Adrian FaulknerFantasy Author

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.

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.

When I decided that I would take my writing seriously – really try and make a go of it – I decided that I would always take risks, that I would never play it safe. For the most part, I’m glad I did that. I probably didn’t realise it at the time, lost in the mists of self-doubt, but I had a strong sense of who I was and where I wanted to sit in the market.

Keeping true to that means I sometimes get wracked with self-doubt. I’m quick to self-efface and sometimes people take it seriously. As a result, I question myself constantly.