Plans for 2010: The Space Opera Novel

I don't really know what to write about as an end of year post, but feel that I should do one. Why? Even that question I can't answer. With so much going on in my life outside writing from starting a new job in a new state in the New Year, writing and editing has taken a back seat. When I'm not writing I'm thinking about writing, and currently my thinking has been along the lines of how much I miss writing when I'm not doing it, like the last few months. So I'm looking ahead, to 2010 and what I want to achieve, when I'll be writing again.

So far I have two books lined up to edit for the New Year, both horror, one gaming and one fiction, and both with US publishers. I'll also continue reviewing speculative fiction books for Albedo One and already I have a few I should be emailing to the team in Ireland. I also have a few short stories I want to finish and send off to various magazines to see how I go, mostly science fiction. All of this, well it's happening, what's not happening is... the novel.

Over 2009 I've been reading a lot of new space opera, particularly Alastair Reynolds, and find that although I've always been reading this subgenre of science fiction for a long time, there are always ideas here that excite me even after thirty years of familiarity with the setting. It's what I love reading and what I love writing.

So I've decided 2010 is the year I really need to give my new space opera novel a go, get it done and out to agents and/or publishers. That's the plan, write the novel. It's what every author needs to do if they are ever to become professionals in this game. Will I succeed? Who knows, but with the experience I've had since the last seven years since I wrote my last 100,000 word manuscript, I feel I'm in a much better place to give it a go.

Anyway, I hope everyone out there has the successes they hope for in the new year, and that the future will be exciting and rewarding. And perhaps I'll get to know a whole lot more of you in the writing/editing game now that I'm moving to a new state.

There you go, 2010 is looking great already.

Influences: Gorky Park

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith remains one of my favourite novels, which I first read as a teenager when I was going through a period of devouring spy thrillers. The novel published in 1981 is set in Moscow during the era of the Soviet Union. A police investigator called Arkady Renko is investigating the death of three mutilated bodies found frozen in Gorky Park in Moscow. He keeps suspecting then hoping that the KGB will take the case off his hands, since the bodies have had their faces and fingertips removed by the killer, so the case reeks of a contract or political killing. But the KGB won’t let it go, and Renko finds himself embroiled in a case that could cost him his career and even his life, regardless of whether he drops it or follows it to its logical end.

I was first drawn to the book by the movie, but found the book to be complex and rich and so many levels. While most thrillers of the day were told from the Western viewpoint of the cold war, the hero of this tale was a Russian. Similarly, I’d found that the story wasn’t over the top with a race to stop a nuclear World War Three that peppered so many plots in other Cold War thriller writers of the 1980s. I also enjoyed how well Smith captured what life was like inside Russia, which at the time was still closed behind the Iron Curtain.

The skill which Smith used to unfold the mystery interlaced with moments of reflection and tension stayed with me and became a big influence on my own writing, and one of the major contributing factors as to why I chose the thriller approach to structuring my own stories. His character, Arkady Renko with his dogged persistence to solve a mystery regardless of the consequences, influenced my character Harrison Peel who appeared in The Spiraling Worm.

I liked Gorky Park so much I went on to read more of Smith’s work, including more Arkady Renko novels such as Polar Star and Red Square, and his American Indian thrillers Nightwing and Stallion Gate.