.

It was a pirate hat.

So it's a bit of an order and chaos.

Ying and Yang with your wife and yourself?

I think my chaos is in my head.

She's actually if you say, what have you got to do tomorrow?

She can reel off all the work and she knows when it's due and when

it's all coming and she diaries and stuff, but she has a lot of stuff.

Yeah.

If you say what you've got, when's your deadline?

I'm like, oh, I dunno.

I'm writing a book.

And my chaos is in my head but I don't like stuff.

So it's all just, I do have a notebook that I have here.

But I just doodle on it.

I don't actually write anything useful.

Or I write notes, the stuff that I'm going to do and then forget them.

And that stuff seems to be part of my process.

Because it's ringbound, for our listeners, it's a ring bound notebook.

Yeah.

Is it useful to have tearable pages that you can just rip out?

No, no, I I always start things away and I don't keep stuff, but

this is a bit of a cheat cause it's not actually what it looks like.

It's me trying to micromanage my wife.

It's a Rocketbook.

Okay.

Which is it feels like paper and use special pens and you can make your

notes and then just wipe them off.

But you take a picture on your phone and it uploads it to a thing.

So I kind of got it as a as a present for my wife saying

maybe this might work for you.

Cause you can take all your notes and she went nah, I hate it.

I want bits of paper that I can throw all around the room.

Okay.

So it's come to me now, but I just use whatever is there when I'm writing

stuff down and have like notebooks and then they're put in the bin.

Cause I never look back.

It's not, it's about churning through the stuff in my head rather than

going back and referencing stuff.

I'm not a referency person.

And you don't have a special pen and a special book for each

project or anything like that?

No I don't even have a special place.

I can write more or less, once I'm in the zone it doesn't matter where

I am because I'm in the story and that's all that matters and I'm off.

As long as I have a computer with a good keyboard.

Okay.

So do you have a desktop computer or do you have a laptop that

you can just take wherever?

I have two laptops.

I have this one we're on now, which is a Microsoft surface

laptop, which I love a lot.

It's keyboard is really nice.

And it just works.

Works really well with Word because it's made by Microsoft, so it should do.

And then I have a Microsoft Surface Go to like a tablet with a detachable keyboard.

I've seen those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I take that with me places telling myself that I'm gonna write

on the train, but I'd never do.

It just goes in my computer bag and it was a lot of money that I

never use, but I atone for that.

Just between you and me.

But it looks good.

It looks good and you could.

It's better to have it and not need it.

Than need it and not have it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's actually what I use for a lot of edits and copy edits because it

changes, I use it as a tablet and it changes the way you look at the text.

Because it used to be that publishers would send you it printed out,

but they don't do that anymore.

With covid has provided a convenient excuse for them not to.

So I use tablet or I use, I used to use my Kindle, but it's killed Kindle for me now.

I can't read anything off it because it puts my head into

that, oh I'm criticizing this.

I'm looking for the things that are wrong with it.

And I can't enjoy anything to read on it because I'm just...

You've got that association, it's work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Even the authors I really love, if I start on Kindle now I just grind to a halt.

They are still actual books, which I feel quite cheated actually.

But my sons, my son has stolen my Kindle anyway.

I'll have this, if you're not using it.

That's because he reads an awful lot stuff and he won't throw his books out, so now

the house it's just all full of his books.

Yeah.

I'm the same.

It's just I've tried reading on the Kindle, but there's just

something of the tactile nature.

I think it's, it's the reading equivalent of a sugary drink.

It's just, you have it.

And you know how far you've got until the end because you can feel

it between your thumb and forefinger.

I like to fold pages.

I know some people don't, but I like to fold pages because then if I reread that

book, I'll be able to see where I stopped.

And I really liked that.

These are my footprints in this book.

I can see where I've been.

Yeah.

I'm not a things person.

I'm not attached to a book as a physical object I'm attached to what's in it.

There's a few that are special books to me, but most of them

they're just a machine for getting the story into my head.

Yeah.

I don't get precious over the individual editions of books.

Cause I know some people would react in horror at folding a page or

breaking a spine or stuff like that.

I like a well-worn book.

It shows how much I loved it and have read it.

And if I wear it to the point it's unreadable, then I buy another copy.

And there's a joy in knowing that I've worn out a book that I need a new one.

So yeah, I don't get precious over books.

There is weird ones though, like I love Patrick O'Brien.

And some of the books of his I have are falling apart, but I have to

replace them with the same ones because the covers, a really beautiful

drawings, paintings of ships.

And for me that's an art object, slightly different.

They're really, I like ships.

There's a beauty to sailing ships.

I just really enjoy.

So are you quite attached to the cover art of your own books?

Is that a long process or is that something that the publishers

just go, you're having this?

Yeah they just go, you're having this and you go, oh, okay.

And I did have quite a bit of trouble when my first books came because they

were not how I imagined my covers.

My agent eventually just said to me, look, these are the covers are not for you.

They're a vehicle to sell your book.

they're to let people pick it up, that's all they're for.

They're not for you to enjoy it.

And I was like, oh alright okay then and I can disassociate myself to a degree.

But yeah, I think if I was in charge to be very different.

I like art, so I think i don't think anyone would buy them.

I think people would just go what on earth is that book about, I'm not touching it.

Because you don't realize until you within it, how much it's coded.

It is coded!

Yeah.

I've heard that from a lot of authors actually, who've been the

same of, they haven't liked it, but they go you're in this genre.

If you want people to pick it up, they have to recognize it as a type

of book they'll like from the cover.

Yeah.

My first book, the Wounded Kingdom books.

I was quite convinced they were crime books.

It just happened to take place in a fantasy world.

And my agent just went, no they're epic fantasy books.

That's good.

What?

Why are they epic fantasy books?

Because that means I can sell them.

Okay then.

That's how it works.

That's how it works.

And he did!

So he knows what he's doing, but yeah.

But to me they're crime novels.

They're structured as crime novels.

But it's because a big love of mine is crime.

And then yeah, I've learned now, marketing knows what it's doing.

Nobody understands it.

Not even sure marketing understands it, but they make it work.

And obviously my books are sold.

So...

To burst the magic bubble of your love of fantasy and crime.

Obviously some are under a pseudonym.

Yeah yeah.

There's another me.

Yeah, so how did that come about, was that a conscious conversation with

your agent or publishers to say, if you want to release these books, it

will be better under another name?

