Ed Fortune

Well, National Novel Writing Month started today, and good luck to anyone who’s using it as an excuse to give their writing aspirations a kick-start.

Now, I’m sort of participating, in the sense that I’ve a been taking this writing business seriously for a while now and I’ve a bucket load of work to do. The way I currently work is shockingly wasteful, mostly because I’m self-employed and thus have most of the day to myself. This, alas, does not mean I can sit around playing video games and reading books. Y’see, the more non-writing things I have to do in a day, the more efficient I become with the actual discipline of applying my arse to the chair, my fingers to keyboard and my brain to creating a story.

My method, such as it is, can be easily broken down into three ‘P’s. Plodding, Planning and Panicking.

I've actually had this conversation, sort of.

Plodding is essentially where I do anything but writing. Usually, this is doing something that has nothing to do with writing, but, if I’m lucky, happens to pay well. I keep a notepad handy while I either procrastinate or do something useful, and slowly accrue a sense of what I need to write today.

Planning is more useful. It’s either editing previous work, or making extensive notes as to what needs to be done. Finally, Panicking is where I realise I’ve not done my 500 words for the day, and rush to get them done. Typically, I get much more than 500 words done, but still, it’s the panicking that’s the key. Someday, I’ll develop a more disciplined process. Promise.

So, what am I writing about? Well, in case you really want to know, here’s my next few months, roughly sketched out.

Rockets, Rayguns and Really Nice Tea is a LARP project I’m running and I’ve a lovely team of very talented writers, and we’ve reams of plot to create and write, as well as a whole world to fill in and expand. With larp, the more background detail you can throw at the players, the better, because it means the players are more likely to find something they can run with. It’s already turning out to be lashings and lashing of fun, and should occupy my spare moments well into the new year and beyond.

I’m also working on a submission for Circalit’s Immersive Writing Lab Competition. It’s an exercise in world building, which is something I love to do, and do anyway. I do like to write to a brief, as it gives me a structure and a deadline, and that helps me move from the plodding to panicking stages of the process pretty swiftly. So when I see a competition like this one, I go for it.

I’m also working on a variety of Steampunk based short stories. Partially because it’s excellent practice for Victoriana¹ , partially because more than a few small press publishers want Steampunk shorts to sell to the e-reader market, but mostly because writing alternate history fiction is an awful lot of fun.

Oh, and I’m writing a book. It’s a slow beast, and it’s initial incarnation was rubbish, so much so that I scrapped it and started again (same world, better story.) It’s a decidedly English piece of modern fantasy, and I’ll not bore you with the details until it’s ready, which should be sooner rather than later.

1: Victoriana is yet another LARP I’m involved with, though thankfully only as one of the writers this time. The lovely lunatic in charge of Victoriana is Mike Smith, of Ruin Mikey’s Life fame.