The same 4 questions we're always asked

So my darling friend Simon Spurrier poked me with a stick and asked if I'd be game to participate in a little round of "blog-around-the-rosie." FOR GREAT JUSTICE. Or shits and giggles, as the case may be.

I've poked several other writers in a stick-like fashion in turn, but thus far I've received no solid commitments on the matter, which surely means that some TERRIBLE ILL-FORTUNE WILL BEFALL ME because I'm breaking a chain letter, or something. OR...anybody who feels so moved could pick up the torch and run with it, and that would probably work, too.

So here goes.
Ahem.


What am I working on?Right now? Cleaning up Princess X for my lovely editor at Scholastic, for she is expecting it back by the end of next week.

But from a fiction output standpoint, I'm about 2/3 of the way finished with a draft of Chapelwood - the followup to this year's Maplecroft. As I've harped endlessly over here, Maplecroft is my 19th century gothic epistolary novel about Lizzie Borden fighting Cthulhu with an axe; and Chapelwood is...well, it's from that same planet, at least.


Chapelwood happens 30 years after the events of Maplecroft - and it's set in a very different locale: early 1920s in Birmingham, Alabama. It would be a wild (and incorrect) exaggeration to say that Chapelwood is "based on true events," but that's partly because the "true events" in question were so damn weird that I had to de-weirdify them a bit in order for anyone to believe them.

And then I added a space-worshipping murder cult, so, yeah.

Next up - a dark modern fantasy/horror project with Tor called Godbothering. It's basically about three ancient characters who accidentally destroyed the world...and are trying to keep from doing it again. More details on that one later on this summer - when I get that one underway in earnest.


How does my work differ from the others in my genre?It's hard to answer this question without sounding delusional, or egomaniacal, or otherwise unsavory - and I'll be honest, I'm struggling to compose a reply. But I suppose if you held a gun to my head, I'd say that my work differs from its genre brethren because so much of it is inspired by real places/people/events. Real history is always so much weirder than anything I could make up anyway, so why not use it? Sometimes I have to change a few names here and there, and file off the serial numbers ... but often the most "outlandish" and "unbelievable" elements in my material is something cribbed directly from somebody's life.


Why do I write what I do?I spent a lot of time afraid, as a kid. In much the same fashion that bullied children sometimes become bullies themselves ... these days, I really like to scare people.


How does my writing process work?Wake up around 8:00 a.m., walk the dog, get myself dressed and ready to work. Spend the rest of the morning doing Writer Business - answering emails, sorting out contracts, responding to phone calls and/or requests for information, etc. etc. etc. Break for lunch. Then it's ass in chair trying to write new words until about 4:00 - 5:00 p.m., at which point I stop and either go do some yardwork, or try to come up with a blog post.

Maybe that doesn't sound like a great deal of writing time daily, for someone who earns a living doing this - but it's just One Of Those Things: I can only spend (up to) 3-4 hours at a time dedicated to purely creative output. Some people turn on the faucet and the words flow all day, but not me. My brain starts shutting down around Hour #4 or 4000-5000 words, whichever comes first.

(Hint: the clock almost always comes first.)

As for "process" in the creative development sense, well, it's hard to say. Sometimes I draw up rough outlines or synopses, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have timelines all sketched out, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I know how a book ends before I've got the first chapter written, sometimes I figure it out as I get there.

I don't really have a single way I go about it; each book is different, I guess.
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Bonus: Naked Greyson, for it is summer and he is otherwise too fluffy to be very comfortable, bless his heart.