LAUREN ALDER’S ELEVEN BOOK WRITING QUESTIONS, Answered By Simon Collis
- Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1972. After a few odd jobs I’ve settled down into the software industry and have moved all over the country – I think I once worked out that I moved house over twenty-five times in my life so far. My most recent move was to Lisbon in Portugal where I now live with my fiancee, two dogs and nine cats.
- What is the title of your current work (WIP or recently published). and what is its genre?
My current work doesn’t really have a single genre, actually, but lots. I’m writing a short story a week for 2018 and publishing them on my website. I’ll then be compiling the stories into two volumes, with some light editing, the first one of which will be available later in the year.
Because they’re short stories, and also because I don’t want to repeat myself by writing the same story again and again, the genres are mixed: there’s some horror in there, some fantasy, some dystopian futurism, quite a bit of crime, and some even with a more “literary” bent.
I have set myself some ground rules though: no sexual serial killers, or locked room mysteries, or anything else that has become cliché through the endless parade of murder-of-the-week shows that television seems to specialise in these days.
- Is this book suitable for children, or is it adults-only? If there’s mature content, what type of mature content does the book contain?
I tend to write more for an adult market, but that said there’s almost no sex or romance in my work, simply because that’s areas I don’t feel I have the right writing tone to tackle. Plus in both cases I think you need to add space to the work rather than the more compact form that I’m working in at the moment.
In addition, the language I use is all “family-friendly” simply because I’m aware that I’m not good at swearing. That’s in real life, as well. So I’m careful to use that sort of language only when I absolutely have to, because otherwise I get into an infinite loop of editing it out because I feel it was inappropriate, putting it back because the paragraph now doesn’t read right, then taking it out again because it feels like I made the sentence even worse, then putting it back because I think I might have had it right the first time…
The subject matter, however, is not so family friendly: there’s been quite a few murders (although they mainly happen “off screen”), and some of the themes are quite adult.
- What inspired you to write this work?
For years I’ve had people saying that I should write more, write a novel, try and get published. I’ve never really had the confidence, or the portfolio, to do that, and then in December last year this idea came to me – write a story, every week, for a year, and publish them.
I’ve stuck to that so far and we’re in September now, with thirty-five stories out (and it will be 36 by the end of this weekend).
I don’t have a firm schedule but I try and publish the story on a Saturday. On a Wednesday, I do a “behind the scenes” piece, explaining a little bit about where the inspiration for the story came from, where I got some of the ideas from, and some of the rejected idea I used. I don’t know if anyone actually reads them, but I like to think of them like my “director’s commentary” for each one.
- What makes this book special, unique, or interesting? How does it “stand out”?
I guess mainly the challenge aspect is what stands out. Everything you read is specifically written for that week, so if you want to see a style evolving, you can do that. If you want to read something new and different every week, you can do that. You won’t know what you’re getting, how long it will be, whether there’s a happy or tragic ending, or even whether the characters from this week are going pop up again in a few weeks time.
I’m already planning the compilation books, and little will change about the stories, although I will reorder them to try and break things up a bit, so that two horrors don’t follow each other, and you don’t get two stories about the same characters together (unless they specifically follow on from each other).
- Tell us some key information about the main character(s), both protagonists and antagonists.
You would think that in a collection of short stories there aren’t any main characters that I could talk about, but I have a few recurring characters.
For a start, there’s Munro Elkwood, who owns an antiques shop. He tends to sell haunted and unpleasant things, and I’ve done a couple of stories where people have bought things from him and they have changed their life in some way – usually not for the better. The original story had him visiting an old man and claiming that he has eternal life: although whether that’s a genuine claim or whether he was trying to scare his assistant is something I intend to come back to before the end of the year.
Recently I introduced a character that has been in my head for years – she was actually the main character in a short story I wrote when I was fourteen, and she is a medium who really not only doesn’t believe in what she does, she actually thinks she is a fraud but goes along with it anyway because it’s all she knows how to do. There’s a whole backstory about her that I won’t go into, because we really don’t have the space here, but I do have some more plans that include her.
And finally there’s a journalist called Graeme, who is a music critic. He’s a minor character in “The March Society”, and the narrator in “Zero Nine”. I do have plans for him – I originally created him, and Estrella Raine, who is his girlfriend – for a story called “The Event” that I wrote about five years ago. I might include that story as a “bonus feature” in one of the collection volumes…
- What is your back cover blurb? Or if you don’t have one yet, how would you pitch your work in 200 words or less?
I have started work on a blurb for volume one, so here’s my work in progress. Please, be gentle:
<blockquote>What happens when you challenge yourself to write a short story ever week for a year?
A haunted antique shop, a self-doubting medium, the end of the world and a few murders – and that’s just the first six months.
Along the way you’ll meet a boy that can’t sleep without a monster in the cupboard, a wolf that changes into a man at the full moon, and even find out what the best-selling fantasy series is in a world full of centaurs, goblins, dwarfs and elves.