Or was it an idea that you thought these are so different that I

might have to create a persona?

I would liked to have release it all under my name, if it was up to me.

But it was my agent's advice not to.

I do wonder if somewhere buried in my contract is a thing saying that

this is RJ Barker, it's who you are.

You are a fantasy writer, you have to be that.

Cause I don't read my contracts.

That's what he's paid for.

I wouldn't understand them anyway.

But it's quite nice cause when somebody gets in touch with you about them you

immediately know what book it's about.

Yeah.

Which I wouldn't otherwise.

Yeah, and, and weirdly the books have come out as RJ Dark, which is my other persona.

Actually get more email about those because they don't sell

nearly as much than I do about the fantasy books, they seem to..

The people who read them seem to really connect with them, which is really lovely.

And they're probably the oldest idea that I've ever gone back to.

Everything else is new, but they're an idea I've had for well over a decade.

Those two characters have been sort of, I'm really attached to them.

And whether they sell or not, I'm going to continue writing them

just because I enjoy doing it.

So it's kind of a bit of a jolly for me.

What changed with those characters?

That you had them percolate in your head, and then suddenly

they snapped to the forefront.

Now I've got a story for them.

What was the missing piece that was like, I need to write this now?

There's two, two characters in the book.

There's Mal Jones, who's a pretend medium.

He never changed.

He was always the same.

He's personality wise, quite close to me in sense of humor and the fact

that he's terrified of violence, so he'll runaway and stuff like that.

Otherwise very much not like he's an ex-drug addict, and I

am too lazy to be a drug addict.

It takes a lot of work.

I've seen addicts, terribly tiring.

And and then his friend, Jackie.

And Jackie changed quite a lot.

He was various different people and he was never quite..

His personality was always the same, but who he was.

And it wasn't until I settled on Jackie as this Sikh boy raised by a white

family on a predominantly white council estate who doesn't belong anywhere.

And that kind of crystallized it in these two outsiders and

why they would be together and why they're such good friends.

But I'd always been trying to tell the story of what brought them together.

And that was a murder mystery and it exists, and I will.

And each time I done it I got about 20,000 words in and then I just

realized it was like a flash, just that's like novel number three or four.

That's not your first book.

And the plot for the first book just landed in my head.

As I did with Age of Assassins, my first book sold, I thought

we've got to go write this.

And I did, I just wrote it.

Flew straight to it.

And as soon as you've done that, when you finished your book, it's

a psychological kind of step.

Cause you can do it then.

You, you know, these characters, I know how they talk and

I know how they interact.

And I know how to react to situations.

It's just a matter of throwing things up and then letting it write

itself, it's really fun to do.

But fantasy is harder.

That's more you have to make stuff up, but writing in our world,

everyone knows what it's like already.

So yeah, that's what changed.

I just suddenly realized I was writing the wrong book.

So once I'd written the right book it was easy then.

Okay.

So are you planning a prequel book then for book three?

Is it something that?

No, books one, two and three are written.

They're in the editing process.

Probably book four or five will be that, but it's not a prequel.

It's about how that past comes back to bite them.

How things that were, that have never been discussed or overlooked

can suddenly reappear much later in your life and cause problems.

And it revolves around something that they thought was not a mystery

and it turns out it is, or is it?

And I like, I like stuff like that.

And it pushes their friendship pushes them into an adversarial

position against each other.

So you have to stretch that, which is quite fun.

I'm looking forward to doing it.

And so is that going to be your next project?

So you're editing the earlier books now, or is there another fantasy

that's gonna sort of space between the books that you've written?

I write a lot.

I love writing I really, the act of doing it, I've always said this, I don't really,

as a writer, hold to the idea of genre.

I think it's a useful tool for selling things.

It's all just clothes for telling stories, whether it's fantasy or

science fiction or crime or whatever.

I've just got back my edit letter for my newest fantasy book, which

is vaguely Robin Hood based and the things she pointed out were

the things that bugged me about it.

And she said, we can go ahead with this as it is if you want,

but I did notice these things.

Maybe we could mess about with them?

And because they were exactly the same things I thought about.

I went, yeah, yeah, maybe we should.

So I'm doing that.

That's the thing I should be doing.

That's my proper job.

I'm going to do that.

I've got an edit to do such probably about a month and a half, and then I've

got a copy of it to do for the second Mal and Jackie book, that's not as hard.

That's just, can I put up with this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can take that comma out.

I use far too many commas.

Um, and then um, I wrote like, a cosy crime book.

My agent sent me edits for that.

So I've got that to go through, but that's a speculative project.

So that, that's what I can fit it in.

I'll come back and do that, give myself a month.

And then I've got the second in my new fantasy trilogy to write.

It sounds like an awful lot when I do it like this.

And then I said to myself, I'm taking Christmas and New Year off.

I'm not writing.

I'm not doing any of these things I meant to be doing.

I'm not doing anything.

So I started a new book and I'm like 17,000 words into that now

that I'm quite excited about.

That's like a thriller.

I was just laying in bed and I thought, could you do Jack

Reacher in England without guns?

Could you do something like that?

No, you couldn't.

And then I woke up in the morning and thought, oh no, you can.

I can see how that could work.

I just started that and I'm quite pleased that I did.

You never know if it will be anything but yeah.

So that's what I'm doing.

I'm just writing all the time.

So you don't do one project beginning to end, start a

new project beginning to end?

There's various projects on and you're kind of spinning

the plates and multitasking.

I think in a way I do.

I'll just write the fantasy novel.

And then I finished the fantasy novel and then I moved on to the next thing

while it went with my editors to look at and then I do the next thing.

And then when I'm editing the fantasy novel, I'll probably edit

the fantasy novel in the morning.

And then if I'm still excited about the new project, write

a bit of that in the evenings.

Do like a couple thousand words.

Cause they're very different voices.

So I do tend to be stuck doing one thing mostly.

And then I just line them up.

I've got to cause I write quite quickly.

Yeah.

I tend to blast through it.

So yeah, I'm not actually spinning plates as that much.

I have all my plates lined up and I'm moving them on as quickly as possible.

And when you said you edit in the morning and write in the

evening, do you find that you're more like analytical in the mornings

and more creative in the evenings?

Or is it just, as you said, there are different voices and it's one

voice tends to benefit the morning or tends to benefit the evening?

