What I'm Working On Now

This week, a blog post was handed to me on a silver platter in a tweet, to participate in a blog hop/blog tour. The wonderful Ken Armstrong, of the Mayo variety, was in touch to find writers to follow up from his post.

I met Ken back in the days when Bebo was the exciting place to be. They had launched two new features: groups, and Bebo Authors. Ken joined the group, after I plugged it on his writing page. It wasn't until I joined Twitter that we really started talking. His blog has been a joy to follow, and it was my utmost pleasure to take the baton from him to continue on The Blogging Tour.

The gist is that at each stop, we point you in the direction of another three writers, in the hopes that they too will write a post on what they're working on now. You should check out their blogs, now, to get to know them before they put up their posts next Monday. (They might not, but hey: awesome writers!)

Darke Conteur is a writer at the mercy of her Muse. Author of stories in several genres, she prefers to create within the realms of the three 'S'; Science Fiction, the Supernatural, and Steampunk. Some with erotic elements. She has stories published in several online magazines including Bewildering Stories and Aphelion.

A gamer at heart, she also enjoys knitting, gardening, cooking and good music. When not busy writing, she looks after one husband, one wannabe rock star, three cats, and one ghost dog.

Check her out at: http://darkeconteur.wordpress.com/

I also contacted a couple of wonderful Irish writers, Ruth Long and Alison Wells, to post. If they're still up for, or you want to find out more about them, just click their names.

Incidentally, all three of the writers I contacted have books available, across different genres and on different formats. There's something for almost everyone! Now, onto to the questions that are begging to be answered!

1) What am I working on? At the moment, though it's in the early stages of writing, I'm working on a book called The Shadows of London. It's the first in a series about a few individuals in the London area who grew up with what could be described as superpowers. They're not heroes. They don't see themselves as special. As it is, the protagonist of The Shadows of London is a petty thief.

I'm also working on a couple of books on writing, but progress on them slowed down when I found something new and shiny from my childhood. (Okay, yes, I'll admit it: it's a game. I've been bitten by the procrastination bug.)

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre? I've been following the superhero genre for some time now. When I was younger, I was obsessed with the X-Men comic of the 90s. This then led to me watching Spiderman, The Justice League, Static Shock, and all manner of Batman cartoons. As I grew older, new heroes joined the mix. Several television shows featuring superheroes - or people with superpowers - were aired and cancelled, and I seemed to fall in love with each of them. Recently, superheroes are making a comeback on the big screen.

With the exception of Misfits, though, most of the stories I became familiar with didn't push the boundaries of morality, and didn't seem to focus on what might otherwise be considered a normal life. It's the normality of what I'm writing that I think sets it apart. My characters are struggling through life, the same as anyone their ages might. Collectively, they'll experience homelessness, depression, mental illness, unemployment, criminal activity, physical illness, grief, and suicide. The fact that they have superpowers are merely the other side of their stories.

The powers provide a reason for them to find each other, and a means for them to deal with their situations, the same as an author would write, or an athletic would exercise, or an artist would paint. These are their skills, their abilities, and they're as natural to them as writing is to me. They're just less common abilities than most people have.

3) Why do I write what I do? Aside from my obsession with superheroes, I've wanted to write about normal experiences that many people shy away from. I wrote a play about depression, suicide and mental illness for the sole purpose of getting people to pay attention to the existence of those conditions and actions. I want to get people to think about the difficulties others might face.

Not everything I write will have superheroes in it, but this is the constant I want to maintain for my more recent ideas. I want to tell stories about experiences that are very real, and remain taboo. Addressing the New Adult market, I want to get people my age - people who are at the beginnings of their careers as doctors and teachers, bankers and lawyers, builders and store managers - to look at the world differently. We're blessed with advancements in technology. Many of us are fortunate enough to come from relatively stable backgrounds.

Someone has to talk about these issues, because it's too easy to ignore them until it's too late. I'm not going to pretend I write simply for the joy of words. Obviously, I do love writing. But it's people that make me want to write what I do.

