My experiences of getting published

Chuck Wendig, entertainingly foul-mouthed author of Blackbirds, and something of a doyen of writing advice, posted this on his blog today:

Writers And Misinformation, Or: “How Did You Publish?” « terribleminds: chuck wendig.

It spawned a lengthy response from me, which I republish here, if you’re interested.

It kind of helps who you know, but not that much

I’ve been trying to get published since I was 18. I didn’t succeed until I was 34. I was a journalist on a scifi magazine called SFX for six years, I edited gaming mag White Dwarf, then I edited another magazine called Death Ray. Bottom line is, I got to meet a whole load of publishers, writers and other associated industry types. The wordage part of the genre was always my thing, so I always kept up with these people. I schmoozed and tickled their ears with risqué babble. Some of them became my pals. This meant that they were more than willing to look at my stuff when I bashfully said I wished to write.

This does not mean they took it. That you do the secret handshake and air kiss and bare your arse at the hungry would-be writers outside who can’t see you through the silvered glass of word-heaven central as laughing nymph girls slip five thousand pound notes into your author’s jockstrap. It means they might look at it, when they get round to it.

This can take a very long time. Years. I had one book that I sent in. It took six months to be rejected. I sent another. Another six months, and there was interest. Two years of writing, and toing and froing, then resubmitting, then a meeting nearly a year after that… To be told it wasn’t what they wanted. The whole process took four years. This was to someone I had met many times, and who liked me, and who had seen my writing and liked that too. Basically, if it’s not good enough, it doesn’t really matter who you know.

And then there’s taste. I’m quite friendly with one of the UK’s biggest agents. He won’t represent me, seven published or about to be published novels or not, because my stuff isn’t to his taste. So there you are.

Sure, I know who to write to, who to talk to, and I stand a good chance of getting to speak to them. But all that took conscious effort to establish. I went into journalism specifically to build these contacts up. I tell all the other aspiring writers I meet that YOU TOO CAN MAKE THESE CONTACTS. Go to conventions, events, author signings. Nowadays, you can comment on blogs, be tweet buddies. Be nice, be charming, don’t attack them with rolled up manuscripts howling your brilliance in their terrified faces in hotel lobbies. Yes, it does help to know people, so then, get to know them. It’s not an exclusive club. It’s not like all my old colleagues are now novelists. Oh, hang on, none of them are, while I have seen dozens of people without contacts plucked from obscurity. See? No guaranteed entry.

Trad publishing is very slow…

We are talking glacially slow, mind-numbing, awfully, horribly slow. The slowness that sees years flicker by in time-lapse haste, and the rise and fall of entire phyla of organisms. They’re not being haughty, a lot of publishers are ridiculously overworked. Getting to know them helps. An agent helps a lot more.

I submitted something to a contact six months ago who said they wanted something off me, and they haven’t got back. I submitted something else to an actual friend, and our conversations trailed off over a year ago. Bear in mind, I am already published.

I was known to Games Workshop, and worked for them. A lot of them are my genuine “Hey! How’s it going? Let’s play Warhammer right now!” friends. It took me six years of pitches to get published by them.

…and then is impatient for success

If you do get published, and your first book is not a success, you’ll be out. There are a roughly a bazillion-trillion writers who want your job, so publishers can keep popping exciting fresh product out on the shelves with minimal outlay until one of them is a raging success. The days when a publisher loved an author, and had the time and money to nurture them are mostly gone. They’re under a lot of pressure to achieve instant megabucks. The world of publishing is currently in a brutal phase. On the other hand, there is more opportunity available for everyone now. Swings, roundabouts, all that.

Trad publishing is not going anywhere

People will always want filters. Trad publishing is a filter for readers. An agent is a filter for publishers. Reviews are filters for everyone. We all use filters, all the time. Google does, our brains do, our coffee does. If a publisher rates it enough to publish, you know it must be at least okay. That’s not something you get through self-publishing. Self-pub is undoubtedly going to get a lot more important, and the industry is changing. But look at music. That took an earlier and much harsher battering than publishing is taking now, and the big labels are still there. It’s sticking around, it will change, use it to your advantage, don’t spurn it.

