In Five Years

My friend Rebecca asked a question of people, sometimes, when she's trying to get them to really think about their lives. She asked them, Where do you see yourself in five years?, not just out of curiosity, but because of what their answer means to their current situation. If you see yourself married with two kids in five years, but you're currently single and childless, you either have high expectations for the future, or you need to really start taking relationships more seriously.

If you want to be doing something in five years - mothering, publishing, travelling - you need to be working towards that now.

For me, it comes down to a happy little mix of writing, publishing and travelling.

Don't get me wrong. I don't expect to become an overnight hit in the writing department. Writing books isn't how you make money from writing. The biggest earners, aside from the big bestsellers in the publishing industry, are usually screenwriters. Of the Average Joe variety of writer, screenwriters make the most from a single piece of work. (It's also the most competitive market - fun!)

But I'd love to be doing it. I'd love to be trying my hand at screenwriting, while continuing to write my books, and attempting something of a freelance career. It's a difficult life to get started in, nearly impossible to do while in full-time education as an Undergrad. student, but it's not outside of my reach at this point in my life. I have books for guidance on screenwriting and freelancing, and I understand the book publishing sector relatively well, and it's just a case of applying everything I have to that dream.

That's what this month is all about for me, with Operation Overdrive. I want to create my work-life balance now, with an over-the-top last ditch attempt before my Masters starts in September.

And that Masters is where the second part of my five-year-dream comes in: publishing. My Masters is in Multimedia, which will help build up a skill-set in digital image editing, video production, and audio production - among other areas - which I see as being vital for publishing in the future. I have my own plans, aside from wanting to work with a major publishing house in the UK or the US or even here in Ireland (though there are fewer publishers here), and I'm confident that once I get the ball rolling, I'll be able to sort out something big.

Obviously, my explanation here will be lacking in details while they're still being worked on, but I've already started working on what I want to do, and how I want to do it, and it's just a case of getting the background work in place before I fully commit to it all - including putting my energy into the Masters.

As for the travelling, that's where things get complicated. Conventional work wouldn't allow for travel, and neither would a low income, and I don't plan on living at home when I'm approaching 30. I could tell you all of the places I want to go - and I will later in the month - but that doesn't explain how I'm going to afford it.

The travelling aspect is where I get to see the world. I know I can't afford to do it now, not while I'm saving everything I've got for the Masters (because aside from the fees, I'd like to get my own equipment, like a new laptop, and a proper camera). But if I could make the travel part of my work, if I could use it as research, or as part of a freelancing job, then it makes the money put into flights and accommodation part of the necessary expenses.

It's a child's dream, I suppose, but growing older doesn't mean that those dreams have to go away. Growing older just means that I can make more sense of those dreams, and how to make them a reality. In five years time, I want to be doing just that.

Future Books and Future Plans

My friends poked fun at me when I said, in response to the challenge to come up with a book idea in thirty seconds, that I had a wall full of ideas, and I could easily pretend I just came up with one of them. I got the whole "Oh, I just have so many ideas..." line.

Well yes, yes I do.

I don't have plans, but I do have ideas. The ones I really like, I make sure to focus on. They're a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and I don't know how many of them are actually good yet. I have to see how they pan out when I try planning them, when I try to find the story around the idea.

My general plan for the next couple of years with books looks like this:

- I want to release the third Modern Irish Myth book. It'll require re-planning, and writing from scratch, but it's going to happen. Then, the series will be put on hiatus.

- I'll be releasing a series of books set in an Irish college. To put it really simply, it'll be creating a fictional world around my own college experience, inspired by events rather than people. I'm fleshing out a lot of it at the moment, but it's been exciting me for a long time, now, and it'll be appearing sooner rather than later.

- I'll be focusing on a couple more writing books in the future. Some will be specific genre-related titles, others more broad, addressing all writers. Without just giving away ideas, that's all I can say.

- After my Masters, I'll be turning my attention to researching and writing about mental health. I want to make the material accessible. If my experience on teaching placement in 2013 was any indication of the trend, even the people who should know about mental health don't. This is something I've been wanting to write about for a long time, and for the time being it'll remain in my fiction, but in the future I'll be taking on a more proactive role in the field in Ireland - and maybe even abroad.

That's just the books, of course. There's a lot else to focus on in the future, which I can't really discuss until I actually get started (I have books on mental health, and have read a bit of some of them, so I'm not breaking my own rule there). This isn't just a secrecy thing. This is a hype thing. As in, I don't want to create any hype in my own head over this stuff.

Being a writer can be a scary thing, especially when public announcements are concerned. It's with that in mind that I'm keeping a lot of things quiet until I'm ready to talk about them, and why I haven't given any indication as to what's actually going to happen in my new books. For now, you'll have to do with the vague answers I can give, and accept the fact that new material is on its way.

