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.

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.

X-Men: Legacy

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.

Lucifer, volume 1

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!

I must admit, I’m a latecomer to comics. I never liked them as a child, and aside from the odd Batman and Iron Man issue sometime in the late 1980s, it wasn’t until I was 25 that, on a whim, I picked up my first copy of seminal British weekly, 2000AD. Six years on, my taste is more for the American superhero periodicals of DC Comics (a lot of which, ironically, are both written and drawn by British artists), but two names still stick out as key writers who helped develop my latent appreciation for sequential art.

Leah Moore is the daughter of the legendary Alan Moore – and while I’m sure she’s sick of that being mentioned every time, given her own talent for writing, Alan is to me the greatest writer (comic or otherwise) in the English language, and I’m starting to think there is something genetic going on. John Reppion is Leah’s husband, and together they have formed a mighty writing partnership that has given us Albion (with Alan Moore, Shane Oakley and George Freeman), Wild Girl (with Shawn McManus), and Doctor Who: The Whispering Gallery (with Ben Templesmith), among many other titles. They also share my interest in the strange and Fortean, John having written one of my favourite features to appear in Fortean Times, The Childe of Hale, as well as 800 Years of Haunted Liverpool from The History Press. It came as a surprise to find myself living more or less in the same region as the pair when I moved to the UK in late 2006, and although I’ve only had the pleasure of their company on an afternoon in Manchester hot enough to melt boron, we’ve had many fascinating exchanges on Twitter regarding the importance of tea, the influence of steampunk, and popular moustache styles of the late 19th/early 20th centuries.

Their latest projects as a writing team have all been for Dynamite Entertainment using classic characters from literature – The Trials of Sherlock Holmes (with Aaron Campbell), an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in The Complete Dracula (with Colton Worley), and coming in November, The Complete Alice in Wonderland (with Erica Awano).

Ladies and gentlemen, Leah Moore and John Reppion.

John Reppion and Leah Moore

Name
Leah Moore & John Reppion

Location
Toxteth in Liverpool, UK.

What do you write?
Leah: We write comics mainly. Recently the classic characters Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, but in the past we have written zombie stories, fantasy stories, straight superhero comics, all kinds of things really. We are work for hire, so we don’t do a lot of creator-owned stuff, and we don’t usually get much choice about what we write next. The normal route is our editors say they need something writing, and we say okay.

The Complete Dracula (Dynamite Entertainment, 2009)

We both write other things too, John writes articles for Fortean Times, Strange Attractor, anything that is a bit strange or interesting, and he’ll have a crack at it. He wrote a book 800 years of haunted Liverpool which was a round up of lots and lots of weird stories from the area we live in.

I do less writing outside of comics, and more drawing, but I did write the story which accompanied the 2007 Royal Mail Christmas stamps, which was a lovely project. We both have novels we want to write separately as opposed to together but we haven’t ever started such a big project, so we have yet to get going on them. Maybe we can fit a chapter or two in around the comics. Hopefully something will come of it anyway.

Doctor Who: The Whispering Gallery (IDW Publishing, 2009)

What are your writing habits?
John: We don’t have a proper fixed routine but that’s party due to the fact that our work is broken down into very different stages.

We consider the typing the easy part when it comes to comics because it’s very much the last thing we do. An ideal mid-project day would see us get up at nine or ten, sort ourselves out with breakfast and a wash and whatever, probably try to clear the email inbox and then start roughing pages out. We break our individual issues down into a numbered list of pages and put a brief description of what occurs next to the number. The list means we’ll know where we’re up to in terms of the plot. So, Leah would draw out some rectangles to represent the pages and we’d sit and talk about what happens, what shots we see, etc and then she will draw those panels in. Once we’ve got a decent number roughed (between four and eight usually, depending on how dense and complex the series is) we divide those roughs up between us, move to our computers and start typing.

The Complete Alice in Wonderland (Dynamite Entertainment, coming November 2009)

You don’t want to rough too far ahead because there’s a danger you’ll forget some of the discussion that occurred as the pages were drawn by the time you get to typing and miss something important out. Once the pages are typed we repeat the process. Dialoguing comes last – more often than not once the whole script is already typed out.

