Adrian FaulknerFantasy Author

So where I’m moving too I can probably only fit in one bookcase. That means that a lot of my books need to go into storage. I’ve semi been planning for this eventuality and have been an ebook convert for years (an ebook library doesn’t take up any space!)

But this gives me a major dilemma. There’s something about a bookcase. I think it says a lot about the person. I always view people without bookcases with caution. But I’m unsure as to what books I should put in my new solitary one.

For example should I put my favourite books on the shelves as a statement of who I am? Should the books on display be purely ornamental? It’s not like I’m planning to do daily tours. Or instead, should I forego the Lynch, the Abercrombie and even the Pratchett for books that have been sitting there for years unread, keeping in mind that I converted to ebooks more than several years back and the physical unread books are likely to stay that?

And if the former, do I need to fill the entire bookcase when I have movies and video games that are also looking for space?

Enquiring minds want to know!

Starting a new day job is a bit disruptive. It’s even more so when, you’re brought on board ahead of a service launch. It’s meant that my days have been varied and a bit all over the place all whilst trying to learn the role I’ll be playing once the service launches. This week things are starting to settle down a little and there’s the beginnings of a routine appearing.

I’m glad. The new day job’s disruption has been felt wider than just 9 to 5 and both my reading and writing have suffered because of this. I accepted this, knowing it to only be temporary. It’s given me time to take a step back and reflect on my writing.

I have another major disruption looming when I move in the next couple of weeks. I really need to start packing and expect that when I do, it’s going to swallow a lot of my time.

But still, there’s a part of me that wants to start reintroducing a bit of structure, try and reclaim a little reading and writing time. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be moved and settled into my job, but I don’t really want to leave it until then.

After telling my new boss I rarely get ill, what happens? Yes, you got it, I come down with the worst flu I’ve had in years. Luckily, it was a weekend. I’ve spent the best part of the weekend in bed, which is unusual for me, even when ill.

There are many upsides to having an overactive immune system but the downside is that when things do hit, they hit like a truck. There’s often this accelerated illness and healing curve that feels three times more brutal than it did when I was a child. The cold part (which is only now really starting to materialise) is fairly gentle but I’ve spent most of the weekend with a temperature and my brain feeling like it’s about to explode out my head like a Cadbury’s Crème Egg advert.

China Mieville is 11 days older than me. 11 days more in which he’s managed to write numerous successful novels, win loads of awards and become the poster boy of genre fiction. Even if I didn’t sleep in the next two weeks I’d never be able to beat that. If there was a scorecard labelled “Genre writer career”, he’d be miles ahead of me on points.

It’s very easy, as a writer, to look at the careers of others and compare. And it’s very easy for that green-eyed monster to raise its head.

I think if you never compare your career to another you’d be lieing. It’s part of human nature. No matter who you are, there are always other writers who have done more, achieved more, written greater stories. The trick is to realise that envy is one thing, jealousy is another.

Normally, I’m a placid, tolerant kind of person. I think it’s fair to say that I am a nice person. However, yesterday I went Xmas food shopping and it brought out some inner rage.

I am practicising to become a grumpy old man – I believe after years of being nice, I have earned this right – and so, for your amusement, I present, in no particular order, the top ten things that nearly prompted a spat of shoppercide (mancepsicide? My Latin is limited to Google translate)

I consider myself an atheist but I have real problems with it.

I’m a pluralist. Belief is a personal thing and as such, each must choose their own way. It’s a shame that so many atheists feel the need to attack religion, to the extent that I don’t like to call myself an atheist, because I’m not like that.

I think it’s as fair to have buses plastered with “there is no God” as much as I think it’s OK to have one plastered with a quote from Proverbs. I also think those that calling the Catholic Church into question over child abuse is the right to do so. Those that deny people medical treatment in favour of divine intervention are wrong and should be labelled as such. But those that throw “there is no God” in people’s faces equally annoy me.

I’ve finally got round to doing a number of site updates. I’ve changed webhosts and the blog has moved from using Drupal to WordPress. This means it looks a little different, but all the old content has been migrated.