4) How does my writing process work? This varies from book to book, and from week to week. It all depends on how many days I work per week. In an ideal week, if I'm starting a book fresh, it looks like this:

- Plan the book.
- Write the book, either exclusively (without even stopping to play Tales of Symphonia), or spread out over a couple of weeks.
- Edit the book.

Okay, that's simplifying it a bit. The writing process is more complex than that, usually. I follow my plan strictly, but that doesn't stop me going onto Twitter or Facebook. So, really, I write on-and-off for a few hours, sometimes with some successful marathons.

Often, I'll "warm up" with a haiku or two beforehand, or I'll put on music and just focus on the word document for a couple of hours. That's how I wrote Balor Reborn, and that's how I tend to write most of my books. More recently, I'm writing while my niece is asleep (when I'm minding her, obviously), which gives me about two hours to complete something. That could be a chapter, or it could be a blog post, or a combination of the two. On a good week, I'll get my posts for the week scheduled across various sites by lunch time on Wednesday, and then focus on other projects after that for the rest of the week.

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Anyway, you're probably tired of me talking about myself for this post. If you've gotten this far, thank you. If you're new here, welcome. And if you're Ken, thank you for passing the baton on to me. I look forward to seeing what Darke, Ruth and Alison have to say next week.

A Story That Sticks

It's finally happened: when I thought I was done with a story, it came back.

About two years ago, I wrote the first draft of a Sci-Fi novel called Bliss, with planned sequels in mind. I considered that book complete. At least, the story was complete. Part of me considered writing a novella set during the time of the novel to explore one aspect of the tale that isn't of real importance for anything else going on.

But that's not what I'm talking about here. I had that idea way back when I actually finished writing the book. I didn't actually write that novella - college will get in the way like that - but I still have it in mind.

I'm digressing. Yesterday, as I was getting ready to go to college for an exam, it struck me: a revised ending for Bliss. Don't get me wrong, I liked how it ended. It felt complete. I'll obviously have to change things a bit when I write the new ending.

Thing is, it's a whole extra section to the book. Several chapters, of actual significance.

How I didn't think of it before, I don't know. I think I was wondering how to make certain things work for later in the series when the idea actually popped into my head. I was quite proud of it, actually, but I won't know how well it works with the rest of the book until it's actually written. (I need to plan it, still, but it should be easy enough to make a natural progression from where I left off.)

Ideas don't usually come to me like this when I feel like a story has been finished. The only time an idea has ever stuck around for a while is with my many attempts to write a story with superpowered characters. I get ideas, I try to work with them, and inevitably I give up on the book.

The last time I was happy with an idea that I was working on was with The Jump, and that didn't last long. I didn't really plan the book too well to work with, or plan for sequels.

I'm planning a superhero novel at the moment - or, I was, for a while, and I need to get back to it - so hopefully that'll finally produce something close to what I've been trying to write since I started out writing. Early attempts resulted in being rip-offs of X-Men or Heroes. Even The Jump was veering on being too-close-for-comfort.

It's difficult to deal with such problems when the market already has a lot of different stories out there. However, I think what I'm working on now is coming closer to original than anything else, insofar as a superhero novel can be original.

We'll see how that works out, but for now I need to deal with the idea that won't stop hanging around for Bliss. I'm dying to actually get it written! On a related note, how did I get to be the person who writes these stories?

Superheroes

I'm on a superhero buzz at the moment. Like, more so than usual. I've been mulling over an idea for a book for a while now, thinking through the plot and the characters and the way the universe works, and eventually it led to me picking up a book I'd bought a few months (or a year) ago, called The Physics of Superheroes. It's a surprisingly interesting read, though, of course, it combines two of my favourite interests: superheroes and science. (Is it bad that I like science so much while studying at God College?)

Anyway, one thing led to another, and I started looking up different books about superheroes. This is to add to my physics book, and the books I have about various superheroes from the Marvel universe, and the vast history of comic books and plots I've picked up over the years (and that I can acquire from the Internet).