We break the day up with lots of cups of tea and a bit of marmite on toast (for me) and pink grapefruit cordial and cereal (for Leah). We’re usually interrupted by real life quite a lot, especially since we both write. Stuff like paying bills, shopping, etc which might not stop an individual working if they had a non-writing partner who could do things on the way to/from their job tends to impact more heavily on our schedule sadly.

What software or tools do you use?
Leah: We just use Word for the typing, we do all our planning and drawing out of pages in A4 books, so we can both see what the pages look like and we can discuss layout more easily. We can also go back and find notes and bits we have scribbled next to the comic pages.

Its really fun when we get the pages through from the artist to go back and look at my thumbnails and see how similar they are. We can really tell if an artist is on our wavelength by how close their pages are. Other than the workbook we usually have a fair amount of reference from the internet, or the books we keep handy. Every writer needs a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to hand, it’s the best resource you could have. We don’t really need much more than that, we used to have a laptop, but it was stolen, with the last issue of a series on it, so we stick with less portable hardware now!

Albion (Wildstorm, 2005-2006)

John: I’ve recently discovered that the sore wrist I get from using my mouse when the weather is hot can be avoided by wearing a sweat band on my wrist. It might sound stupid but it’s really, really helped and I recommend it to other writers!

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Leah and John, thank-you very much indeed!

Leah and John’s website is MooreReppion.com, and they can be found on Twitter as @leahmoore and @johnreppion. The Complete Dracula, The Trials of Sherlock Holmes, and the forthcoming The Complete Alice in Wonderland are from Dynamite Entertainment, and can be collected from your favourite comic store. Trade paperback collections of Albion and other works can be found at Amazon.

Leah and John are guests of the Merseyside Doctor Who Group on Saturday, 5th September at the Jacaranda, 21-23 Slater Street, Liverpool, L1 4BW from 1-5pm, where they will join Doctor Who Magazine artist Adrian Salmon talk about their work. Entry is just £1!

For those of us familiar with the world of podcast fiction, today’s writer in the hot seat needs no introduction. J. C. Hutchins kick-started the podcast novel revolution in 2006 with 7th Son, a serialised technothriller trilogy dealing the aftermath of the US President’s assassination… by a four-year-old child. While it started life as a podcast novel, the award-winning 7th Son was optioned for development as a feature film by Warner Bros in April this year, and will be released as a print novel trilogy by St. Martin’s Press, starting with 7th Son: Descent in October 2009.

The Hutch’s latest project is a mind-blowing interactive, multimedia, immersive supernatural thriller novel Personal Effects: Dark Art. This book comes with actual physical objects – driver’s licences, credit cards, psychiatric hospital certificates, and much more – that link the reader with the events of the story, and seeded through the book itself are phone numbers and websites which are real and can be called and visited. This engaging and exciting project is the result of a collaboration between Hutchins and game designer Jordan Weisman, and was published by St. Martin’s Press in June 2009. Hutchins has followed this with a Personal Effects: Sword of Blood, a free podcast prequel novella.

On top of all this, Hutchins is a champion of social media and an all-round top bloke. He’s also a frightening creative power, his friendly, charming exterior belying the horrific and twisted stories he delights in telling us with a childlike glee. An evil, evil, childlike glee. If you want further proof of his secret powers and not-so-secret genius, Hutchins teamed up with alt-culture and pin-up site Suicide Girls to create a Personal Effects-themed photoshoot. Suicide Girls is not safe for work and is adults-only, but a PG-13-rated photoset can be downloaded from JCHutchins.net. See? A genius. I wish I’d thought of that first…

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr J. C. Hutchins.

Podcasting's Mr Nice, J. C. Hutchins

Name
J.C. Hutchins

Location
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States

What do you write?
I write novels – technothrillers and supernatural/horror thrillers. I’m a lover of Crichton and King, and their inspiration and influence show up in my work. I also take great joy in crafting short stories, though I don’t write them as often as I probably should.

