Liverpool-born comic writer and novelist Mike Carey is another talented creator with fingers in many pies – perhaps best known for the Eisner Award-nominated Lucifer comic from DC Comics’s Vertigo imprint, Mike is not only the ongoing writer for Marvel’s X-Men: Legacy comic series, but the fifth novel in his series following the adventures of occultist and ghost-finder Felix Castor, The Naming of the Beasts, was released by Orbit/Little, Brown earlier this month. The Felix Castor novels are gritty and noirish, and written with a flair that makes them, quite honestly, absolutely fascinating. The urban fantasy genre is crowded with vampires and gothic romance and teen angst, but Felix’s world is far darker and dangerous, and all the better for it. The magical and supernatural system that Mike has crafted for Felix Castor is also highly original and imaginative. Yes, you might call me a fan. Have I mentioned how good the Felix Castor novels are yet?
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Mike Carey.
Name
Mike Carey
Location
Just outside London, England
What do you write?
A lot of different stuff. Comic books have been my mainstay for at least the last twelve years, and they’re still (to put it bluntly) my bread and butter. But I’ve written five novels now, too, and a dozen or so short stories, and I’ve done both TV and movie screenplays. Radio plays, computer game scripting… there’s actually very little I haven’t at least had a go at. These days I divide my time more or less equally between comic books and prose fiction, except when some screenplay work comes in.
The Naming of the Beasts, the fifth book in the Felix Castor series
What are your writing habits?
I’m a spectacularly undisciplined writer, but I’m also a neurotically driven one so nobody notices.
My editors see me hitting deadlines, handling a very large workload, and they assume I must be efficient and organised. I’m honestly not at all. A woman I used to work with back when I was a teacher said that when she saw me working, she was reminded of the physical concept of entropy: energy dissipating itself into a vacuum. I work long hours, get a lot done, but I have no plan of attack. I just go from one thing to the next.
My working day tends to start when the kids have gone to school and my wife has gone to work (unless it’s a day when she’s at home). That would be about 8.00am, most days. I work through, with breaks, until the kids come home at 4.00, and then there’s a period when I’m both working and not working. I’ll talk to them about their day, maybe make dinner for the family, play a game of chess or some other board game with my sons, or whatever. But usually I’ll go back to the keyboard later in the evening and put a couple more hours in. I’ll also take a lot of phone calls in the evening from my American editors, because their day kicks in so much later than ours.
I work in bursts, if I’m honest: short periods of intensely productive writing, followed by lulls. I wish there was some way of getting out of those tramlines, but that seems to be the way I am. On a day when I’m chasing a deadline I can swing the balance a little, spend more time actually working, but the down time still has to be in there. But like I said, it seems to work: I get a lot done. If I’m writing prose, I’ll typically have a 2000-word-a-day baseline. With comics, I’ll usually aim to spend one day planning, one day roughing, one day writing.
What software or tools do you use?
Microsoft Word for novels, comic scripts and radio plays. Final Draft for TV and movie screenplays.
Final Draft is wonderful – a piece of software that’s absolutely fit for purpose. Word is more of a general function tool – the Swiss army penknife of word processors. It was a happy day when I discovered the macro function, though.
I’ve found over the years that I can’t plan on a computer – it just doesn’t feel organic enough. It’s like whatever you decide gets stuck there on the screen and you can’t move on from it. So I have this massive page-a-day diary where I do my planning, mostly in the form of an endless catechism. “Why does he hide the revolver? He’s afraid that someone will pick it up and guess from the weight that it’s not loaded. Could there be two revolvers? Not unless we’ve shown both of them in the earlier scene, and then we give the game away.” And so on and so on. It’s a crazy thing, but it works for me. I’ve tried on occasion to move to one of these “idea processing” programmes, most of which allow you to draw mind-map diagrams of varying degrees of complexity: but scribble on a page seems to be a closer approximation to how my mind works…
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Mike, thank-you very much!
Mike’s website is MikeAndPeter.com, which he shares with artist Peter Gross. Mike can also be found on Facebook.
The Felix Castor novels are available on Amazon and at all good bookstores, as can collected editions of X-Men: Legacy, Lucifer, and his other comic work. For current issues of X-Men: Legacy, check your local comic store!
Mike is appearing at the Forbidden Planet London Megastore (179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JR) on Thursday 10th September 2009 from 6-7pm, where he will be signing copies of The Naming of the Beasts. I hope you can make it!