You most likely don’t need to know this, but I need to give some of the additional features a test

2010 was a limbo year for me as a writer, but an important one.

With the acceptance of ‘Jetsam’ to New Horizons magazine, I started the year on a high. Having someone pick up that story was immensely important to me; some personal validation that this whole fiction malarkey wasn’t some fool’s errand and that I could actually do it.

But I came to accept that I am not naturally a short story writer and that my strength lay in novel fiction. Or at least this is what I believe given that my novels seem so much ‘more’ than my short fiction. This is where I’ve put the effort in 2010 and I’ve had to remind myself as I’ve watched others enjoy short story success. It’s so easy to get jealous of others when you have no yardstick by which to measure your own progress.

Success also came in the form of my co-written (author 5 of 7, or 6 of 7 or whatever it is) non-fiction book getting in the British Fantasy Awards long list. It was through this that I found that I can’t handle success very well, and I somehow ended up getting really depressed about the accolade until my friend Sam kindly gave me a virtual slap. I think if I should ever be so lucky as to get an accolade again, I’ll just take myself off for a day and get over it.

The big work of 2010 has been the novel and as frustrating as it is be so behind where I wanted to be, it hasn’t been for lack of effort.

July saw the awful realisation that what I thought was one novel was actually two. This was both exciting and frustrating. I could almost hear my friends’ sighs as I announced the book was almost finished only for me to announce I needed to rewrite.

“Why do you need to keep rewriting? Are you going to be one of these people who tinkers with their novel until their death?”

I don’t think so. I know in my head the standard I need this novel to be.

But a rewrite was what was needed and I still don’t regret it. Book 1 now feels like a solid book; a really solid book. People who have read excerpts have been universally positive, although I’ve not used it as an excuse to rest on my laurels. Instead it’s spurred me on more.

September saw the completion of the “first draft” of the revised book, although the term “first draft” is a little misleading. Many parts of this book are well over twenty drafts. It felt like a major victory and for the first time it felt approaching the book I wanted it to be.

The autumn saw all manners of disruption in my personal life as the house seemed to fall apart around me. This really affected my writing and any semblance of a plan or self-imposed deadline for editing the novel went out the window.

Editing has been a laboriously slow process, partly because I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing and because I’ve worked really hard at it. There’s also a little fear here as well. I’ve yet to find anything even approaching this book on shelves (I mean, there are elements that are very familiar, but it doesn’t sit nicely in any one sub-genre). There may be very good reason for not seeing books like this on shelves, but I find myself feeling guilty that this novel could be special (and secretly excited, because every time I go back to work on it I find the semblance of a novel I really love). But whether it’s good or not I don’t want people saying that the prose let it down. Hence more hard work.

My lack of confidence in my work has let me down a lot I think. For me, the divide between over-confidence and lack of confidence is razor thin. I’ve yet to find the right balance. I think I perhaps need a year being over-confident, even if that makes me a tiny bit of an ass.
When I did the old website, I used to get in from work at 6pm and work pretty much solidly until Midnight. That slacked off a bit in the later years but when I gave up the site in order to make time to write. However, I’ve felt guilty that I wasn’t writing 6 hours a night. It’s taken some time to realise it’s OK to only write for an hour or two, but I think I got there this year. In a bizarre way, I think it’s helped improve my productivity (although I still subscribe to the idea that you should find new hobbies through which to procrastinate).

However, I think the most important thing about 2010 was twitter or the friends I gained from it. I’m not sure exactly how it all happened either, it just materialised. Whereas I’ve had a miserable time at conventions being Billy No-mates, Eastercon proved a completely different experience. With Adam, Amanda, Jason, Cara, Mark, Sam, Liz, Mark, James and a load of others (probably including some important ones) we seemed to have a bit of a posse going on. Yes the drinks were expensive in the pros bar, but I had such a great time. So much so that Fantasycon was a completely different experience to previous years. I also attended two Alt.Fiction events and enjoyed them both.