The interactive novel experience, Personal Effects: Dark Art

What are your writing habits?
Since I’m often spread pretty thin with my new media projects – twice- or thrice-weekly podcasts, promotion of my novel, social media outreach including twitter, pitches and answering emails – and a day gig, I consider myself a “binge writer.” I’ll go weeks without writing a word, and then dive head-first into a project.

When I’m writing, caffeine is omnipresent – and when I’m not chain-smoking on the balcony, typing away, I’m usually blasting music. Scene/mood-appropriate instrumental tunes, mostly. I aim for 4,000 words each day, and can go as high as 7,000 when I’m in the zone.

Juggling the mission-critical necessities of promotion and content creation bedevils me. It’s an intense workload, but I’m hungry to carve new paths in online fiction and published fiction. The effort is worth it.

7th Son: Descent, coming October 2009 from St. Martin's Press

What software or tools do you use?
For brainstorming, it’s good old fashioned pen and paper. I love the organic process of unearthing plot twists and character traits on the page. My notes are a flurry of arrows pointing from one bullet list to another… and lots of question marks. I find asking myself questions stimulates my mind to find answers… which begets more bullet points, arrows and question marks. It’s a blast.

These days, I craft my fiction using the Macintosh program Pages. It’s a very elegant word processor that gets out of the way and lets you type… but has the whiz-bang formatting tools I sometimes need. It also has a very powerful page design feature, which is very useful for me, since I create a lot of my own promotional materials.

For my new media projects, I use Garageband to record and edit my podcasts, Photoshop for graphic design, iMovie for video editing, and WordPress and TextWrangler for website management. I have a handful of other apps that I use for niche projects, but those are the biggies.

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J. C. Hutchins, thank-you very much!

J. C. can be found online on at JCHutchins.net and on Twitter as @jchutchins. Personal Effects: Dark Art is available on Amazon.com and at all good bookstores – if your local store doesn’t have a copy, ask them to order it! The prequel audio novella, Personal Effects: Sword of Blood, can be downloaded for free at SwordOfBlood.com. 7th Son: Descent drops on October 27th, and is available for pre-order at Amazon.com. For those who can’t wait, the entire 7th Son trilogy can still be downloaded, for free, from 7thSonNovel.com. A brand new recording of the print version of 7th Son is coming later in 2009, so stay tuned for that!

As if you didn’t know it, Scott Sigler is a New York Times Bestselling author, the king of podcast novels, and our Future Dark Overlord. He’s also a real gent, and his limited edition hardcover of The Rookie is due to ship at the end of the month. Just look at the blurb and pick your jaw up off the floor when you’re done:

Set in a lethal pro football league 700 years in the future, THE ROOKIE is a story that combines the intense gridiron action of “Any Given Sunday” with the space opera style of “Star Wars” and the criminal underworld of “The Godfather.”

Aliens and humans alike play positions based on physiology, creating receivers that jump 25 feet into the air, linemen that bench-press 1,200 pounds, and linebackers that literally want to eat you. Organized crime runs every franchise, games are fixed and rival players are assassinated.

Follow the story of Quentin Barnes, a 19-year-old quarterback prodigy that has been raised all his life to hate, and kill, those aliens. Quentin must deal with his racism and learn to lead, or he’ll wind up just another stat in the column marked “killed on the field.”

So to prep y’all for this rather exciting event, I spoke to Scott about The Rookie’s journey from podcast to print, his five-book deal with Crown Publishing, and his writing habits. Thanks to my good friends at the Box Room podcast, this special Writing Habits episode is available at their forum here. It’s also up on iTunes as a free podcast here – hit the subscribe button, and when I get around to going more audio interviews you’ll get them straight away.

The FDO himself, Scott Sigler

Scott Sigler himself can be found at scottsigler.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/scottsigler, and on Twitter as @scottsigler. You can order his books from Amazon and all good bookstores, apart from The Rookie which is exclusive to his website, for reasons which he explains in the interview.