It's more that the edit has to be done because I'm being paid for that.

So I'll do that.

I'll do that in the morning.

And then if I still feel like I've got things that are going to then I'll

write right in afternoon or the evening.

But it doesn't matter if I don't, so I could be tired,

I do get tired quite quickly.

But actual writing is the easiest part of it for me.

It's just, it's like playing.

It's like doing a video game or something like that.

It's not, it's not actual work.

I'm not sat there working stuff out.

I'm just playing.

I don't plan anything.

I have a couple of ideas I want to touch on as I go through.

And sometimes I know the end, mostly I do, but it's just as surprise

to me as the reader half the time.

So how long is a typical writing session for you in one particular day?

Do you have a word count or is it just a couple of hours or is it,

cause it's play, it's just when the whim things you and just I'm going

to start now and then I'm done.

I'm going to stop now.

I write Monday to Friday, when boys are at school and my wife's working.

And I try and do a minimum of a thousand words, at least.

Sometimes it'll be more, sometimes it'd be two.

Sometimes it'd be three.

And usually that's about two or three hours at most.

And then then I'll play the video games quite a lot of the time, which is

important research as everybody knows.

If I'm editing, I tend to edit for four or five hours a day.

Cause in my head I just think of it as reading.

I'm just kind of thinking oh, does that does that read how I want it

to read and just moving stuff about.

It's a bit, even though writing is fun, I think it's more intensive

on my brain than editing is.

Editing is putting things in the right place, so that sentences

feel like the right shape.

And so that the questions my editor has are answered.

But I never know if I am actually answering them.

And I'm just, I just thought well I hope this is what she means.

But it's a different kind of head.

It's not as tiring.

Now you've made me think about it because I don't, I'm not

thinking about things person.

I'm not sure I could write and then edit.

I think I might be exhausted.

Yeah.

I also think, because you said it was like play and like a computer game

or reading, it's the release after a very analytical sort of time where

you're being very critical of things that you've done before, and then

you can just well, I'm just going to make some stuff up and have fun.

So it makes sense to do it that way.

Absolutely.

And when you finish a writing session, because again, I've spoken to many

authors and they everyone's different.

Do you like to have a stopping off point of okay, I'm writing a scene

or a selection of scenes, and then there's a pause, a stopping point.

Or do you like to leave it mid sentence, mid scene so that when you

come back the next day, it's easier to pick up where you left off because

it's in the middle of the action?

No, I like to finish at a place.

Usually it tends to work out I finish at the end of the chapter.

Or the end of a scene within a chapter, but it's usually the end of a chapter.

I usually write a chapter.

But what I'll do is as things occur to me, I put them as notes

at the bottom of the chapter.

So when I finished the chapter, I copy and paste those into a new document.

And save that document, which I've learned you have to do then.

Not the next day when you're halfway through and your computer

goes off and you lose it all.

So I do that.

So if I'm on chapter 11, I'll paste my thoughts that I've had.

They might not be for chapter 12, they might be for like chapter 50

or whatever, and that's carried forward throughout the whole book.

So as I, so things occur to me.

I don't use all of it, but I set out the next chapter for the next

morning and I come in and say, right, I've got a blank page.

I've got some ideas I can throw at it.

So that's the way I do it.

I don't find starting hard.

It's always exciting to start writing.

What we're doing, where is it going to go?

Because you said, you're not someone who really creates an outline

beforehand, you know your end point and the fun and the enjoyments creating it.

But you also said earlier and it's something I wanted to pick up on

that fantasy can be harder than crime fiction because you're actually

creating a world and possibly languages and things like that.

What is the hardest part of starting something new?

Is it creating a three-dimensional character.

Is it the world-building?

It's just coming up with a fitting name?

And which bit do you find the easiest out of those sort of things?

I don't really think of world-building and characters

and all these things as separate.

I find them very much the same thing.

I'll usually have a few ideas.

Like when I started doing The Bone Ships, I had this idea of a

world without wood and big ships.

And I had the idea of a matriarchy when I started and then I started with

the character of Joron, whose someone referred to as a drunk xenophobe when

we meet him and that's quite fair.

He's not very nice.

And then it was just seeing where it goes.

And the world, everything I learn everything about

my world on my first draft.

And then I come back and I go through again.

And by the time that first draft you have quite a solid idea but world building

to me is time I could be writing.

I'm immensely lazy.

I don't see the point in doing work that I'm not gonna use.

So my world is you see what you need to see as you go along and

then I'll work back and see how it works on the second draft.

So it makes sense.

I never think of it as hard, quite frightened of thinking it was hard

because I think how you think of things, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

The more I think, oh boy, if I can't do it, makes it more

likely that I can't do it.

So just think yeah, it'll all work out.

All right.

If it don't work out it will be fine.

And I have a few ideas of something that I think might be cool.

Like when I wrote The Bone Ships, I had the scene where we first see

one of the sea monsters, because that was quite clear in my head.

Like, yeah, I want, I want to do that.

I want big sea monsters.

And the thing I'm writing now, I had this really clear idea of

unrealistically massive forest, and I want it to sell that to the reader.

and, And there's other stuff, like often the things that excite me in a

story are things that I can't tell you.

Cause it might be things that don't happen until book like not in book

one but it happens in book two, it happens in book three, but um..

You're seeding it.

Yeah, yeah.

They're the things like, like the thing I'm doing now, the first books

the story and it's self contained, but it's almost all entirely set up

stuff that's going to come later.

And as a reader you're come and think, oh, God, I can see the arc.

I can see how he did that and what this was set for and it's

not great to be what you expect.

So yeah, but it is all it's all very subconscious what I

do, I do n't think about it.

Has that ever got you stuck at a point where you're writing a later

book in a series, but something's happened in an earlier book that the

physics or the laws and the rules of the world deny you the thing that

you want to write in say book three.

But it's impossible because of something that happened in book one.

Cause sometimes you get fans who are very pernickety and say, oh that

couldn't happen because of this.

And has that, have you had an editor pick something up in a redraft about that?

No.

No, really.

Because to me, that moment where you do a thing and think that

can't happen in this world.

That's the fun.

The fun is thinking well, how can I make it happen.

In the third Assassins book, I kind of a rough idea of where it was starting.

I knew where it was going.

I knew the end of the book, because it was the end of the

emotional arc of the whole trilogy.

