Adrian FaulknerFantasy Author

The wonderful thing about ideas is that they never present themselves at the right time. In fact, they usually turn up at entirely the wrong time. They come out of nowhere and hit you sideways.

Last night, an idea for a Swords and Sorcery novel dumped itself in my head. I’ve been thinking for the last couple of days how much I enjoy the whole “rogue’s tale” subgenre (a subgenre that includes Lies of Locke Lamorra and the brilliant Among Thieves). As much as I love big epic fantasy, I find that it’s sword and sorcery that is leaving me fulfilled these days.

The important thing is that this wasn’t an idea I was looking for. If anything, the idea I want is some added element for Gods of the Wild Frontier. But over the 10 minutes whilst I was cooking last night, I came up with an opening scene, a concept and four main characters. Not bad, and I think the book could be a lot of fun, both to write and read. On the downside, it’s a bit safe for me. It sits firmly in Sword and Sorcery. There’s no spaceships or helicopters, and I can’t help but wonder if the idea has been seen before.

So I after cooking I basically sat down and pitched the novel to myself in an additional note to my file of ever growing novel ideas. It depresses me to look at this list. I really need to be able to write a complete novel in about 2 months to ever get through this backlog. I’ll be glad once I move, so I can get down to some very serious writing, although at this time I have no idea what I will be writing.

Disassociated thoughts rattling around my brain today:

New day job means my writing schedule is all over the place. There’s a few things I’ve been working on, but nothing that feels productive. I’ve tried to at least keep the blog ticking along and I’ve also started writing a test scene for Refugee in first person but mostly I’ve been thinking about one of the secondary characters in Gods of the Wild Frontier.

Most people go into town to go shopping. On Saturday I appear to have used it as an excuse to clear my head and think about one of my writing projects (although I did get the new shoes I wanted for work as well as picking a book up in a charity shop I was about to pay full price for).

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about my novel Refugee. The book has been drafted and has sat dormant for a year whilst I work on other projects, but always in my mind.

It features a young protagonist, and whilst he isn’t the only one, the framework of the novel largely hangs around his character.

As some of you are aware, I’ve been writing my latest book using a discovery process. This is where you go into the project not knowing a whole lot about it, and find the plot and story as you write. I normally like to think on a book, let it ferment in my head for as much as a decade before coming out as something pretty much approaching a finished novel, where every character is known, pretty much every scene is visualised. However, whilst I have no end of ideas (I think I’m up to 19 books now), there’s no way I can spend a decade on each. If I want to be a commercial writer, I need to speed that process up and I genuinely believe that not only can I do that but feel if I get my process right, I reckon I could possibly get two books out a year (although there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to speed up and fine tune the editing process). And so I’ve been using the time Four Realms is sitting in piles waiting for people to say ‘yes’ (or ‘no’), to play around a bit, try different approaches to writing.

I took a netbook with me to SFX Weekender, and despite all the fun and merriment I still managed to get a thousand words a day done whilst there. I was really proud of that, felt dedicated to my craft, a “real” writer. Then I took an 8 hour journey home, had a day of sorting out major real-life issues the following day, got good news the day after that, and suddenly… I’ve not written anything on the novel for nearly a week. I know why it happened and feel there’s good reason but still… Gah!

Persistence is so important in this industry and something every writer fails at from time to time. I used to think that because sometimes I never got round to writing every day or procrastinated, that I wasn’t a real writer. But falling off the writing wagon happens, procrastination happens. It’s picking yourself up, dusting yourself down and getting back on that proverbial horse that matters (although why you’d be on the horse if you had a wagon is beyond me!).

Anyways, I need to go write!

Things have been pretty quiet on the blog mainly because I’ve been knuckling down and working. There’s nothing sexy or exciting about the vomit draft other than seeing the story come together, and that’s not something I can really share without ruining the book.

There was a depressing moment mid-week when I realised that I’d probably have furthered my career if I sat a little neater inside genre categories. But then I realised that I write fantasy as much for what I dislike about the genre as for what I love. And in creating my own cross-genre fantasy novels, I’m not trying to emulate anyone else. That’s got to be a good thing in the long run? It’s so easy to look at other authors and think “If I had done that, maybe…” but the world don’t work like that.

On a positive note, there seems to be genuine love for my 140 character novel pitches I give when asked on Twitter what I’m writing. It is the excitement about those that spur me on through those fleeting moments of despair. There’s definitely a large audience for my type of fantasy, I honestly believe that it’s actually quite commercial. But whether it is or isn’t, my latest novel won’t write itself and so I continue my process of discovery writing, hoping that this now 20,000 word flashback section won’t end up being cut when it comes to revision.

There’s more to being a writer than just writing these days. If you want to do it in some professional capacity (large or small) there’s a lot of business; whether that be promotion, dealing with agents and publishers, or just following the market. And then there’s that business of being able to take a look at your work objectively.

There’s a lot to be said for crit groups but I think as you develop as a writer, the criticism that you need changes. I’ve found the members of a group often outgrow each other as they hone their skills and follow their chosen paths. And as a result, crit groups can often provide diminishing returns.

So whilst the first draft work on Gods of the Old Frontier continues, I’m also starting to edit Refugee.

Refugee (or more likely ‘Refugees’ – I’m still undecided) is the tale of a family who become refugees in a fantasy world following the destruction of our own. It’s post-apocalyptic with fantasy imagery. It has a lot of twee fantasy stereotypes in it, mainly because this was born out of a challenge to see if I could write elves, fae and unicorns (almost no-one writes serious unicorn fiction any more!) and make it gritty. I think the pitch to myself was ‘Post-Apocalyptic fantasy with unicrons’.

The result is an almost nihilistic human drama along the lines of The Road, and you know… I think it works as a novel.

Gods continues to be an interesting process. If you’re not aware, this is the first book I’ve attempted to write where I’m discovering the story as I go. It’s a western fantasy with helicopters and spirit animals. There’s part of me that felt as if the ideas needed to ‘cook’ for another couple of years, but I have to say that the results so far have been interesting.

The book is going pretty well and most importantly, the voyage of discovery is entertaining me even when it takes me in directions I’d never previously thought of.