I hope you enjoy the interview. I’d love to hear your feedback, so please post in the comments below!

California-based crime novelist Seth Harwood is another podcasting success story. Having introduced his high-octane detective thriller stylee to the podsphere in 2006, in May 2009, the first volume of the Jack Palms series, Jack Wakes Up, was released by Three Rivers Press. Good crime fiction is hard to write, but Seth is on top of the game. I can’t really beat Scott Sigler’s summary of the book, when he said: “Jack Wakes Up is like a Tarantino film pulled off the screen, rolled in a John Woo zig-zag wrapper and sparked up with a vintage Miami Vice lighter. Buy it now and thank me later.”

Wise words. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Seth Harwood.

Seth Harwood

Name
Seth Harwood, aka the Palms Father of Soul, The James Brown of Podcasting

Location
California, USA – the Berkeley Hills

What do you write?
I write crime novels in the Jack Palms series and literary short stories… so far. Who knows what I’ll get into next? More crime, definitely more crime!

Jack Wakes Up: A Novel, by Seth Harwood

What are your writing habits?
I write first thing or as close to first thing in the morning as possible. The sooner I can get from bed to keys, the better it seems to flow. I’ll go through periods where, honestly, all I do is work on promotion of my work. That can take the form of podcasting, blogging, interacting with fans online, and building in new media. Fortunately there are times I get excited about this so it’s not a grind.

Then there are the writing drafting times. When I’m in this mode, I’ll avoid the internet altogether until I’ve done my word count for the day. I usually set a goal of however many words (1,000 when I’m starting out and then 1,500 and 2,000 or above when I’m really into a project.) But I try not to overdo it. I’m a big believer in feeling out your limits and not going beyond. That’s how I think people get “blocked.” I’ll try to write as many days a week as I can, but usually not more than 6. Every day I make sure to stop at a point where I know what’s going to happen next; this makes starting up the next day a lot easier.

I don’t write with an outline. I like getting to know the characters and their situations as I go. If I’m getting surprised, it usually amounts to good writing, exciting for the reader. I believe in writing each sentence as best I can, and letting that one lead me on to the next. Then in revision I try to find out what I learned about the story along the way, then try to build that in from the start.

What software or tools do you use?
I use Scrivener for writing my novels and a MacBook. I used to use Word, but literally I can’t imagine how I’d write a novel without Scrivener now. I guess that’d make me do outlines – outline as I go. There’s nothing that can match Scrivener’s chapter view for seeing where the book has gone and is going. I title my chapters so I know a bit about what happens in each one and just look back at that list as my outline. I can also jump right to the parts I need to see with it, instead of massive scrolling and reading movements like I had to do in Word. Blech!

If you’ve got a Mac and want to write a novel, you’ve got to get Scrivener!

I also use 3″ x 5″ notecards. I jot stuff down on them all the time, like crazy. Stick them wherever I can.

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Seth Harwood, thank-you very much! Seth can be found online at his website, sethharwood.com, and also on Facebook at facebook.com/sethharwood and twitter as @sethharwood. The Jack Palms series of podcast novels can be downloaded for free from Seth’s website, and the original podcast novel version of Jack Wakes Up is also available for free from iTunes, while the print version can be found at Amazon.com and your local bookstore.

Take Scott’s advice and buy several copies today.

Bram Stoker Award-winning author Jonathan Maberry is responsible for one of the most entertaining books I’ve read this year. When someone says they can’t put a book down, it’s such a cliche, but in this case it’s entirely true. His 2009 bio-tech thriller, Patient Zero, is 24 meets Dawn of the Dead, an action-packed story in which terrorists are bent on releasing a pathogen that turns people into zombies. It’s fast and furious – more than 100 chapters packed into just over 400 pages – with police detective Joe Ledger finding himself recruited into the mysterious Department of Military Sciences after a run-in with the undead. Jonathan’s tight prose skips the story along, and will have you believing that infectious animated cadavers are a perfectly realistic terrorism threat. The good news is that Patient Zero is the first of a three-book deal with St Martin’s Press, which means more trouble for agent Joe Ledger and more fantastic thrillers for us fans.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Jonathan Maberry.