And I got to a point and I wrote a sentence and the sentence disobeyed an

entire set up plot I done throughout the first two books and it just ruined it.

On one level, I thought, well, the sensible thing to do now is to delete that

and just carry on as if it never happened.

But there was a much noisier voice in the back of my head going oh, come on.

Let's just see what happens.

Let's just go with it.

And it ended up being the engine for the entire plot.

And why this would happen and the thing I liked the most about it

was that I knew that one sentence shouldn't work and I made it work.

So no, I don't.

Yeah, I'm not ever.

And if somebody says, oh you did this in this book and later on

this happened, you just, yeah magic, it's magic, magic happens.

And I'm not really into the idea of canon, especially with fantasy.

I think fantasy as, as mythic.

As it's the continuation of the stories we would tell each other

around a fire side in the woods where we didn't know what was out there.

And mythic does not have to make sense.

Yeah.

The Bone Ships are deliberately set up at the beginning to give

you this kind of feel that maybe this is a story you're being told

by someone in a place somewhere.

So I don't have to have to obey rules as it goes through.

It's a story talent got it wrong.

That's deliberate, test actually.

Unreliable narrator.

Yeah.

All my narrators are highly unreliable, especially me.

I'm the worst, but yeah, I don't hold to the ideas of

canon and also I hate answers.

Sometimes you'll see a reviewer say, oh I particularly like this.

Can't wait for him to explain why this happened.

I'll just be sat there thinking well, it's not gonna happen,

I'm not interested in that.

I'm following a thing that interests me and that's the story

I'm telling and I'm not going to explain all that sort of stuff.

That's just set dressing, enjoy it.

So you don't get tied to researching things for accuracy?

No, I'm quite lucky that I have quite a broad knowledge base to start off with.

And that's quite fun.

But I know my own personality and I'm quite fascinated by stuff.

I love history.

I tried writing a book set in Napoleonic Wars.

And all I did was read about Napoleonic Wars for three months.

I didn't take notes.

I just read stuff about Napoleon.

Honestly right, I can't do that.

It's just not how my mind works.

So in The Bone Ships, my dad was a sailor.

So I knew a reasonable amount around ships.

I've got loads of naval fiction and books on the Navy that I liked at that time.

And I thought, I'm going to use those and just try and create a feel of the sea.

That's what I'm interested in.

I'm not interested in actually being technically right.

There are other writers that can do that for you if that's

what, it's that's your thing.

And I'm a great believer that have a little bit of stuff

that people go, that's right.

Then you'll sell it.

You can sell it on that.

There was a reviewer who quite rightly in the review, pointed out

that said look, big ships to the line have a massive supply train.

That goes right back and and they do it in our history, England.

So much of our language and our landscape is to do with our sailing history.

And I knew that.

But they have no place in the story I'm telling.

It's just not about that.

It's like I could have gone out and done, not even research,

just putting the knowledge that I have about that in these books.

And I'd have bored 90% of my readers silly, with this stuff that's personally

fascinating to me, but not them.

So I think research is often over-rated.

And then wing the rest of it.

Yeah, I think we're all vessels born out of our experiences and our

influences and things that inspire us.

And I think there's definitely a strong argument in creative writing and

speculative fiction that you just distill what you've learned and what you've read

and what inspires you uh, to create.

cause everything we write is a remix of everything that's gone before.

I think my aim is to create something believable, not to make something real.

And they're very different, I'm not interested in realism,

interested in selling you something that you can buy into.

And for anything you write, there is a degree of people who will know a lot

about something, like swordfighting.

I know enough about sword fighting to get away with it for most people.

But I have friends who really know about sword fighting and my

sword fights they'd just be like, piss off RJ, you can't do that.

But that's because they know, and that's that thing.

And you can't write for them.

You can't write for those people.

Well, you can, but I'm not interested in it.

Because it annoys them, it's funny.

Especially the friends of mine, it's even funnier.

But yeah, you're kind of, you're writing to sell it to as many people as possible.

Not selling in a physically take your money way.

Sell in a, buy into my world and that's my joy.

Because God knows if you know about sailing ships, if it's your

thing, don't read The Bone Ships.

(laughs)

I've got a friend, who's a scuba diver and a sailor.

And I sent it to him and he sent me back the best bit of criticism I've ever had.

And he just said, RJ this is clearly the best thing you've written yet.

Beautiful engrossing world and I loved it, but you know fuck all about boats.

And I love that.

I'm just yeah.

Yeah.

But it sold it to him.

He said, I know it's wrong, but I'm in it.

Yeah.

I think it's compelling characters and the adventures that they go on.

And you will follow a compelling character anywhere in any world that doesn't make

sense, Alice in Wonderland for example, but it's making well, she's not compelling

character actually, she's very reactive.

That's a terrible example.

But but having,

The world is the character in Alice In Wonderland.

It doesn't have to follow rules.

It's brilliant.

Yeah, if you make it compelling enough, then people will have that

intrigue and will forgive a lot because they want the answers to

the questions that you're posing.

Do you find then that when you've got an end in mind and stuff like

that, that you're asking yourself questions that you want to answer is

that more your approach to plotting?

Or is it just a ripping yarn?

And it's just, this is a really cool plot that I'd like to see panned out.

I don't even think it's that conscious with me.

I think I just start and then I write a book and then at the

end I find out what it's about.

Oh, I was writing about that.

Okay.

There were a couple of things that, that I try and keep in mind.

I've got a friend who's a screenwriter.

And he told me the greatest thing about characters is that if you know what they

want and what they need, and that those two things working against each other.

You have a character set up then that works for most of my characters,

like Jaron in The Bone Ships.

He thinks he wants to be a brilliant naval commander.

Actually, what he wants is a friend and to fit in somewhere.

And he never really realizes that, but that's his story going through.

But mostly it's very exploratory.

Feel that word's panster, which is an ugly word, it's just not nice.

Exploratory.

That's a good line.

Yes.

Well actually, it's the...

This won't make sense for any of our listeners now because

that's far in the future.

But the episode that just was released yesterday the author describes himself

as a pantser and I was just like, you need to explain that to the audience,

because that's very much an industry term.

Um, It's writing by the seat of your pants.

But yeah, it's, it is, I don't like it either, which is like, you're

describing it, you're explaining what you've just said, but yeah,

exploratory we'll use that.