So, I'm reading up on superheroes a lot more than usual. I suppose this is my way of compensating for the failure what was World War X. The story, I liked. My execution, however, was sorely lacking. As in, I didn't write anything after a while. There was so much to focus on, such a large world to build, and I didn't feel like I owned any of it.

This time around, I'm going back to my roots and utilizing some ideas that were mine from the start. The story is much more exciting and dynamic than the World War X plot, though I always have the possibility of using some of the characters and ideas I was coming up with for that story. I can put my own personal spin on things, and explore the humanity behind the superhero complex, along with the ethics and morals and the great big ideas of heroism that people support in their minds when they feel like they have the power to do the right thing.

It's a massive bundle of crazy at the moment, still only in the planning stages and developing wildly of its own accord. That planning is going well, though, and once I have my reading done for the book I'll be able to develop a massive system within which to develop the best possible superhero novel I can come up with.

In my opinion, it's going to be awesome.

But then, that's slightly biased. Okay, more than slightly. It's biased by the combination of superhero fun and, you know, my decidedly high opinion of myself (because I don't always have to be self-deprecating.)

Anyway, I think this story stands to be enjoyed by a lot of people if it ever makes it out into the wide world. It's not just about superheroes and superpowers, but about the effects these powers have on what had been otherwise stable lives, the opportunities offered, the problems that arise; in short, it's about the people behind the powers.

Plus, if it was a movie there would be lots of bright lights and flashy explosions. That's always fun.

Now I just need to plan the book and do all my reading for it. Then I can actually start writing it!

Review - All My Friends Are Superheroes

I love subtle and simple titles, don't you? I also love titles like this one, where it's everything but subtle and anything but simple, and I'm sure that every time I tell people what book I read they just look at me like I'm a mad fool (this is just proof of that, mind you). The book in question, All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman, delivers a simplistic story in a relatively short read, and it's as entertaining as the confused looks on people's faces when you tell them its title.

So, are all his friends superheroes?
Considering the fact that he was a nobody before he was a friend of every superhero in the city, yes. His friends are superheroes - by some definition - and his wife is a superhero and he's... well, he's invisible. To her. By no fault or cause of his own.

Okay, what? "By some definition"? What does that even mean?
Well... not all of them are especially "super". Some of them have powers that we would deem to be an ordinary skill. Almost all of the anecdotal descriptions of them - of which there are many - are highly entertaining nuggets of wit and imagination. And while the superheroes are quite a big part of the story, you don't need to be a comic book fan to appreciate the wonderfulness of their "powers" and how they contribute to the madness that is the protagonist's life.

Riiiight. And he's invisible to his wife?
Yeah, she was made to not notice his existence. She's called The Perfectionist. Anything she touches becomes instantly perfect. As the story begins, she's getting ready to start a new life in a city that will become perfect by her very presence, and so she can get over her husband's disappearance. He has the duration of the flight to figure out how to convince her he exists, or he loses everything he holds dear.

And that's what the book is about?
Books aren't "about" anything, but if they were, this one wouldn't be "about" a man proving his existence to his wife, or "about" a bunch of superheroes with powers that are questionably and variably super. This book is "about" love, undying and heart-wrenching and life-changing love, and how losing love can cause you to lose everything else, and how silent appreciation of someone is love and taking up smoking because someone's gone is love and following someone unbeknownst to them across the country trying to prove you exist is love, and everything else in between, all the hurt and all the joy and all the jealousy and the troubles are love. And this book is all "about" love.

So wait... what's the target demographic?
I would say anyone who likes quick and delightful reads, anyone who can appreciate the many unique powers that Kaufman can create, stories about love, stories about loss, stories that centre around characters and people, and people who appreciate and/or love any combination of the above, as well as many other things I probably missed out on. It's a wonderful book and possibly the most diverse and universal book I've reviewed; it's not complicated or too specific to genre, not overly literary, or any other complaints that might arise from readers about books. It is, quite simpl, a subtle delight, without the subtle and simple title!