I know some will go on about how networking is important, but for me it’s about having like-minded friends. They have no idea just how much they have helped me keep my sanity this year.

So onto 2011.

The pessimist in me says that if 2010 was the year of limbo, then 2011 will be the year of rejection. But that’s just me being pessimistic. In reality I think it’ll be a year of hard work and waiting. The novel is good now, but I believe it can be great. However, that’s only gonna happen with a bucket-tonne of editing. That’ll take time, but I hope that by the summer I’ll be submitting to agents.

I won’t know what writing I will do in 2011 as a lot depends to the initial reception to Book 1 (A New Year’s resolution has to be to find the darned book a name). If people like it, I’ll start on book 2, if they hate it I might do something different.

This will be the first year where I don’t have “write THE book” as one of my resolutions (admittedly over the years ‘THE book’ has applied to different novels) so I guess that’s progress. However, I think even if 2011 goes amazingly well, it’ll still be another limbo year. The trick is to just keep plodding on, word by word.

I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait

You know how it is. When it comes to extended family, Xmas can be very expensive. If you have a lot of uncles and aunts, cousins with kids, and the like, you get to the stage where pure economics means you either agree to forsake buying gifts for each other or you just buy a token gift.

It’s the latter my family go for. My parents and brother get decent gifts, but all those aunts and uncles usually end up with a bottle of wine, a box of chocolates or a funny book. Nice, but it’s hard to really wow people with a small budget.

It was my mother and my aunt who came up with the idea last year as they were getting into arts and crafts, that we should do things differently this year, and *make* things for each other. It didn’t matter how badly things turned out, or what people did. What was important was that people just had a go.

And so for the last year, our entire family has taken up new secret hobbies in order to learn or perfect the skills needed to create their gifts. I’ve seen my mother thoroughly enjoy her knitting project, where she made a cushion and knitted a garden onto one side of it, complete with 3D carrots, strawberrys, a hedgehog and even chickens. She’s been so entertained and involved in it, come September I had to remind her that she also needed to make gifts for other people.

So today, we all met up at my aunt’s and exchanged gifts in a second Christmas. And you know what? It was great, hearing people generally whoop and be thrilled to bits by everyone’s endeavours.

My brother made a jar of chocolates for people, some of which did not last the afternoon. My aunt positively shrieked with pleasure at the cushion my mother made for her. I loved the little stocking my Grandmother knitted for me, stuffed with little gifts she’d bought. My cousin and her son baked biscuits for everyone. My aunt made button boxes for her two sisters (something my mother had only said the day before that she wanted).

For my part, I’m not the greatest when it comes to physical skills. I’m the type of person who glues their fingers together. So I decided that what I would do is gather up those short stories that are fairly decent but are never going to sell, and produce a one-off Print-On-Demand Anthology for them. To make it special, I designed different covers featuring the person whose gift it was, along with an in-joke style title. Seven absolutely unique anthologies, only one of each cover in existence in the world.

I’m pleased they went down a storm. My aunt even asked me to sign hers (so she can flog it if I ever get famous she informs me). But in truth, I think everyone really enjoyed all the gifts and this little attempt at bringing back a little bit of the spirit of Christmas. I think everyone agreed that we’ll do it again next year as we all had such a brilliant time not just giving the gifts but in making them as well.

But for me, there was one present that stood out. My father had decided that for his project, he’d learn how to make pens. He bought himself the equipment and spent many an hour whittling down funky acrylics to form the body of these pens. He made some special ones as well. For my cousin’s newly announced fiancée (who’s a teacher), he took wood from an old school bench and made a pen with black at one end and red at the other. For my grandmother who loves the middle-east she made her pen from an olive tree from Jerusalem.

And for me, he managed to get hold of some bog wood. This is nearly fossilized oak from Ireland that is between four and seven thousand years old. That’s older than the pyramids, and I have to be honest, just totally blows my mind.

Don’t get me wrong, the ‘proper’ gifts were awesome, but I’ll really treasure that pen and only use it for the most significant of occasions.

Such an awesome Christmas.