I don't know if I feel like I'm..

Right, I've got friends that plan and plan a detailed story out.

And they're sitting there and they might write like 30 or 40,000 words plan.

But all I do is I do that as a first draft of my book.

It's the same thing.

It's just calling it different bits of the process, but it's the same process.

I'm doing a plan.

It's just most of it the reader will get to read.

Hopefully, fingers crossed.

And how long does a first draft usually take you?

Would you say?

Well, there's a thing.

Um, Varied amount of time.

I wrote the cosy crime book which we've got edits for, I wrote the first

draft of that in two and a half weeks.

So 75,000 word book.

And it was just really easy, but as a lot of work to do on it.

So that, that tells you something.

Age of assassins, my first fantasy novel, I wrote in six weeks.

Okay.

But that was steroid assisted cause, cause I was quite poorly at the time and

I had a course of steroids and that was brilliant for writing, but look a bit like

a moon faced weirdo, but you write a lot.

And then each book, each of the fantasy book has got longer and longer since.

I think it took me 11 months to write The Bone Ships Wake, which

is the third Bone Ships book.

And it took me about 10 months to write the second one.

I think the second one was the first time I really didn't enjoy writing a book.

It was hard.

Just because sometimes you have a crisis of confidence, I think in the

middle of writing that book coincided with the first book coming out.

And it's a really, I'm not stressing or sort of person who gets help about stuff.

It's not in my nature, but even though it's subconscious, when a book is

coming up to release and you don't know what people are going to be thinking,

it's there in the back of your head.

And I think I was halfway through this book thinking, "have I

just written something terrible?

Oh, no."

and that kind of ground to a halt.

Crime books, I can do a 70,000 word novel that's reasonably good in three months.

The first Mal and Jackie book took three months.

The second one took three months.

70, yeah, 70,000 words in three months isn't unrealistic for me.

Can do that.

I don't have to do a real job though.

I think that's important that people understand that.

This is all I do.

And I think one of the most useful, because people always after advice

and I'm not really good at advice, because I think we're all very unique

people that need to figure out.

But something I do that I think is useful for me, is I give

myself permission to be rubbish.

I just write, I'm going to write a book and it's going to be awful.

Yeah.

And that's fine because once you've finished it, you can make it good.

It's much easier to make something awful good than it is to write

something really good off the bat.

The works in the edits for me.

Write a book reasonably quickly, then edit better.

Yeah.

How long is it?

Do the edits vary as well?

Have they taken longer as you've written more books or are they getting

shorter as you get longer first drafts?

Tend to write quite closely to what you get in the end, reasonably.

The next fantasy book, I think we making some bigger changes.

I wrote it in first person.

And then my editor said, yeah, are you sure that it's the right point of view?

And there'd been something annoying me about it, I don't know what it was.

And as soon as she said that, I just thought, yeah, you're right.

That's why I missed it.

It's not a first person book.

I write the first person when I'm tired.

Yeah, if I'm tired and writing then what I'm writing will slip into

first person as it goes through.

And I just thought, yeah, cause it's not worked for me.

It's easy.

It's easiest form for me, it flows out of me when I'm doing first person.

And I was like, yeah, I was slacking, this book, slacking

and writing in first person.

And by changing it to third, it allows me to do a lot of stuff

that I thought about and didn't do.

So this edit will take longer cause I'm doing that.

But it's usually is about two and a half months for 150,000 word book.

Maybe a month, two weeks for 70,000 words.

But depends on how much work there is to do, really.

Can be quite quick or can be quite slow.

Changeable like the weather.

Talk about changeable, I was going to ask consistency with the next one.

With your editor, do you have the same editor for all your books or do

you have a one for a certain trilogy?

How have they changed over time?

No, I have Jenny Hills at Orbit.

Who does all my fantasy stuff and I'm very much a creature of habit.

No, I'm not.

That's a lie.

I'm a creature of chaos.

You're changeable like the weather, RJ.

You just said it (laughs).

But when it comes to working with people, I try to only work with people

I will be friends with in real life.

It's like, my agent.

The minute I spoke to him, I just thought, yeah.

Yeah, I want to be your client.

And we get on, he makes me laugh.

And the reason I like being with his agency is all the people he employs.

I also get on with and think are funny.

I think you've got good ethic.

And orbit are very similar to that.

I get along with them all like them all, Jenny's..

Jenny knows what I'm trying to do.

And she always makes my books more me and I trust her.

And if she left orbit to go somewhere else, I would probably want to follow.

Because she's my editor and I like having her as my editor.

And other editors probably great but I've not worked with them.

So I don't know.

And then my crime ones I have Nicole, that's a different type of editing.

They tend to be quite, because it's an indie publisher, so it's

not quite as in-depth maybe.

Crime books are, I said easier and easier is not the right word..

It's easier that you don't have to keep this whole world in your

head and make loads of notes about what things are called, which

infuriates me because I never do it.

And then I go, what was that thing called?

There's big gaps in my first drafts.

Tree thing, man, but um, a crime book you don't have to do that.

Cause you know what everything's called and you can say car, and

people know what a car looks like.

It's a block of flats, people know what it looks like.

But a fantasy plot is quite a sort of spacey, airy thing.

A lot has to happen and cause I'll tootle along and what is considered pacey in

fantasy isn't maybe in other genres.

But a crime plot is like clockwork and has to all clock in

together, not clocking together.

And that's the hard work bit, it's making it all, making sure that person

that's there in chapter one is the right place and they're doing the right thing.

With the Mal and Jackie books, it just seems to work in my head.

Other stuff I've done, it hasn't, like the cosy crime one, I have to go

back to that and go through it again.

But the Mal and Jackie, so there's not actually much editing done on those.

It's more copy edits.

And my, my agent does edits too and stuff that's going out unseen.

Like stuff that goes to Orbit's a bit different because I'm their author, and

there's an expectation they're going to pick it up because I'm doing all right.

But other stuff that goes out on spec it, Ed will edit it.

Ed Wilson, my agent.

And he's probably actually the hardest editor that I'll deal with.

Because he will just write stuff like, stop being an idiot.

Or this writing's awful.

You can do better.

Thanks Ed.

Building my confidence up, but I can hear his voice, he makes me laugh.

So yeah, but I like editing.

I like being challenged.

