Questions About The Golden Circuit (The Smith Chronicles, #1)

by John K. Irvine (Goodreads Author)

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I can't wait to read the next book in the Smith Chronicles and wondered where got the the idea for the Golden Circuit?

John Irvine Hi Wendy, I've only just seen this question on my Goodreads page, so apologies for the late reply. First off, thanks for asking the question! It's qui…moreHi Wendy, I've only just seen this question on my Goodreads page, so apologies for the late reply. First off, thanks for asking the question! It's quite a thrill to have someone ask something about the books.

The idea for 'The Golden Circuit' came from a short piece of free-writing I did in 2013. It was one of about 5 such things I wrote one day, randomly picking a topic and writing freely. One piece was about a tough, young girl thinking about her life, while she was in class at school. Just a short sketch of internal thoughts. One of the other pieces was a paragraph or two attempting to imitate the language of 'space -opera'. These ideas combined to create the Mikita Smith story and the Captain Jameson story. I gradually came up with the basic premise of the book through developing these ideas.

The plot took a while. It needed a lot of work to get the events to work out properly, but also making sure that everything work chronologically. Everything happens over 4 days, so distances travelled needed careful thought. How long would it take then to travel from Tapi-36 to one of the moons? Would it take the same time in different kinds of space craft? These things kept me up at night !! But the main method for ideas was simpy to ask questions like: where do they go now? what's the weather like? who do they meet? does this character have a family? friends? what is her ambition? And gradually ideas come into your head, and some kind of direction comes out of it, eventually, if you keep writing enough, a 60,000 word book appears! However, when I presented the first draft to my editor (my wife, who is a pro TV writer) she cut my first chapter! I was devastated (I still am, LOL). It was 2,000 words down the pan! She said I didn't need all the background stuff, it made for a slow exposition. She was right of course, but I did manage to sneak some of the text back in at later points! So, Go Me!

The writing of the book took about 4-5 months, with another 2 months of editing. As it was my first book, there was a sharp learning curve going on at the same time, this I found was more to do with plotting and discovering the nuts and bolts of prose writing, than writing dialogue and such-like. Technical things like not repeating words too close to each other in the text (like at the end of Chapter 1 where I alternate 'lift' and 'elevator'), when to write the name of the character and not 'she', or when to leave off tags like 'said Polo' or 'said Mikita' after speech... These kinds of things that can really disrupt the flow of the narrative.

Anyway, my apologies again for the delay in replying, and I hope that answered your question. I'm so happy that you enjoyed the books.

All best,

JKI(less)

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