Adult readers - a reprise

So, partly as a result of my previous post about getting feedback from adult readers, I accepted the offer of a few friends who said they'd be happy to read my a novels.  I've got 2 readers - both colleagues - reading Hacking the Dragon and 1 reading Big Brother's Little Sister, with his 13 year old daughter reading it, too.  I'm hoping that a good FB and Twitter friend will be happy to read the latter, too - she is, after all, the person who after whom the main baddy is named.

And 1 of them has already finished, and read the book really quickly.  I'm very, very grateful, and looking forward to his feedback.  Very much.  Except that I'm also quite nervous about it.  He's already mentioned that he found it a real page-turner, which is a great relief.  In fact, it's probably the very best thing he could have said, because the thing I'm most interested in, as far as my readers go, is that they want to read to the end and find out what happens.

But what else?  Is the characterisation awful?  Is the plotting obvious, or just unconvincing?  Is the pacing too quick, too slow?  I don't know.  Maybe there are some plot points that don't hold together.

We'll see - I have only myself to blame for asking for more feedback, but if I'm ever going to be a published author, or expand my readership beyond a few friends and family, then I need to be ready to accept that other people are going to read it.  And that they won't like everything they read.  Sometimes because what I've written needs work.  Sometimes because the style doesn't suit them.  Of course, in the latter case, it's their fault, because my writing is, in fact, perfect, and doesn't need any work at all.

Or something.

Anyway - I'm looking forward to hearing the feedback.  Whatever it is (almost).

Favourite authors: Melissa Scott

The Womens Room UK is a great organisation which seeks to help the media in the UK find female experts on all sorts of topics, and was founded as a reaction to the under-representation of women's voices in the media.  It's a great group of people, and has a very active following on Twitter at @TheWomensRoomUK.  Today, they asked people to name their favourite female authors, and I chose Melissa Scott.

I can't remember when I first came across Scott, but I think the first of her books I read was Trouble and her Friends.  I hesitate to pigeon-hole her work, but it's broadly science fiction, and often has an element of cyberpunk.  It's also always refreshing, but what really stands out for me is the positive LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans) characters that she introduces.  A number of the books explore issues of gender and sexuality, but mostly, the characters are just, well, there, and the question of their sexuality, in particular, is incidental: it's just part of who they are.  There are times when this - or their gender - may be relevant to the main plot, but often it's not.  To give an example, I've just re-read The Shapes of Their Hearts, where one of the characters, Traese, is a woman living on her own with sporadic, but non-physical contact with another woman.  Is there a longing there for a deeper relationship?  She (Traese) also speculates briefly on whether two or more of the other (male) characters may be more than partners in the professional sense, but this feels like an honest and unforced reflection which fits effortlessly into the story.

I also like the fact that Scott's main characters are often female, and as the protagonists in both of my novels (Hacking the Dragon and Big Brother's Little Sister) are girls, I wanted to nominate her because her writing was part of what spurred me on to write books for my daughters.  She's exactly the sort of writer that I hope they'll grow up to read when they're a little older.

Whilst writing this, I've discovered that Scott has her own Twitter account at @blueterraplane, so go and have a look/follow.

What's with the title? Or "The wife is always right".

So, what's "Mike Bursell - deconstructed by default" all about then?  You may well ask.  Or not.  Well, the first bit, obviously, is my name.  I thought it would be useful to include it.  The second bit?  "Self-indulgent twaddle" Catherine, my lovely wife, would call that.  Did call that, when I told her.  Well, actually, she didn't use the word "twaddle", but an equally British but rather more "Anglo-Saxon" term.

You see, I spent the first 2 years of my university career (rather a grand term, but let's agree to let it ride) studying English with an achingly right-on group of tutors who were generally battling against what they saw as the reactionary literary critical methodologies of a painfully out-of-touch department.  Now, they may have been achingly right-on, and may have felt somewhat ostracised by the rest of their faculty, but they were also excellent and enthusiastic educators, and they taught me and my variously enthusiastic peers the joys (jouissances?) of Derrida, deconstructionism, post-structuralism and all the rest.  And the thing is, it stuck.  I can't pretend that I bring a deconstructionist critique or hermeneutic of suspicion to my every day-to-day encounters with each product manual, O'Reilly-published technical guide or online HOWTO or FAQ around me, and my initial thought on discovering a new author is not, if we are honest, "ah - this author is dead, and his/her intentions and biographical impact are zero", in a ho-ho-ho Barthes-ian way, but I did come away with a fairly postmodernist take on the world.

But let's at least agree to allow me to profess that I have "deconstructionist tendencies", and that, as a self-confessed "author", my first, and default position is to deconstruct myself and call, if you will, my own bluff.

Catherine will, at this point, turn her eyes to the heavens and require another glass of wine.  And she's quite right - as always.

You see: self-indulgent twaddle.

Being an author - first thoughts

I'm an author: there, I've said it.  I get the feeling that saying it - or writing it - takes you at least half way there.  I've finished 2 novels now, and I'm looking for an agent for the first one: "Hacking the Dragon".  The other one ("Big Brother's Little Sister") is currently resting - in the way of chronically-under-employed acting types - before I come back to it and edit it up. 

Hacking the Dragon has been through two re-visits, and now feels ready to face some agents.  I got some very good feedback on it just as I was starting BB'sLS, but was too far into that to risk working on Hacking the Dragon.  I'm glad I waited: BB'sLS was flowing very well, and I think interrupting that wouldn't have been good for it.  Equally, more time to let Hacking the Dragon stew in my unconscious let me come to terms with the suggestions, and give it a bit more space.

So - what's it about?  Well, it's probably fair to call it light cyberpunk science fiction for young adults.  That sounds awfully clinical, though.  Maybe best to explain who it's for.  To be frank, it's for my eldest daughter - let's call her J.  When she started to get really into reading, I looked around, and couldn't see the sort of thing that I like reading, but for children.  Particularly for girls.  That felt awful: my two daughters - J and M - enjoy science and watching geeky programmes on TV, and I was pretty sure they'd enjoy reading about it, too.  It turned out I was right.

I started writing it partly as an exercise in introducing the girls to Linux and geekery.  Which was a terrible, terrible idea.  I then carried on writing it because I thought that the plot was quite cool.  Which was better, but still a pretty bad plan.  I finished writing it because I'd grown interested in the characters, and how they were going to cope with what was going on around them.  The plot unfurled round them.  That was a significant improvement.

I'll save a synopsis for another post, but what I wanted to write about on this blog was the process of writing.  I really enjoy writing, and I find it fascinating.  I know that I've got better at the craft of writing between Hacking the Dragon (now around 65,000 words) and BB'sLS (currently around 115,000 words), and I wanted a place to reflect on the process of writing, and to get comments and feedback.

There may not be much in this post that merits comment yet, but if there's anything you're interested to say, or hear about, get in touch.  More will, as they say, follow.