But the internet really is where it’s at

One thing I’ve noticed is that the new writers who have been the most successful are those with an established internet constituency. Good old Chuck here, or Adam Christopher. Doing cool, engaging stuff on the internet can help, nay! ENSURE, success when you are picked up by a trad publisher, or if you self publish. This is a lot of work in itself. God knows how much time the likes of Mr Wendig or John Scalzi spend blogging. When do you guys eat? It’s a constant struggle for me — write something for guaranteed repo-men repelling monies, or spend valuable time-units connecting with the world. Gah! My head acheth already at the merest contemplation of it.

 Trad publishers are only human

I got some very stern advice from one publisher about never, ever writing spin-off fiction, that I’d waste my talent, that I’d never be taken seriously, that I’d not develop as a writer if I yoked my meagre portion of creativity to the every-hungry franchise monster.

This was very bad advice. It was well-meant, and it was true in some respects – people still do look down on tie-in fiction, and I’ve a few examples of this – but it’s not as true as it was. Plus, I need to pay the bills. Franchise fiction offers an instant audience, and a guaranteed return which original fiction does not. On top of that, franchise stuff can lead others to your original fiction. Writing shared-universe material is not hack-work, it’s as hard as and can be as rewarding as spinning out your own world. BUT the same publisher did give me lots and lots and lots of very, very good advice too. You are the arbiter of your fate, not some “gatekeeper.” So, follow your own head.

Trad pub can work for you

I’m dubious of the utopian claims of some pundits who herald the collapse of trad pub and the emergence of a creator culture, as trad publishing provides stability to the whole ramshackle edifice of storytelling, primarily by allowing writers who aren’t bohemian whizzkids with a ton of time on their hands and/or an enormous trust fund to eat by paying advances up front. I pray this does not go away, or I’m out of work.

They’re generally not bastards

Publishers are nice people who love books. I have never had any ideas stolen, or been mocked, or been otherwise humiliated or even discomfited (outside the soul-crush of rejection). Sometimes books come out with suspiciously similar ideas to your own, but that’s almost certainly coincidence (like, I’ve had a lot of ideas I’ve told no one about, and this has happened several times). The publishers I have met have all been lovely, lovely people. Authors, on the other hand… Sheesh. Kidding! They’re pussycats too.

A lot of it is down to you

Every time I do a seminar, I get a crowd of (metaphorical) pitchfork waving people hailing self-publishing as the new god, and about how trad pub deliberately keeps them out. I get the feeling they are impatient (see above comment on slowness). You have to: Keep writing. Keep schmoozing. Keep positive. And be humble. I’ve met more than a few “They don’t recognise my genius!” type aspiring authors. They are generally rubbish, as well as annoying. If you don’t at least listen to the advice many publishers give you in the bar/rejection letter/on the net, you will lose. Listen to criticism, talk to your friends, join reading/ writing clubs, read tons of books, don’t follow the one path, follow them all! And read this blog — Chuck’s advice is among the very best. All these things are surer ways to publication — by whatever means – than whining about traditional publishing houses and their status as Illuminati puppet-theatres. We’re all people, trying to do our thing. Evil rarely enters into it.

Does that help? I hope so.

Why I like writing for the Black Library

Here’s a guest post I wrote for The Black Library Blog, about why I enjoy writing for the Black Library (in case the title didn’t give it away). Click on the link or scroll down to read it.

I’d like to add some more regarding the writing of tie-in fiction rather than the consumption and validity of it as a literary form (for this, dear readers, is the underlying topic of my BL blog).

What’s in a name?

Here’s a piece I did for that really rather top fellow, Abhinav Jain, to publish on his blog, Angels of Retribution. It’s part of Names: A New Perspective, a series of guest blogs by writers about what their attitude is to naming and language in speculative fiction. Re-reading mine, I sound like a grumpy bastard. Hang, that’s because I am a grumpy bastard. Ah me. I also use the word “important” a lot. Makes me sound pompous. I’m probably that too.