My First Book

When I think back to the first book I ever wrote - the 120,000 word epic that was What Lurks Through the Mirror, I can only think of one source of inspiration for it: choice.

I was going through a tough time. I had some social problems that I wasn't addressing. I had some big exams coming up. I wasn't sleeping right. I felt a lot of pressure at home to do well.

I wanted to change my whole life, right then and there, and I felt I was lacking one very important element: choice. To me, it felt like my whole life was being planned out for me by everyone else. It felt like I wasn't allowed to have proper friends, or to do anything other than study, or to have a night's sleep that wasn't disturbed by dread and bad dreams. Worse still, it felt like I wasn't allowed to talk about these things.

So, I created Sarah Tane, a teenage girl who was going to escape her boring, quiet life. At first, things were going to be scary. She was going to have to face monsters and magic, and none of it would make sense. But then, then, she was going to get away from it all. A magic mirror was going to fall on top of her, and drag her into a little room with large mirrors, and each one was an opportunity.

I gave Sarah a choice, to live a life without magic, exploring the streets of New York, and enjoying the hustle and bustle of a world so much like her own, but with the excitement that was lacking.

Or, she could explore the ruins of a broken world, all grassy plains and strange people - a strange breed of dragon and human, or angelic warriors missing only their wings, or a wizard in a house surrounded by a perpetual storm.

Or, she could find home in a very old kingdom, sit on a throne that she was told was rightfully hers, where magic existed in artefacts in the market, and people treated her with admiration and respect.

Sarah Tane was different. Sarah was Chosen. She could decide her own fate. She had everything I wanted, and I was able to give it to her just like that. I gave her adventure, excitement, magical powers to free a kingdom, and the noble heart to choose to do right by everyone - to save the worlds from an evil that threatened everything. I gave her courage, and found some of my own.

Fate and destiny were a big deal for me then. I didn't think everything was mapped out so rigidly, once I actually put some positive thought into it, because there was something Sarah had that everyone else had too: the ability to make a choice.

I spoke up about the social problems I was having, and guess what - everything else got better, too.

I was inspired to write the book because I didn't see that I had a choice in anything I did, and doing so gave me more choices than I ever dared dream of. I think it's fair to say that if I hadn't written that book, however poorly written it actually is, I wouldn't be writing anything. Writing makes me happy with my life, but I had to realise that first.

Why I Want to Be A Writer

When I was a child, I wanted to be a journalist. I didn't know how to get into it, and I thought it was the only way to be a writer. I found out later that the people who write books were also children at one point, with those same dreams - to write for a living.

When I realised I didn't need to study journalism, and that I didn't necessarily want to write news pieces for a living, I turned my attention to what really mattered to me at the time: fiction. I started writing a book, and I wanted to do that for a living then for the same reason that I want to do it now: writing a book makes me unbelievably happy. When I finish the first draft, I feel a sense of fulfilment like nothing else I've ever experienced.

Over the years, I stopped just writing novels - especially since they weren't that great at first. When I realised that lots of people asked me for writing advice over the years, I decided to write about writing. That goes back to my second childhood dream: to be a teacher.

I love teaching people about writing. I love getting to explain how I do things, and why I do them, and how else things can be done if that doesn't work out. If my years in college taught me anything about education it's that everyone has their own way of learning. That affects how people write, too. Planning Before Writing is clear evidence of why I want to be a writer. It's split up with different methods of planning a book that address different ways of thinking.

Writing lets me deal with complicated issues that I've needed to read about in my own lifetime. It's helped me put to words the stories that I feel need to be told, and has helped me create lessons for other writers to develop their craft.

To put it all quite simply, the reason I want to be a writer is to reach out to people. If I can do that full-time, writing stories and books on writing (for now - I have other interest areas I'd love to explore in the future), and if I can earn a living from it, then I'll not just be earning money from what started as a hobby, from something that I love doing for the sake of doing it, but I'll be helping people. There's first draft fulfilment, and there's changing lives fulfilment, and the latter is the driving force that keeps me going, that makes me want to be a writer full-time.

A Writer For the First Time

Identity is a big thing, and it turns out that leaving all of your friends to go to a new school is an excellent way of realising that your identity needs to be a little more established than "in the same class as..." or "friends with..."

The one constant in my life since secondary school started - and we're talking almost eleven years ago, here - has been writing. You would think, then, that I considered myself a writer from an early age. Nope.

It wasn't even when I finished my first book. I was just a guy who wrote a book. I was calling myself an "aspiring author", whatever the heck that's actually supposed to mean. Aspiring, from Google's definition, means "directing one's hopes or ambitions towards becoming a specified type of person." Wikipedia defines author as follows:

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work and can also be described as a writer.