This collection brings together the first twenty-six short stories from the author’s “Year of Short Stories” challenge, covering a wide range of genres, and includes some previously unpublished bonus material.</blockquote>
- Share a tempting bit of the plot with us. Is there a particular scene that you’re really excited about? Why does it excite you?
It’s difficult to pick one. I’m particularly fond of a trilogy of stories that started with “If, Never”, because they all tell the story of the same murder from three different viewpoints, and in each case end with what is, hopefully, a surprise ending.
“Doctor Fog” also stands out. I’d had this idea in my head and had wanted to write this for a long time. It’s basically an inverted version of the “monsters in the wardrobe” trope, in that in this case, a paedophile comes to “say goodnight” to a little boy, and the monster comes out and eats the paedophile. It was particularly hard to handle, because I wanted to get the scene close enough that it was unequivocal what was about to happen, but not close enough to make the story really difficult to read. I ended up with a scene where the mother is saying to a psychiatrist – in the hearing of the boy – that he can’t go to sleep any more unless she says there’s a monster in the cupboard, and the bigger teeth it has, the better he sleeps. It felt like a good payoff for what was otherwise quite a dark story.
- Share up to 800 words of your current work with us (with an intro of up to 200 words to establish context).
Here’s a scene from “Poppy And Zara”. The protagonist is worried that his wife and child are sick and he’s wanting to get home early from a conference, so he’s trying to check out of the hotel early. This is from fairly early on in the story, and at this point the protagonist is still trying to balance his diminishing level of empathy for strangers versus concern for his family:
<blockquote>I packed my things quickly, and headed down for breakfast. It was empty. There were no tablecloths set, no knives and forks, no buffet – nothing.
“Hello?” I asked. The empty air made no reply.
I walked over to reception and rang the bell.
A thin man – not the man who’d booked me in yesterday – came out of the back office. He was sweating badly.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“No breakfast?”
He shook his head. “Most of the kitchen staff are sick, I’m afraid. There may be something open a little way up the highway.”
I nodded.
“May I apologise on behalf of the hotel,” he said, and leaned over to steady himself on the desk.
“I have an issue,” I said. “My daughter’s sick, so I need to check out early to get home. Is that OK?”
He nodded. “That will be fine.”
I handed over my key card and he placed it in the reader.
“I see here that will be -”
He suddenly bent double, and vomited, a substance that looked more blood than food, all over the desk and the computer. There was an electrical fizzing noise, a crack and a puff of smoke, and that seemed to be too much for the receptionist, who collapsed on the floor behind the counter.
I moved over to the side and looked over. He was curled in a foetal position, shivering.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine, sir.”
“What about my checking out?”
“We could just send you an invoice, sir, if that’s all right?”
“That’s fine,” I said, the bizarre nature of the conversation barely registering with me right now. “Can I get you anything? Or anyone?”
“I have an emergency pager on my belt,” he said. “I’ve pressed the button… someone will come.”
“OK.”
“You can leave, sir, it’s all right.”
“Are you sure? I mean…”
He closed his eyes. “Just leave me in peace,” he snapped.
“All right,” I said, and pulled back from the desk. I picked up my bag and headed out to the car park. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to catch whatever it was he had.</blockquote>
- What is the easiest part of writing for you? And what is the hardest?
The easiest is allowing the words to flow, and letting them lead you. It’s dangerous, though, because you can always end up somewhere that you didn’t intend to go.
The hardest, really, is when I can’t get started. When I know where I want the story to get to, but the route that it needs to take to get there is difficult. I have many half-worked out plots sat in notebooks, ready for use, that are missing sections – like a jigsaw puzzle where you’ve lost a key piece.
- Finally, if you could offer some advice to up-and-coming writers, what would that advice be?
I’m really still a beginner myself, so mainly my advice is to read and learn. Follow someone on Twitter or Facebook who is doing this – as many as you can – and read up how they did it. Read “The Curve” by Nicholas Lovell to understand how the model behind Patreon and Kickstarter works (The Curve was written in 2014, so very early on in this process).
Be your own sales and marketing: get on Facebook and Twitter, connect with your readers. Use Google Analytics on your website to see where people are coming from.
But most importantly – don’t give up. I can’t stress this enough: Do. Not. Give. Up. You might be tempted to, and giving up is really easy, but if you’re tempted, do what I do about making any life-changing decision (and I’ve made plenty of those over the years, as I’m sure everyone has): I ask myself, “how much more will I regret it more not doing this, than doing it?”. I’ve found that’s my best motivator of all.
BONUS INFORMATION
Your FB page: https://www.facebook.com/simoncollisauthor/
Your Twitter link: https://twitter.com/NomisSilloc
Your WordPress (or other) blog: https://www.simoncollis.com/
Your online book purchasing link(s): Nothing as yet, everything (so far) is available free to read on https://www.simoncollis.com/.
The Many Worlds of Lauren Alder 