Jonathan Maberry

Name
Jonathan Maberry. I have published one nonfiction book under the pen name of Shane MacDougall, and the textbooks I wrote while teaching at Temple University were written under the name John Earl Maberry.

Location
I live in Warrington, a small town in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA. About twenty-odd miles north of Philadelphia. I was born in Philly.

What do you write?
I write techno-thrillers for St. Martins Griffin (Patient Zero, The Dragon Factory, The King of Plagues), supernatural thrillers for Pinnacle Books (Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song, and Bad Moon Rising), movie adaptations for Tor (The Wolfman), Young Adult post-apocalyptic thrillers for Simon & Schuster (Rot & Ruin, Dust & Decay), nonfiction books on the occult, paranormal and related pop culture for Citadel Press (Vampire Universe, The Cryptopedia, Zombie CSU, and Vampire Hunters and Other Enemies of Evil), and comics for Marvel (Punisher, Black Panther, Wolverine, and Marvel Zombies Return. I write a monthly interview column for The Big Thrill, the newsletter of the International Thriller Writers, and have so far sold over twelve hundred feature articles to a variety of magazines. I write short stories by invitation only, and have stories scheduled for The New Dead edited by Christopher Golden (for St. Martins), and others that have appeared (or will appear) in anthologies of horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

Bio-tech thriller Patient Zero, and forthcoming non-fiction title They Bite

My agent typically sells books for me based on 75 pages and a synopsis, so I have a number of books sold that are not yet written. At the moment I have two or three books due out each year. Next out for me is a nonfiction, They Bite: Endless Cravings of Supernatural Predators, co-authored by David F. Kramer. It’s a follow-up to our Bram Stoker Award-winning book, The Cryptopedia. That’s due out at the end of August from Citadel Press. Also in August I begin my run as the regular writer of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther (starting with Issue #7), and in September Marvel will release Marvel Zombies Return, for which I’m doing one installment and David Wellington (Monster Island), Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and Fred Van Lent (Marvel Zombies 4) will write the other installments. At the end of October, Tor Books will release The Wolfman, which is my adaptation of the new Universal Pictures film starring Benecio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye...

What are your writing habits?
I write every day. On weekdays I generally write ten hours a day and aim for a total word count of 3-4 thousand words each day. On weekends I generally do 1-2 thousand words. Part of my work day, however, is given over to marketing and publicity – such as doing interviews, working on pitches and proposals for future projects, arranging talks and appearances, working with my agent and publicist, posting on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., and writing my twice-weekly blog. I usually find a coffeeshop where I can camp out at a table for about four or five hours, then go to the gym for an hour, and then find another coffeeshop where I finish my day.

I don’t rewrite until I finish a complete first draft, and I generally do research for the next project while writing the current one. I also alternate projects based on deadlines. I might, for example, bang out a comic book script in the morning and spend the afternoon working on a novel.

Before beginning a new novel I outline it completely and write a ‘preliminary synopsis’ of what the book would be like once it’s done. This helps me work through the logic and events of the book. However, once I start writing the book tends to grow organically and I don’t try to impose too much order on it. When it’s completely done in first draft, I read it aloud (often with my wife during long drives), and then do a comprehensive second draft followed by a polish draft. My first novel, Ghost Road Blues, took fifteen months to write. The Wolfman took seven weeks. I pay attention to my process so I know when I’m doing my best work and when I’m going completely off the rails. It helps smooth out and speed up the process of writing a book.

I also type very, very fast. I took typing classes in 9th grade, mostly because it put me as the only boy in a class of thirty girls (and that’s damn good math!), but as a result I type about 130 words per minute.

What software or tools do you use?
Microsoft Word for all text projects; Final Draft for scripts; and Photoshop CS4 for any graphics associated with my nonfiction work. For hardware I use a Dell laptop that still has Windows XP… I’m resisting moving to Vista because it has too many bells and whistles and I can’t waste time learning a new system!