Think, I think that's when often the most interesting stuff will come out, because

your editor will say you can't do this.

And I don't hear that.

I hear, find a way to do this thing that you clearly want to do.

So I don't take a lot of stuff out, but I'll change how things work.

And Jenny's generally right.

The only time I've ever gone against her advice is um, in The Bone Ships,

I think there is a three, four pages of how to load your weapon.

And she was just like, This is too much.

It's too much detail.

I was like, no Jenny.

You can't write a naval book without an overly complicated

sequence where you load the cannons.

It's just not, it's just not a naval book otherwise.

You have to have that.

Yeah.

It's the rules, Jenny.

And she's like oh, okay.

You can have that, but you're taking this bit out later on.

I'm like, oh okay, you can have that.

So for you, what makes a good editor?

What is it about an editor that they bring to your writing that

you don't do automatically?

A good editor makes you more you.

Yeah, that's what they do.

They understand what you're doing and they improve it.

I'm a terrible editor.

Occasionally people contact me and say, would you have a look at my thing?

I always say no, because I'm a monster.

I'm not an editor, I'm a writer.

And if you send me something you'd written and can you have a look through this?

What I would do was try and rewrite that thing as though I'd done it.

And I have very particular interests.

You have 5,000 word short story.

Lovely.

But you mentioned a talking cat on page two, and I think

it should be about that cat.

Just get rid of the rest of it.

Yeah.

I want to know about the cat.

Tell me all about the cat.

And a good editor takes your thing and says this is what

they're trying to do with it.

With the final Bone Ships book, can't remember what it was.

It was two things that Jenny mentioned to me, one the beginning one at the end.

And they look like separate threads in the stories.

And I suddenly realized that actually, when she said it, that they weren't.

They were connected and they should be connected and I had not done that.

And it was just like somebody grabbed the whole book and just

twisted the ends and tightened it.

And that's what makes it good.

That she understands technically how things work, which I have no idea.

I have to Google what adjectives are.

I didn't go to school, I was going to be a rock star.

And that's what makes her good.

She knows it, and she tries to make it more me.

She's not, she's

Has that developed over time or was it like the first feedback she gave you

was like, oh my God, she understands me.

I'm sticking with this person.

That was straight away?

It's straight away.

It's the first comments came back with for Age of Assassins.

Yeah, you get it.

You get what I'm trying to do with this.

You understand and you're making it better.

That's what you're doing.

And it's been that way all along and I like her, hang

around with them if I wasn't.

And she just really good and she she's made everything I do better.

I'm quite sure you probably wouldn't have heard of me if

I'd had the different editor.

If I'd self-published them, you definitely wouldn't have done.

The assassin book, there is a big battle at the end of it.

And originally that wasn't there.

Because I wasn't interested in, I was interested in telling you who

done it, so it just finished with the crime, but that's who did it.

And Jenny was like, you are aware there's a war going on?

Well yeah, but I'm not interested in this.

She went, well your readers will be interested in that,

so you have to tell them.

Oh, okay then.

People hitting each other with swords, if I have to.

(laughs)

I think a lot of times with a lot of how-to writing guides and masterclasses

and all those things, it's very hard to define what makes a good editor.

And a lot of people just say, get an editor, get a professional editor.

You know, you will not be able to make your book as good as it can be without

it, but I think what you've said there is the most concise, brilliant, way.

Is that they make yourself better.

They make a better version of you and it's people who are maybe listening

to this and trying to get an editor.

If the person's coming back with what seems like good advice, but

they don't seem to understand you.

That's probably not going to be a lifelong working relationship.

I don't think it should, it should ever feel destructive what

you're getting from an editor.

And never does from Jenny.

Even when it, when it's let's take this out.

In Blood of Assassins, there was a, I tell this story a lot, if people

have listened to other podcasts with me in just skip the next minute.

There was originally an epilogue on the front of it.

No, not an epilogue prologue.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a difficult, I have problems.

C'mon, you've told the story before.

You can tell it again.

Yes.

Just get it right.

And this prologue, this lovely motif of an arrow in flight that I carried

through the entire text and it was attached to a very emotional moment

where somebody doing something.

And Jenny read that prologue.

And she went, this production be here, it's rubbish.

You've made a mistake.

People will hate the main character when you've sold them on liking

him and he does something awful.

And I wrote a five page email explaining why, and actually it should be there.

And what it did and why it was there and I think it should be there and why it

was there and I got to the end of this email and thought, I know she's right.

All my reasons are wrong.

That's nothing.

And it doesn't make us like you.

Okay.

So that went on and and that's what I like about her.

She's not frightened of telling me when I'm completely wrong.

She will say, this is bad.

Take it out.

Okay.

So it sounds like you've got like a really strong team uh, with you,

with Jenny and with Ed, your agent.

Do you have any beta readers before it gets to them?

Cause I know some authors have either peers or just close friends

that they have for initial feedback or is that just straight to Jenny?

I do have beta readers that read most of my stuff.

They don't always read it before Jenny.

Just because sometimes I don't finish it until the day it's meant to get to Jenny.

A lot of us do that.

But I have three and they've read my stuff for a long time.

Since before I was published.

And I like that cause they know me.

I know what they think and I know how they think.

And I know a lot of the stuff, they say I ignore.

ignore.

They know that.

Because I know what fascinates them and they're very particular

readers and I like that.

They pick me up on stuff.

And one of them my friend, Matt.

I would go and play badminton with and he would let me talk

stories at him, which brilliant.

And when we're playing, I just sort of come to the net and go, and then

what happens is and I'd talk at him and he'd sort of talk back to me.

And I think that was a really good way of me working out stories.

In fact, in The Bone Ships, there's a creature called a gullaime, which is

like an avian wizard that can control the wind, very useful to sailing ships.

And that's entirely Matt, because I'd been explaining to him how

this was a world where there are only birds, there's no mammals.

Yeah.

And there's also these wizards that can control the wind.

And we were coming out of badminton and he said, I love the idea of the

bird wizards that control the wind.

And I was like, no Matt, that is not what I said.

Birds and wizards that control the wind.

But by the time I come home, I had this amazing idea for the these bird wizards.

Yeah.

And I when I told him about them, he really liked it.

So that's where they came from.

And that's why the third book's dedicated to him.

Yeah.

He gave me the idea and then..

Having people to bounce stuff off is really useful.

