1. SF

I write science fiction. A little horror, occasionally, but mostly SF. To the general public, this might seem a peculiar choice, but to me it's perfectly reasonable. To put it bluntly, I can't imagine any other way to write.

Science fiction (aka sci-fi) falls under the umbrella of speculative fiction, which is how I prefer to describe what I write. It's not all spaceships and aliens and scantily-clad women. There's much more to it than that. It's often described as "the literature of ideas", with no limitation placed on the ideas one can explore, be they technological, psychological, sociological, theological, etc. It has, in fact, been described as the literature of the 20th century -- which might sound odd until you consider how broad the field is. It includes classic works such as Lord of the Rings, 1984, Home of the Brave, The Day of the Triffids and Neuromancer -- and, closer to home, Goldsworthy's Honk if You Are Jesus and Bradley's Deep Field. The inclusion of the latter two books may surprise some people (including the publishers, who determinedly avoid any mention of SF on their covers) but the only definition of SF which could possibly exclude them is one which makes it a condition that SF must be written badly.

I'm not going to argue with anyone who insists that SF is inherently badly written, or respond that capital-L literature isn't worth reading either, for different reasons. Both have their strengths. All I'm going to say is that, unlike 20^th century literature, music and art in general, which are sometimes, arguably, caught up in form rather than content, SF is usually more interested in the content than style. (I'm qualifying everything I say because there are always exceptions.)

By content, I'm referring to the origins of story-telling -- the tales told around firesides to friends and relatives about gods and monsters, extolling simple but important social mores and/or teaching the youngsters about the real world. This doesn't mean that such tales are simplistic -- anything but: people are still arguing about the bible three thousand years after it was written. But it seems to me that the dual purposes of education and entertainment, not necessarily but most successfully both, is what originally drove story-telling, and drives most popular fiction today.

SF is, IMHO, the only literature that can educate and entertain with absolute freedom. It is therefore a return to the literature of our origins.

So that's the genre I fit into. More towards the story end than the changing-the-world end, I must admit. I've been devouring a diet of junk SF since a very early age, and some people might believe that, having been raised on a diet of crap, one should expect little less than that to emerge down the tracks. "You are what you eat," and all that. But in some ways, I'm happy to describe myself as a hack: I'm not pushing any boundaries; I'm not seeking to revolutionise anything; I'm not intending to take any serious risks. I'm under no illusions, in other words. I just want to do my job as well as I can -- and part of that includes submitting my manuscript to my publisher on time, which, if I took every effort to make it word-perfect and timeless in every respect, would probably never happen.

2: Methodology

That may sound a little mercenary, and it is. There is, inevitably, an element of compromise to, and a drive to efficiency in, any profession. Writing should be no different. I take pride in my work on every level. If I touch a reader, I'm glad. If they come back to be touched again, I'm even more glad. And just because I'm not aspiring to literary greatness doesn't mean I'm not aspiring to anything. I'm always trying to better myself -- be it in the fields of characterisation, plot, scene-setting, or whatever. There's always room for improvement.

At the same time, I'm aware that writing for a living is a privileged and perilous prospect. How long I'll be able to do so is contingent to a certain extent on how business-like I conduct myself with editors, agents and the public -- so that has to be part of my job too. If I ignore the market and everyone working in it, then I won't be doing this for very long. And I want to be doing this for a very long time. I don't want to publish one book, then disappear. I want to be writing when I'm eighty. And without making money, without selling books, there's no way I'm going to make it that far.

This hard reality has to be faced every day. I've been facing it for ten years, now. Before then, I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. Once, I was going to be an archaeologist. Then, a musician. For a while, I toyed with being an accountant, but that was a complete disaster.

It took me until 1989 to look seriously at all the things I enjoyed doing, and realised that I'd already been a writer most of my life. In the years leading up to 1989, I finished four novels. I wrote them for fun, to give me something to do in my spare time. I was writing because that was what I enjoyed doing. It took me over twenty years to realise how important that was.

Instead of working hard at a job I hated in order to afford the things I wanted to do in my shrinking leisure hours, why didn't I do something I enjoyed as a job? Then, when I had spare time, I could do even more stuff I enjoyed.

It sounded good in theory. No-one had told me about the 70-hour weeks at that point. But I knew that I had to work hard because, otherwise, how would I get anywhere? Plenty of people want to be writers, but few of them are. Why is that? Because the market is tough, and when you start writing you know nothing.

Luckily for me, I came across two pieces of advice that helped me along my way. I can't recall where the first one came from, but it went: "If you want to be a writer, sit down and write one million words. By the end of it, you might be starting to get good." A million words sounded like a lot to me at the start, and it is. It's about ten average novels, or an awful lot of short stories. The only way I'd reach it, I knew, was to start and to keep going. If the first stories were awful, well, maybe I'd improve around the million-word-mark. And if I didn't improve, I would give up.

The other advice was from Locus editor Charlie Brown, who addressed a bunch of new writers at a 1994 workshop in LA. Although I'd been writing for about three years, by then, and had reached maybe half a million words, I was still green. The advice he gave us budding writers was to give up now to save years of frustration and heartbreak. Go out and get a life, he told us, for the sake of your family and friends. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to make it -- so why torment yourself?

These two insights -- that improvement only comes from plodding, slightly insane persistence, and that ultimately I won't get anywhere anyway -- have kept me going for years. I wouldn't be where I am now without them.

