Completely Nuts (and Bolts)

When readers ask me questions, it's usually about the mechanics of writing, the methodology and routine. There is method (though sometimes it seems more like madness) and I can describe it.

I write on a laptop, tapping away with two fingers. I never learned to touch-type. I wrote on an iBook until its premature death late in 2007, when I was thankfully able to retrieve the half-finished Dark Echo Word document from its hard drive. My son lent me the old Compaq Presario which has served faithfully ever since. (You're not getting it back, Gabriel).

My chapters always average about 8,000 words and the novels just over 100,000 words in total, except for the books I did for Severn House, where for reasons to do with production costs, they limit manuscripts to 90,000 words. I think novels in the genre in which I write should give the reader 300-plus pages to read to deliver full value. It's just a personal opinion.

I write in the mornings and I write fast, with only two or three sentences of notes sketched out to keep me on track for each chapter. When I start a novel I'll do 2-3,000 words a day. However - and this is where the madness manifests - as the story progresses, I get up earlier and earlier and write more and more. Towards a novel's conclusion I'll be starting at 4.am and doing 4-5,000 words, stopping at around 2.pm and revising what I've written that day in the evening after a break from it intended to encourage a bit of objectivity.

Location doesn't much matter. I started The Memory of Trees in Brighton and finished it in Southport. I wrote The Colony in Shaftsbury. I started The Lazarus Prophecy in Southport and finished it in West London.

I don't do as much research as people think. There is quite a lot of history in my books, but I did my degree in history and the subject fascinates me. The stuff I put in the books tends to be stuff I knew already from reading about it for pleasure. That said, I did research the Antichrist - and the Whitechapel Murders - for Prophecy.

Is writing enjoyable? Yes; hugely so. But it's also very sedentary and I counterbalance the physical sloth with a lot of running. It keeps me fit and it's when problems with my plots tend to resolve themselves.

There's no master-plan (maybe I'd be more successful if there was). I just write the kind of books I'd like to read if someone else was writing them. That might be simplistic and it might be self-indulgent, but it's the only way I can retain any integrity.