Jonathan’s website can be found at www.jonathanmaberry.com, where you can find his blog and details about his writing and projects. You can also download Countdown, the short story prequel to Patient Zero, for free. Jonathan can also be found on Facebook and on Twitter as @jonathanmaberry. Patient Zero is available in all good bookstores, and of course Amazon.com.

Phil Rossi is one of those incredibly annoying creative people who is good at, well, everything! Not just a fantastic writer and podcasting maestro, he’s also a talented musician, not only composing his own soundtrack album for his debut novel, Crescent, but performing a 3-hour concert streamed live on the internet on the book’s launch date. Me? Jealous? Well of course…

Crescent is a fascinating book. Described by New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler as “Blade Runner as written by HP Lovecraft”, I was hooked as soon as I heard the podcast version. Dark, scary, but also extremely well written, Crescent is an intriguing blend of SF, horror, and ghost story, set aboard a remote, haunted space station. After podcasting Crescent as a free audiobook (still available and well worth a listen), the esteemed smallpress publisher Dragon Moon Press picked Phil’s book up, producing a handsome print edition that was released on Thursday 9th July, 2009. On that day, Phil’s fans, listeners and readers joined the author for an Amazon rush, pushing the book to a remarkable 56th position on Amazon.com’s sales chart. I watched Phil’s launch day concert, during which he played guitar, read from his work, and chatted with fans. Launch day for book of this quality is always tremendously exciting, and with Phil putting his heart and soul into the party, it was a great few hours.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Phil Rossi.

Phil Rossi

Name
Phil Rossi

Location
Virginia, USA

What do you write?
At present, I write horror and science fiction, and often a blend of both. My writing style has been described as gritty and visceral, and I’m often paralleled to Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, and H.P. Lovecraft, which is enormously flattering. The foundation of my stories is the human experience – something I believe a reader or listener can latch onto at a very primal level. At least, that’s what I tell myself. The human experience fascinates me and I think it’s something that can be explored, even in science fiction and horror.

Though I enjoy writing short stories, I focus most of my effort on writing novels. That’s not to say that I haven’t written quite a few short stories over the past several years – I even podcasted a number of them in 2008 as part of my Notes from the Vault series, but I haven’t made a great effort to get them into magazines. Chalk it up to lack of time to engage in the submission process and maybe a little laziness.

Phil Rossi's debut novel, Crescent

What are your writing habits?
My philosophy for hitting goals and getting my writing done is to take advantage of any and every free moment that I can. I call it “guerilla writing.” Be it in the middle of the night, waiting for the ferry that brings me across the Potomac River, or on lunch breaks – I take what I can get. Even fifteen minutes spent writing is far better than zilch. In a perfect world, I like to have an hour or more to sit down and get things done, but as busy as I am, I have to be realistic. Some days, I just can’t get that sort of time to dedicate to writing. My daily writing goal – I try to write no less than 1000 words a day, most days it breaks out to be more. As far as setting and environment, there’s no such thing as an ideal place or time. The time is now, the place is here.

What software or tools do you use?
Software wise, I use Word – I used to use Copyright, but have shied away from that due to some formatting inconsistencies when importing into Word. I always travel with a small notebook shoved into my pocket and a pen – when an idea comes, I want to be able to get it down as quickly as possible. It’s frustrating to have a flash of inspiration or insight but have no way of capturing it. I’ve found saying “Oh, I’ll remember” is always a colossal self-deception.

Thank you very much, Phil!

Phil’s website can be found at www.crescentstation.net, where you can find details about Crescent and his other projects, including the new podcast novel, Harvey (iTunes link). Crescent, published by Dragon Moon Press, is available from Amazon and all good bookstores (if they don’t have it on the shelf, get them to order it in!). The original podcast of Crescent is available on iTunes or at podiobooks.com

Last time, I introduced the Writing Habits interview project, an ongoing weekly series in which writers and creators I admire tell us a little about how they actually get their work done.

