The New Age Of Being A Novelist…

Stuart Harrison, Author

There was a time not that long ago when authors wrote books and, with the exception of a few local bookstore signings, they rarely got to connect with the people who read them. They didn’t know how people felt about the stories, which the author had probably sweated and laboured over for six months, or a year, or even many years. Thankfully, that’s all changed, thanks to the internet and webpages like this one. Now authors can write their stories and put them out there for people to read, and readers can connect back using blogs and social media and sites like Goodreads, and talk to authors directly about their work. Because of that, writing novels feels very different. It’s not just storytelling anymore, it’s part of the whole world of communication. I think what I’m trying to say is; suddenly it’s not quite such a lonely vocation as it once was. Hooray for that.

So, welcome world, to my blog. Of course, I understand that right now there’s probably nobody out there reading this, but I’m not disheartened. I might be shouting into the wind a little bit, but I guess my voice will carry and somebody somewhere will hear a faint sound and look to see where it’s coming from, and maybe that person will be the first make their way here. If you happen to be that person, a special welcome!

I better begin, I think, by telling you a bit about myself. I started writing novels after a business I began in the late nineties crashed and burned. At the time it wasn’t a fun situation. My wife was pregnant with our first child and we had a big mortgage on the house, so suddenly being broke and having to sell up wasn’t exactly how we had planned things. On the plus side, I’d always wanted to try to become a novelist and this seemed like a good opportunity. You have to find the positive, right. Well, this is the short version of that story, but let’s just say it wasn’t easy and there were a lot of rejected manuscripts along the way. Eventually though, I sold a novel called The Snow Falcon to various publishers around the world, and to my utter amazement I had a hit book on my hands. (There’s a revised and rewritten version of that book available now, by the way.)

After The Snow Falcon I went on to write four more novels, until in 2004 I took a break. I was having a crisis of direction, I suppose you could say. My books were hard to classify. They were part mystery, part relationship-based dramas, for want of a better term, though Snow Falcon was a love story as much as anything. That was my problem. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write love stories, and for that reason I began trying my hand at various other genres. I worked up a few thrillers and a few more mysteries with the emphasis on suspense, and somehow they just didn’t work out. Meanwhile the years went by and readers who had actually read my books and liked them, understandably forgot about me.

I’m going to fast forward here. Somebody mentioned that blogging ought to be like chatting with friends over a coffee, and I don’t want to turn that into a chat over a four course dinner. Out of all this turmoil, what I eventually came to realise was that I actually really like to write about love and relationships, and I like to set the stories in evocative locations. I’d had this idea for a novel in my mind for a while, about a young man and a woman during the lead up to, and during the First World War. The young man was a pilot, that much I knew, flying those old biplanes made of flimsy wood and canvas, and I saw him as an ordinary person from a working background, as opposed to having the kind of privileged background a lot of the aviators of that time did. Then I thought, what if the woman he’s in love with was his social opposite? What kind of problems would they face?

That was basically the genesis of the book that became The Flyer. It took almost two years to write, partly because of the research involved and partly because I sometimes struggled to capture the mix of adventure , love and realism I was looking for. I’m looking forward to hearing from readers to let me how I did.

So that’s what I’ve been doing since I last published a novel, but it’s not all I’ve been doing. During that time of soul searching I also realised there is a side of me that wants to write a completely different type of story. I’ve given this side of me the name Stuart C Harrison, and beginning in Feb 2013 I’ll be releasing episodes of a series called the Black Sun. If you’ve ever wondered about the mysteries of the world, such as what was the real purpose of the Great Pyramid and who built it, was there a civilisation known as Atlantis and if so, who were those people and what happened to them, and what does any of that have to do with crop circles and climate change and what’s happening in the world today?  – then this series is for you. More on that soon.