Writers groups are really useful and I'm not sold on the use of going to a

learning to write thing in and of itself.

But the fact that you go to them and you meet other people doing the same thing.

I think that's immensely useful.

I think being around people who do it is actually more useful

than going and listening to someone telling you how to do it.

Which I'm never sure you can get that much out.

I know when it started, I don't think they were really very helpful talks.

I did a couple of just before got published and there were quite

helpful, just in letting me hear somebody talk about how they're write.

And being able to think yeah, I'm doing that, but I'm doing it this way.

And that I think when you start off, it's really about trying lots of

different ways, see which works for you.

And until you finally get it into your head, that no one knows what the doing.

You can make some terrible mistakes.

That's the exact purpose of this podcast.

Is that I'm not an aspiring writer, but I know many.

And it's just, yeah, having an outlet where you can have professional authors

all say, yeah, we have no idea what we're doing, but we all have no idea

what we're doing in different ways.

And everything you do is just tricks to get you to sit in front

of a computer and type stories.

Yeah.

It's just about some, someone was saying to me that they

do masses of world-building.

And someone else would say, RJ doesn't think you need to do that.

And that's not what I say, I don't think I need to do that at all.

But if doing that is what gives you the confidence to sit down and

think right, I can write a book now, then that's what you need to do.

And I'm an idiot, I just sit down and write a book.

It is probably not the best way of doing it.

Especially not when you get to the end and realize that you've not

made notes for all these things you have to remember for two more books.

Yeah.

Well, You've still got the book.

So you still got that note.

um.

Yeah, yeah, but that means reading it again, and by the time it

goes out, you're really sick of it.

Yeah.

But it's just, my hope with this podcast is that because

everyone's different, someone will listen to more than one episode.

You listened to a few and disagree with some, and then they'll find someone

who goes, oh, they write like I do.

Or they think that I do.

And the more people I interview, the more the podcast has all these variable

styles that hopefully long-term listeners will find someone that resonates.

That's my dream.

I do a thing called Writeopolis with two other writers called Kit

Power, who's a horror writer and Scott K Andrews, whose like like science fiction.

He writes TV related books and things like that.

One of the things we've discovered, cause we talk to writers and we've

talked to people around and in the industry and people write different

things like TV and stuff like that.

Is it's about finding what gives you the joy in doing it.

And if you're sitting down and just enjoying doing it,

you're never wasting it.

It doesn't matter if it's published or not.

Cause you might be six months away from publishing.

You might be five years away from publishing, but if you're

enjoying it you're learning.

And the enjoyment of it will teach you that you enjoy doing that thing.

So you'll do that thing more.

And that's how we're trying to think of everything.

I wish I could tell myself, I enjoy jogging.

That didn't stick, that didn't even stick a little bit.

Um, one thing I do want to jump to, cause you did say earlier when

you were writing the second Bone Ships book that there's some anxiety

because the launch of the first one.

Have you ever had like severe imposter syndrome where it's just, I can't write.

Someone's going to find that actually, I'm just a pile of shit and I'm

never going to get published again.

And if so, how did you deal with that?

I think some level of imposter syndrome is constant and I'm

suspicious of people who would just say yes, I'm fantastic.

I can do that.

Because it took me a long time to realize that the more sure

someone is they're right, the more likely it is they're an idiot.

Because it's the people that go, well I'm not really sure but it could be this.

They're still questioning everything.

And people who question things are learning and doing interesting stuff.

People who are sure, they've stopped.

So it's always there.

It's a very difficult thing to answer because I'm not an anxious

person or a stressy person.

But being a writer is a weird career because you're, you are

always aware it could just stop.

The next book could come out and no one might buy it.

In which case it will stop.

You will have to, well, it won't stop you, you'll have to reinvent yourself

and come under another name and come back and do something different.

But I also, I think that imposter syndrome drives me.

I've said before that I think there's within me there is a much better

writer than me, and he's always just over the hill and I'm chasing him.

And I'm always chasing him and trying to catch him and write better.

And that's why I think you can tell at quite an early stage

if you cut out for it or not.

If you get comments, is your reaction, oh my God, I'm destroyed?

Or is your reaction, well no, I'm going to show you?

Because that's always my reaction.

I never hear no, I hear not yet.

Right.

It's a fine line being a writer.

It's like a tight rope between the massive arrogance of standing up and going now,

I'm not only good at telling stories.

I'm good enough that you should pay me money for it.

That's how good I am.

And you need to believe that.

Yeah.

Because especially when you start, no one else is gonna.

And also, at the same time thinking I do however need some

help and maybe I'm rubbish.

And because those two bits fighting allow you to do it.

Because if you won't take any, if you won't take any editorial advice

there's a number of authors you can check out, who've stopped taking

editorial advice and you could tell.

You read the books and they become self-indulgent or just Because it's a

necessary part of it for 90% of us, 95%.

Nearly all of us.

To have that sort of pushback on what you do.

I never feel like I know what I'm doing.

I always think the book I've delivered to my editor is the

worst thing I've ever written.

Every single time.

Because I did it with, I handed in my newest book and said to Jenny

said, this is a terrible book.

You can hate it, it's not very good.

And she turned around and said, you do know you said that for every

single one of The Bone Ships books.

And I was oh, did I?

I thought they were quite good when I handed in.

And she said, no you said they were awful.

Cause you self edit in your mind, in my mind, I handed in the Bone Ships, and

I was like, Bone Ships, it's brilliant.

They're going to love it.

But actually I went, It's a bit long.

Not much happens for the first half of the book.

It's just people talking.

It might be terrible.

So yeah, I'm very aware that there's a really sure of themselves person inside

me, and there's is also a really, oh my God it's rubbish, person at the same time.

Well, I think you mentioned earlier, a great bit of advice, which is that

you give yourself permission to be shit.

And I think that is definitely when writing first drafts, a lot

of people get anxiety paralysis.

Where they can't think of the best way of phrasing it, so they

don't write anything at all.

And it's just write what you can in the way that you can

and worry about revision later.

It can always be better.

Don't worry about it being shit.

I've quite often not found the voice of the book until I finished it.

The stuff that handed into Jenny and then went straight into the second book

and I wrote 20,000 word or something.

I always overestimate what I've written.

Then I go back to it like three months later and find out I've written 5,000

words and I'm really disappointed.

I thought I had a lot less work.

