Welcome to my blog. I’m a fantasy fiction writer, and I’m going to write about the process of bringing a project to fruition, and finding it a home in the publishing world. Hopefully it will be an interesting story, and if you’re an aspiring or early career writer, it should be a good guide to the process and its pitfalls. If I’m any good as a writer, more experienced scribes might be interested too. Am I any good? That’s for you to decide. I mean, I think I am, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I haven’t published anything, but I’m going to post a prose fiction series on this blog as well, alternating episodes of that, with posts like this. And the ‘posts like this’ won’t all be about me: I plan to cover a variety of topics relevant to the craft of writing, and the craft of selling it.
It’s taken me a long time to start writing some fiction I’m ready to share with the world. The few people that have read my blog or followed my social media over the years will know that I’ve been working on some kind of fantasy fiction project for a long time. They might also know that I’ve spent a lot of time writing reviews of recorded music, and more recently of more or less anything that isn’t nailed down. Those who are especially interested in me (yeah, right) might also be aware that I haven’t been posting to my blog or doing much on social media for quite some time. There was no intentional decision to withdraw from that stuff—it just happened. I retracted my tentacles, and put them to work writing the stuff I really want to write.
Well, I’m back. I haven’t actually finished a draft of my first novel, but I’m getting there. For the past ten years and more, my primary creative focus has been on fantasy worldbuilding. I’ve been developing a setting, complete with maps, histories, mythologies, and grammatically functional languages. Yes, that’s right, like J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin in Always coming home, Suzette Haden Elgin in Native tongue, the almost unknown Lorinda J. Taylor in The Termite queen, and nobody else that my research has turned up, I’ve built complete languages as a part of the setting for my fiction. I’ll talk more about that in future posts, and I’m sure I’ll post some examples at some point.
I’m now about halfway through the first draft of my first novel, envisaged as the first of a trilogy, which in turn is envisaged as the first of a longer sequence of books, all to be set in the same fantasy world. I’m in my middle years, so I’ll have to prioritise at some point, and think about what I have time to produce, and what best serves the heart of my creative project, which is the world itself. I’ve just finished a creative writing MA with the Open University (I don’t know my result yet, but I’m pretty confident it’s not a fail!). During that course, I discovered an interest in short fiction.
Historically, I’ve felt resentful if a story I was enjoying stopped before the 600 page mark, and I had not the slightest inclination to write anything short. I’m not sure what happened, but the start of a science-fiction story popped into my head, and I started writing. I carried on until it was done, which turned out to be at 5k words. I’ve only written a handful so far, but I’m planning to write more, in between chapters of the book. After I accidentally wrote one, I decided I had better also read some short stories, and I’ve been enjoying them a great deal—particularly ones by Ted Chiang and Priya Sharma. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on my journey into short fiction as well.
So where am I now? I’m enjoying a period of high momentum, and I’m hoping to whizz on and finish my book pretty quickly. Doing an MA in my fifties, after many, many years studying and practicing writing, was a mixed bag. To a large extent, it got in the way of writing. Progress on my novel slowed to a crawl, while I worked through course materials that, by and large, didn’t have anything to tell me that I hadn’t heard before. Working through the exercises with my fellow students, however, was a joy, as were the many opportunities to exchange work and critiques. I came to understand just how lonely it is being a writer, and what the benefits are of putting yourself into a community of other writers. Since my course is over, and its forums are about to close, I’m finding other avenues: national, largely online ones, like the British Fantasy Society (BFS), and the British Science-Fiction Association (BSFA), and local, in-person ones, like the group of writers that meet to write together every Wednesday morning in the café/bookshop across the road from the library I work in. I’ve also re-engaged with social media, posting on my writing and reading life, rather than the minutiae of my daily existence (although food and cats get a fair crack of the whip too)—and of course this blog is a part of that re-engagement. Please do follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon for my unique take on books and writing.
In the next few weeks, I’m going to my first convention, Fantasycon, and hosting the first meeting of what I hope will be the East Anglian chapter of the BFS and the BSFA—because if it doesn’t exist, and you don’t make it happen, nobody else will. Then I’m going on holiday for a fortnight. Just before I go, I’ll post the first episode of my story series, and when I get back I’ll report on Fantasycon and ‘Eastworlds’ (I didn’t have any good ideas for a name, and I needed to do a poster sharpish!). Until then, keep writing, keep reading, and keep visiting other worlds.
Oliver Arditi 