My Creative Process – The Grand Blog Tour

My very dear friend Annette Thomson of Meldrum Media tagged me to be in this blog-hop. It’s easy. I’m going to answer the following questions and then nominate three other people to pick up the baton and answer them too.

1. What are you working on?

Current WIP is book 3 of The Alchemy Trilogy which started with Alchemy and Shaman’s Drum. This one starts where Shaman’s Drum finished and there are a lot of loose ends to tie up because some characters from the first book have been away for a long time and are not aware of subsequent developments. The working title is Reunion as it is the book where all the character come back together again. There will be a few sub-plots and I think in style it will be more like Alchemy than Shaman’s Drum.

 2 How does your work differ from others of its genre?

In almost every way. It isn’t swords and sorcery style although there is a lot of genuine magic and ritual in it. Even though the motivation for “The Changes” is an ecological problem it is not a hard facts science book, but I did do a great deal of research on alternative fuels. There is big business intrigue but it is not a “board-room saga”. Mainly I think my work is different in that it is very matter-of-fact about the day-to-day use of magic and pagan religion. Everything is based on what I know from experience working with Wiccan covens or Shamanic practitioners, Druids, Odinists etc. As these people are very commonplace in my life, I tend to write about them as “just yer everyday Druid” in my work.

There are demons in my work too but they tend to prey on their victims’ own frailties. They are not horrror-comic book zombies and the general reaction to them is repugnance rather then all-out terror.

3 Why do you write what you do?

I started out on this kind of writing purely because it was based on what I know best. As a reader I can tell at a glance when an author has just googled info and get irritated when even then their facts are wrong. No, you cannot drive from Lyon to Calais in two hours. Also there seemed to be a gap in the market between the swords and sorcery fantasy genre and the misty legend magical genre. My characters are people you could meet in the street and some of them you might get on with. Perhaps I wanted to break down the barriers between the perception of magic-users as a different race and portray them as just people doing a job.

My next work after this will be a total departure. I want to write about where I live. Again, this will be something I know a lot about but I will enjoy having fun with observational humour.

4. How does your writing process work?

In a word? Erratically! I have Bipolar Condition so my energy levels are totally haywire. There are times when I don’t need to sleep at all, in which case I can write massive amounts. There are also times when I sleep 18 hours a day, no work gets done then. I tend to work in “patchwork”. I have the whole story laid out in my head, also written in longhand in chronological order. I then break it down into vital “scenes” and write the scenes as I feel inspired. Some days I might feel like writing like a man, so I work on Iamo or Adrrian’s scenes. When I have finished all the scenes that are essential, I “sew” them together, adding embellishment and other details. Often another scene will come to me while I’m doing that and I’ll go back and pop that in too. It makes producing a final M/S rather a long process but I find it the easiest way to write with my jumbled brain.

My nominees are:

Jo Robinson

India Drummond

and

Mark Ethridge

Also Jessica Macbeth – my fae godmother!

And they then nominate up to three others. Simples!

I hope you’d like to take part – these tours are a good way of getting new readers to your blog.

The first two books in the Alchemy Trilogy are available everywhere! See on Goodreads