What are some of the challenges of your work?
The human life is so short that a day can’t go by when we don’t learn something new. Even seventy good years of living only amount to six hundred thousand hours. And so when you want to craft a story – any story – there is always research to be done, there’s always characterisation to be pondered over. Even the darkest and dirtiest story needs a literary shine, and to achieve that you need to do two things. The first is to learn how to write, not just to vomit words onto a manuscript and consider it a piece of art when it’s really a steaming mess. The second is to delve right into the heart of your story, be it a piece of flash fiction or the world setting of an epic fantasy series. Time is short, and mastering an art not only takes a lot of time, but it’s also something that very few writers can lay claim to achieving. Me, I’ve barely bested the foot-hills of the moutain, so far.
For the Verragos Tapestry, and the ongoing creation of world and story, it’s been a huge exploration of self and an incredible journey into languages and etymology, geography and geology, human society through the ages, cosmology, and a whole host of other interesting areas of research.
My short story When Gods Awaken is less than 5000 words long, but there’s a lot to be found in those words, between the humour. I researched physics, the Big Bang and other astronomical phenomena, the book of Genesis and the creation myth, Earth history from the time when neanderthals and gigantopithecus were still around, and much more. But people don’t see all that on a conscious level when they read it, though hopefully it shows on a subconscious level, or a further read-through, and adds to the overall experience.
What compelled you to write your first book?
2011 was the year I realised I wanted to be a writer. It was a long-overdue realisation, after having been an avid reader of fantasy, science fiction and horror novels from the age of seven until the age of thirty … (mumble) … until today. At the time, I was studying Tolkien’s Arda, which is to Middle Earth what Earth is to Europe; people don’t realise how much richly-detailed lore they’re missing out on when they only know about The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
I remember thinking to myself, “I love this. This is world-building at its finest. I want to do that.” So I began. And boy did I not realise how steep a learning curve it would be to become not just a writer, but a good writer. So while I’d received my catalyst to write, those first attempts at creating stories were appalling, because I hadn’t learned how to polish and tighten my prose. I know when a story is polished enough to be shared with the world, and my time for sharing came in 2014 when I began releasing my short stories and poems between September and January.
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