There's nothing specific about being an author, except that an author writes something. It took a while, but eventually, I did something that would change the way I looked at myself: I dropped the phrase "aspiring author", and called myself a writer.

Why? It's simple: I felt like an author only wrote novels, and I felt like it was about time I stopped dreaming of doing that. I decided that I would actually just write the books I wanted to, and to write the stories and poems that I felt I was doing quite a poor job at.

It was only a few years ago that my Twitter bio reflected this unspoken change in me. A friend of mine encouraged any writers she knew to stop it with the whole "aspiring author" business, and I found things so much easier after that. I set up my own writer website, and I made the decision to start publishing my books.

I went eight years or more dreaming. Since then, I've been living that dream. It's not glamorous, but it's what I wanted as a kid. I was a writer for the first time in my life, in no uncertain terms.

What I Write

When I was younger, I thought I would only enjoy one type of book: one that had magic in it. Then, I found A Series of Unfortunate Events, and everything almost changed.

Except, that was it. That was the only non-magical series I was reading. Until I went to secondary school and was required to read Boy by Roald Dahl, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, I didn't read another book that didn't have magic in it. I was reading Harry Potter, and Darren Shan, and Garth Nix.

My first book was a fantasy book. My second was sci-fi. And it wasn't just a genre fixation. I was only reading and writing novels. Nothing else.

I tried to write some short stories. They were derivative at best.

Then, when I was seventeen, I wrote a book that didn't have magic in it. It was set in Dublin, it had swearing in it, and no one could throw a fire ball or read anyone's mind. It was a perfectly ordinary book. More or less. But it was still a novel.

I tried writing some poetry, and couldn't get it right.

Eventually, I found my poetic voice. That was important for me. I was writing things that had meaning for me, and I was able to put some form on them. It was a big step in the right direction.

As I entered third year in college, I wrote a play for the first time. The only time I'd ever written a script before this was a bad, short screenplay a couple of years back.

By this point, I was doing something else with my reading, too. I was reading all sorts of books. I was reading novellas, poetry, short stories, and non-fiction. I had actually found non-fiction interesting. I was reading books on business and mental health and writing, and I was loving it.

When I wrote Balor Reborn in 2012, I also started writing flash fiction. I managed to take ideas and turn them into 1000 word stories quite easily.

The end result: I now write novellas, in different genres, as well as flash fiction on romance and mythology and vague elements of fantasy and magical realism; I've been writing poetry, and I've written short scripts for stage production; to top it all off, I've been writing books on writing.

It may not seem significant for some, but when stories were my whole world, turning to all of these different areas and genres has been life-changing for me. I'm not just a novelist, or a poet, or a playwright; I'm a lot of different things, all at the same time, and it's the spice that makes my life that little bit more interesting.

When and Why I Started Writing

I started writing when I was twelve. That was when I really tried to write my first book. I knew it was what I wanted, and it was something that belonged only to me. I was in a new school, away from my old friends, and I wanted to do something for me.

Then, the computer was replaced.

I had to start again. No biggie. I hadn't written much. So, I started again. I managed a chapter, and for some reason, I gave up. I wish I could explain why. I don't think I was getting the story any more.

So, once more, I started again. I made the character younger. I thought, "I understand a twelve year old much better than a sixteen year old." Except no. I didn't. I didn't understand characters.

That's a tough lesson to learn when trying to write a first book, but I didn't let it put me off. I started taking notes for the book. I numbered everything. I wanted to understand the world my characters were in. That way, I could let the story try to tell itself.

I started the fourth draft. I made my protagonist sixteen again. I was only fourteen. No, I didn't understand how a sixteen year old thought. I didn't understand how a sixteen year old girl thought, either. But I took a damn good shot at it, and didn't make her from Earth. The story was filled with parallel worlds, and she was from one a little bit like Earth, but less advanced.

Hello loophole.

I gave her a name. I gave her a crush. I gave her a best friend. I threw her into the deep end and surrounded her with some new friends, because I understand that one. I made her face monsters and magic and destiny, and I got to ignore bullies at school.

I finished the book when I was fifteen, at over 120,000 words, and right as my Junior Cert was starting. I wrote the book for the fun of it all, because I was useless at sports - and I'd tried a few, in my defence - and I didn't want to play computer games all the time. I also couldn't afford to buy many books, and my school's library had a limited choice available. I wrote the book I wanted to read, because there was nothing else in this world for me.

It would be over a year later before I got my first job, before I could afford a reading habit the likes of which I hadn't been able to sustain properly before. I would be over a year before I could read more than one author at a time without waiting for presents of books at Christmas and my birthday. And that wasn't enough for me. I wrote because I needed the stories, and they just weren't there.