I first discovered Tim Pratt after hearing an interview with him on DragonPage Cover to Cover. I was intrigued by the description of what was, at the time, his latest – and first – novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. I must admit it took me a little while to pick it up, during which time Tim had created a fascinating ongoing urban fantasy series starring fiesty sorceress Marla Mason. But Rangergirl was a revelation – a unique blend of comicbook adventure, surreal fantasy, good old fashioned human drama, featuring well drawn characters with a highly original problem to overcome. That book has remained one of my favourite novels.

Tim’s latest project is Bone Shop, a free Marla Mason prequel novella, currently being serialised online. Bone Shop, which is something of a Marla Mason origin story, is supported entirely by reader donations – read it, enjoy it, and make a voluntary donation to support the creator. By supporting this project, you are not only showing your appreciation for a mighty fine work of fiction, but you’re becoming a patron of the arts. Each donation is welcomed and really helps out Tim and his family.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Tim Pratt.

Tim Pratt

Name
Tim Pratt, T.A. Pratt, (secret porn-writing pseudonym)

Location
Oakland, California, USA. Very near a lake.

What do you write?
Mostly stories where magic co-exists with contemporary life – variously called Urban Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy, Mythic Fiction. Occasionally secondary-world fantasy. Occasionally erotica/porn, usually with fantastic elements.

The latest Marla Mason novel, Spell Games, and The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

What are your writing habits?
I like writing fiction – I find it entertaining and recreational – so I basically just write whenever I feel like it. Fortunately, I feel like writing very often, so I produce a fair number of words each year. If I have an impending deadline I might impose a bit more structure on myself, but mostly, I just write as the whim strikes me. If I go more than a week or two without writing I begin to get antsy. I don’t have any particular rituals or requirements to write. I live with a twenty-month-old toddler, so if I waited for the stars to align or for perfect quiet or for several uninterrupted hours to work, I’d never get any writing done!

What software or tools do you use?
Lately I write a lot in Google Docs, or even Gmail, so that I can open up my document wherever I can find a computer and an internet connection. At home I mostly write using MS Word on my desktop. I’d love to play with Scrivener, but I own a PC, alas. Maybe someday. When I’m out and about I usually have a notebook, and have no objection to writing longhand, except that it’s inefficient time-wise, as I have to retype it eventually. I take a few notes as necessary, but don’t do extensive outlines, unless I’m writing something where the timing/blocking is unusually intricate.

Thank-you very much!

Tim’s website is timpratt.org, while Marla Mason has her own home at marlamason.net. A new chapter of Bone Shop is put up each week at marlamason.net/boneshop. Read, enjoy, donate!

Writing, like any artistic or creative endeavour, is one of those professions that requires constant and continual learning. It’s not something that you can ever “win”, or reach the end of. You can become a master, true, but even then there is more to do, to learn, to explore, to discover. As a writer myself I’m still at the very beginning of the ongoing journey – I’ve written one and a half novels, one novella, a few short stories, all of which amounts to (so far) less than 200,000 words. Stephen King said that you had to write 1 million words before you started writing the good stuff. I’ve taken the first steps, but I have a long way to go!

What about other writers? I read a lot (another nugget of wisdom from King – write AND read for 4-6 hours a day, otherwise you won’t improve), and have enjoyed the work of many, many authors as a reader of SF. As a writer of SF, I also look at fiction from a different perspective – how did they do that? How does that work? What makes this good? What makes this entertaining and memorable? And most importantly, what makes this better than what I’m writing?

Part of understanding at what makes writing work is to looking at what makes the writers tick, and how they go about their craft from a purely practical point of view. As a writer who has battled variously with procrastination, laziness, and the self-defeating quest for the perfect writing routine, I’m interested to see how others do it.

Starting this Thursday, I’m proud to present Writing Habits, an ongoing weekly series of microinterviews with writers and creators, that will hopefully provide a look at how worlds of fiction are constructed on a practical, day-by-day basis. I’ll be talking to a wide range of writers, big names and small, across genres and styles, poking my nose in on their daily routines and the tools they use.

Stay tuned!