Who is Steve?
Hi!
I'm an aspiring author currently trapped in the body of an IT Service Management professional, a job which is every bit as exciting as it sounds... My dream job, would be to be a published author in SFF.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have visions of being a New York Times Bestselling author or anything like that, I'll happily settle for being published and being able to make a career out of it. I'm not after George RR or Neil Gaiman levels of success here, though obviously I wouldn't be disappointed with that! Either way, it would beat having to explain service management principles such as the difference between an 'Incident' and a 'Problem' any day of the week.
I'm an aspiring author currently trapped in the body of an IT Service Management professional, a job which is every bit as exciting as it sounds... My dream job, would be to be a published author in SFF.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have visions of being a New York Times Bestselling author or anything like that, I'll happily settle for being published and being able to make a career out of it. I'm not after George RR or Neil Gaiman levels of success here, though obviously I wouldn't be disappointed with that! Either way, it would beat having to explain service management principles such as the difference between an 'Incident' and a 'Problem' any day of the week.
I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I grew up reading a lot of young fiction such as the Goosebumps books, Point Horror stories and classic comics like Asterix and Obelix, which we always used to borrow from the local library.
When I really started to read in earnest though, was after, as a young lad, I stumbled across the original Star Wars trilogy on videotape. This was before the resurrection of Star Wars, which tells you it was pre 1999. After wearing out the video tapes that had been used to record the films straight from TV (remember when that was a thing?!) I discovered the abundance of fiction that was written around the extended universe.
That was, of course, before Mickey waved his magic wand and made all of that glorious canon disappear. We're talking the X-Wing and Rogue & Wraith squadron series, 'I, Jedi' and other books about Corran Horn and even collected stories like 'Tales of the Bounty Hunters' or 'Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina'. In the later years there was the New Jedi Order series as well. I couldn't get enough of it.
When I really started to read in earnest though, was after, as a young lad, I stumbled across the original Star Wars trilogy on videotape. This was before the resurrection of Star Wars, which tells you it was pre 1999. After wearing out the video tapes that had been used to record the films straight from TV (remember when that was a thing?!) I discovered the abundance of fiction that was written around the extended universe.
That was, of course, before Mickey waved his magic wand and made all of that glorious canon disappear. We're talking the X-Wing and Rogue & Wraith squadron series, 'I, Jedi' and other books about Corran Horn and even collected stories like 'Tales of the Bounty Hunters' or 'Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina'. In the later years there was the New Jedi Order series as well. I couldn't get enough of it.
Over time, visiting the SFF section of bookshops to get the next Star Wars novel allowed my curious nature to start picking up and reading the covers of other SFF novels. It was a slow and gentle exposure and I think the first true Fantasy novel I took home was Robin Hobb's 'Assassin's Apprentice'. I never looked back.
So why am I writing a book blog?
Anyway, you might (probably not, but might) be wondering what I'm going to be blogging about.
As I said above, I'm an aspiring author (maybe I should just say writer...) and I'm working on a couple of projects at the moment. It's been a slow and long road to get as far as I have with them. Between other hobbies that I dabble in, and having a day job, I struggle to dedicate as much time as I would like to for my writing.
I have (to date) 68,942 words of a novel written. It's a little bit Sci-fi, a little bit dystopian future with a hint at some fantasy elements. Basically I don't really know what genre to attach to it, beyond SFF.
I work on the novel in fits and starts, when I'm not looking at my second project, which is a small collection of short stories. As I don't actually know if I'm any good at writing I wanted to pull together five short stories, based in the same universe, to test the water. Two and a half of the five stories are written and I'm thinking of submitting these to some competitions once they're ready. I thought it would be a good litmus test and it helps build up my universe.
I haven't done any writing courses or studies beyond my English A-Levels at school so I just do the best that I can. If nothing ever comes of this, then that's fine, but I would like to at least finish that first book so I can say I gave it my best shot.
With that rambling context in place, the reason I am looking to start a blog is to try and get a little more involved in the writing/reading SFF community. If you read the blog it would be great to start making some connections and talking to like-minded people. Hopefully a mixture of readers to talk about what they like in their SFF and professionals or other aspiring authors in their experiences. How do you get over those writing humps? How do you find the process of trying to get published? What are your favourite series/stories/authors?
The plan is to write a little about my own progress, as I continue the try and live the dream, alongside reading and sharing reviews of new and old books alike. I've just bitten off the sizeable chunk of once again jumping into Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, so that's where I'll be starting. The plan is to race through it, if I can, and then revisit other older books (as well as some new ones!) from some of my favourites like Robin Hobb, Brent Weeks, Mark Lawrence, Scott Lynch, Patrick Rothfuss, to name but a few.
I'll be starting off with reviews on the Wheel of Time series, interspersed with updates on how I'm getting on with my own work. If there's anything you'd like me to write about or have any feedback, let me know in the comments. I'd like to make this as interactive as I can. Just please don't ask me to explain the difference between an Incident and a Problem! :)
All the best,
Steve L
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