It doesn't get any easier, though. Early on, before I had a contract, I was terrified of slaving away for years and having nothing to show for it. I didn't want to give up, either, so I worked like a madman to avoid having to do that. Later, after my first novel was published, still nothing was guaranteed; the greatest stress, the greatest insecurity, came from the thought that the bubble might burst and I'd have to start over, elsewhere. Even today, now that I have contracts, that fear is still there. I can't afford to wait around for inspiration. I have editors to impress and deadlines to meet. If there's writing to be done I have to do it, even if I'm tired, or the idea has gone from blinding white-hot inspiration to something so boring or flawed that I have no idea how I could've ever thought it worth pursuing.

3: Results

I started writing, with the hope that I might one day make a living out of it, in 1990. I didn't take any courses; I didn't stop to analyse too heavily what I was doing. I just did it -- and I remain to this day firmly convinced that this is the best way, for most people, to start, if they really want to. The only things someone really has to do to become a writer is read a lot, and write a lot. As long as you can look objectively at your work and those of the authors you like, applying what you see in both isn't difficult, in the long-run.

So that's what I did. After a year I had 10 stories, half of them horror, all of them awful. In the second year I produced about the same; in the third, my output was up to 20, mostly science fiction, and it stayed that high for two more years; in ten years, I've finished over a hundred stories, and had over half published. That's not to say I haven't had my share of rejections. I certainly have. At last count, they outnumbered publications four to one, and I still write the odd awful story that will never be published.

But back in my second year, I'd never submitted a story to a magazine. Like every writer I was terrified of rejection. At some point I guess it twigged that I would have to start -- for two reasons: one, to get a measure of how I was improving (friends and relatives are no help, really) and two, to make some progress towards my goal. I was under no illusions that my work would never be rejected; I had to deal with it one day, so I figured it might as well be then.

To my surprise, those first submissions sold. So I submitted more, and kept submitting, and kept submitting, even as the inevitable rejections came and started to mount up. Gradually, my backlog of unpublished publishable stories shrank (and eventually I got better at working out what was publishable and what wasn't), so I wrote more and I sent them out too. For a while, I had over 30 stories in submission at various markets. It was a full-time job just keeping up with all the paperwork.

I was treating writing very seriously indeed by 1992. Right from the start, I considered myself to be a professional writer -- even when I wasn't making a cent (which was most of the time). It wasn't a hobby. One day (went the plan) I would come up with goods enough to prove that I had made the right choice. I even gave myself a deadline: if I hadn't sold a novel by the year 2000, then the chances of me ever doing so ever were pretty slim, and I swore that I would seek an alternate vocation. It simply had to be faced: that not making a living from writing would inevitably erode the life I wanted to live. Being poor and still an amateur for the rest of my life simply wouldn't suffice -- even though being a poor professional sometimes doesn't feel much better.

Have I mentioned I'm a lazy person? I'm probably the laziest person I know. If I don't want to do something, it's that much harder to do -- the same with anyone. But I suspect that a lot of artists are like me. In order to avoid doing jobs we don't really want to do, like accounting, we'll dive into something we do enjoy and mutter about 'the flow' or 'inspiration' and 'needing isolation' to justify our decision. That's what it was for me, at first. I rationalised it by saying that there would be no half measures: if was going to give it a go, then it was an all or nothing attempt. But at the end of the day, I was enjoying it, and that kept me going.

So I was working at least 40 hours a week, usually more, on top of casual jobs to pay the rent. I seemed to be getting somewhere with shorts: I won a couple of prizes and had an awful lot published -- enough, later, to justify a collection and to draw the attentions of a publisher or two. But through all this, I was acutely aware that I would never make money from short stories. No matter how good I became, or how prolific, I needed to write a novel.

The first thing I learned when I tried it seriously is that there's a whole order of magnitude difference between writing short stories and writing novels. That may sound obvious to some of you, but it took me by surprise. The hand-waving that might propel a reader a reader through 5,000 words just isn't going to satisfy across 100,000 words. Everything is different: world-building, character development, plotting, pacing, style, and so on. There is also a difference in the way ideas can be handled.

But like everything else in my career so far, persistence paid off. I worked at it, and I'm still working at it. Now I concentrate on novels instead of short stories. I've just finished my sixth, and I'm considering which of four to be my seventh. The one I ultimately choose will be the one that stands to give me the best mix of enjoyment and money.

Again, this may seem a little mercenary, but I don't think so. In 1993 I co-wrote The Unknown Soldier, a trashy space opera novel set in a gaming universe invented by someone else, not for the money (what little of it there was), but because I love this sort of fiction. It was also too good an opportunity to turn down: how many new writers, after all, are actually asked by a publisher to write a novel? Ignoring a chance like that would be practically begging to fail.

The same with Metal Fatigue and its reference to movies. The Resurrected Man sprang in part from my other love of detective fiction. The forthcoming Evergence trilogy is space opera, again, and the fantasy series I'm working towards at the moment has links to my childhood. All of these books reflect my personal passions, but all of them have proven to be, in one way or another, justifiable in personal and professional senses. And why shouldn't they be? The stereotype of the writer starving for his or her art is, I'm sure, propagated by the publishing industry, which is ever keen to reduce royalties and thereby reduce their overheads.

Every story I've written has come from part of me that really wanted to write it. That may sound dumb or simplistic, but it's true. I simply couldn't do it without enjoyment on some level, just as one can't do anything enjoyable full-time without making some money out of it. There's room for both. It's that balance I strive for.

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And so it continues to this day. The work is endless, and sometimes very frustrating, but I can't quit. I love it too much despite the work, even though I'm such a lazy person. That might make some sort of twisted writing junkie, but I can think of far worse ways to spend my time. And part of me suspects that this is how I know I'm getting somewhere, in the long run: if there was no resistance there'd be no progress. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel; if, one day, I become truly successful, then I can go back to being lazy again and catching up on all the books I've wanted to read in the last decade. Maybe ...