But it was only writing those bits in the second book that I suddenly

realized something that really needed to be in the first book.

So I'm quite glad publishing is slow.

But don't expect, you don't know what that thing is going

to be until, till it is a thing.

Yeah.

And then when it is a thing, you can make a better thing.

And do you feel that you've progressed as an author?

Do you feel that with all these books that have been published and have sold

quite well, that you've grown as a writer, have you consciously learnt

things from each book that you've written?

No.

That's not what you're expecting was it?

I can tell from your face.

You were not expecting that.

No.

I've not learned anything, consciously.

I've undoubtedly learned a lot unconsciously.

And the reviews are getting better.

There's some critical reviews are getting better for each book as they

go along, so I'm doing stuff but I never think about the process.

I just do it.

Yeah.

I don't ever put myself in a position where I'm thinking, wow.

I'll tell you something I do do.

Is that there's things that I think I'm not going to do.

Like second person, I just bounce straight off and decide I'm

never gonna do, don't like it.

But there is second person writing in the book that I've just written.

And also, I, I don't particularly get multi-point of view books.

I like one, one point of view, but the next thing I do is going to be

like three or four points of view.

I think there's something in the back of my head that just

goes, yeah, push yourself.

Just this thing you don't think you like, see if you can make yourself like it.

Just have a go and see.

I think I am always wanting to try new things.

I'm very conscious of a wish to be a better writer than I am.

Pursuing the better writer over the hill.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wish he'd stopped running.

He clearly, jogging stuck with him and it didn't with me.

Like, I'm here going, please slow down.

Please slow down a bit.

But I want to be better, but I don't, I'm not the sort of person

that can read a book about how to write and then take that away.

I have to do it.

And fail spectacularly.

That starts how I learn.

I learn by doing, not by listening to other people or

watching videos or any of that.

It doesn't sit in my head at all.

I just forget it.

And so is there anything that you would love to achieve in the future with

your, you said there that multi points of view is something that you've veered

away from, but is there anything else or maybe a different genre perhaps,

or is that just a stylistic thing?

Maybe a different medium like a screenplay or a comic book or

something like that, that you would really aspire to do in the future?

I don't know, cause I just, I'm a very live in the now person.

This is what I'm doing at this moment.

I'm excited by it.

I am talking with a friend about doing a screenplay of the Mal and Jackie books.

Seeing what we can get, see if we can get any interest in that.

Just cause that I like TV crime.

I'd like to see that.

But it's all, you're aware of how very unrealistic it is to expect to

get something of yours on television.

It's just not going to happen.

My fantasy is never going to be on television.

I was talking to my agent about it and just went, I see you've

sold quite a lot of TV rights.

Then they went, yeah, they don't write unfilmable books, RJ.

You should think about that.

Hmm.

Big ships too expensive.

But I can't, I'd like to write a science fiction novel

because I like science fiction.

And I've written one.

My first book that was good enough to sell, but didn't quite

was a sense of fiction novel.

And I went back to it and it wasn't, I'm glad it didn't sell.

Didn't like it.

And I'd like to write more crime.

Just like to write really.

I remember I used to play in bands and I realized that I was a terrible

musician but I really enjoyed doing it.

And eventually I was in a band that were just so far out

stripping my meager abilities I just said, look, I'm stopping now.

This isn't me.

And I thought, what can I do?

What do I love?

And I had a book in my pocket.

I thought well I love books.

I've always loved books.

So I decided that I was going to be a writer.

I knew from that moment, the absolute astronomical odds of becoming a

writer and how really unlikely it was.

Cause I was, I wasn't gonna be a self published writer.

I was going to be a writer signed to a big publisher.

That was what I was going to do.

And that was what I decided straight off, not there's anything

wrong with self publishing.

I just know I'd be really bad at it because I'm not thorough.

You have to be really thorough.

So I, and also, as I mentioned, didn't exactly go to school cause I was

going to be a rock star, obviously.

Didn't need to go to school.

That, that was a miscalculation on my part.

And so I wrote, and I read a lot and I kept writing and reading a

lot and writing and reading a lot.

And it took me a long time, 10, 12 years.

But eventually I ended up with a book signed to a big publisher and I've

never not been aware of how astoundingly unlikely it is to be in that position.

I've already won.

There isn't a place for me to go that makes it bad than it already is

because the guy who barely went to school is somehow published writer.

Award-winning published writer.

Award-winning published writer.

And they called The Bone Ships literary fantasy.

Yes.

Yes.

Literature, don't you know?

I'm sure actual literature has been laughing its socks off, but but yeah,

I'm never not aware of how amazing it is and that I was really ill and that

kind of knocked me out for five years.

I had to start again.

So it's just, everything is just honey.

When the first book came out, it just, it changed my life entirely.

And I just said to my wife, it doesn't matter if this is the only

book I've published, it happened.

We just had the most amazing year of our life, but it just

continuing and I'm amazed.

That's great.

My life is full of joy.

Just That's all it is.

Well, I was going to say that is a wonderful place to wrap it

up of just live in the moment.

Allow yourself to be shit.

Surround yourself with good people.

And it can always be better.

And chase your future self over the hill.

And Vimto, we've covered it all.

Yeah, we have.

RJ.

It's been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you very much.

It's been lovely.

Thanks Tom.

And that was the real writing process of RJ Barker.

He's a lovely man and he should read more of his books.

You can tell he's quite proud of The Bone Ships, but you should pick up a copy of A

Numbers Game under his pen name, RJ Dark.

It's a solid thriller and the sequel is now available for Kindle download.

I appreciate not everyone likes Amazon, but if you have Kindle unlimited, you can

get both Mal and Jackie books for free.

So deal with that information.

However you see fit.

And if you want more of his general random musings, he's very active on

Twitter and producing some good stuff.

So worth follow.

Uh, I'm not going to try and pronounce his Twitter handle though.

It doesn't have enough vowles.

I'm sure it's an in-joke reference or something.

It will be in the show notes, however.

Also in the show notes is a link to my Kofi page.

If you'd like to support the show by paying £1 or more, that would be lovely.

There's a bunch of extra bonus content coming very, very soon.

And you get episodes like this one nice and early.

And, uh, that's it.

Next week's guest is a pretty big one.

So keep an eye out for that.

Uh, so until then, Thanks for listening.

And may you always keep writing, until the world ends.