I’ve republished it below for ease of use, if you want to see it in its original habitat, click here. For more articles on the same topic, try this.

Dead robots

Here’s a cool thing for a Tuesday, my very own Jim Burns illustration! Jim is one of the biggest names in traditional SF art, having painted covers for most of the genre’s leading lights at one time or another. I’m lucky enough to know Jim personally, and with whom I occasionally enjoy a pint. Quite by chance, he was commissioned to create this image for my first story in Interzone,” iRobot”. It’s in issue 244, out January. I’m very excited by Jim’s involvement, as many of his book covers adorned my shelves while I was a youth. Jim Burns, man, it’s Jim Burns!

Strike and Fade: Salamanders in living sound!

In the grim darkness of the 31st Millennium, there is even more war than in the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, ain’t that a fact? I’ve been lucky enough to write a piece set in this period of galactic-scale civil war, and it is published today! Friday the 14th will forever be remembered by me as a day of firsts. Strike and Fade,  my first Horus Heresy piece and my first audio drama, is story fourteen on the Black Library’s advent calendar, a war-packed countdown to Christmas penned by the brightest and best in BL’s firmament of writerly stars (and, er,  me).

There have been some fantastic pieces this year. Each story is around 1000 words long, with the occasional audio, like Strike and Fade, salted in for extra spice. This is short Warhammer and 40k fiction at its most exciting; pithily told and as sweetsome as a Christmas chocolate, and boy, are there are plenty of nice chocolates in that tin. Go and check it out!

This is the latest in a string of Black Library stories and novels you’ll be seeing from me over the coming year, some of which I have revealed earlier on this blog, others are hush-hush, top-secret, so don’t ask. The pace is picking up, and stories will be arriving thicker and faster as we go into spring.  2013 is going to be an exciting year, and I hope some of you feel inclined to join me there.

And yet, spring is a ways away, so if Strike and Fade whets your appetite, you can always try my Blood Drinkers story,  The Rite of Holos in Hammer and Bolter 24. Or perhaps I could tempt you with some of my non-BL fiction? Freebies on the drop-down “Fiction” menu at top of the site, and details of my novels down the side to the left.

Next big thing? Aw shucks

I’ve been away from this blog for nigh on three months owing to huge building work upheaval. I’m tired of working at the top of the stairs, I said, let’s convert the attic, I said. I’ll do a good chunk o f the work myself, I said. It should take, oh, two to four weeks, I said.

Optimistic chump, I’m saying now.

Ten weeks later, it’s finished. I’ve spent every goddamn waking minute for two months hammering bits of wood together and plasterboarding (okay, I did some work work, had two very short holidays, and have been ill, but apart from that: Hammers. Nails. Swearing. All the way baby, I’m like a foul-mouthed Bob the Builder). And I added terracotta roof tiling to my repertoire of earthy man skills (I’ve done some roofing before, but with corrugated iron sheets, so this was a bit more involved). The result is that I am sitting in a new room, which is kind of weird, like one of those dreams where one discovers one’s house has whole, undiscovered wings crammed with sinister secrets. Or is that just me? I call this haven from the world below THE GOBLINARIUM. Because it’s full of Goblins, alright? Not for any other reason. Sheesh.

I have no stairs, just a ladder. I can’t afford stairs until next year, but other than that, it’s tickety-boo.

Anyway, I’m well behind on my work, and wasn’t going to post for a while longer, but then Richard Ford and Cavan Scott both tagged me in this Next Big Thing meme/blog/pass-the-parcel game, so it’d be rude not to respond. Not that I give much of a fig about being rude sometimes, but now is a more civilised phase in my lunar-linked egocentric psychosis path.  I’ll be back later this week with the covers to my next two books, The Crash and The Death of Integrity. Until then, answers to the meme’s ten questions below. Thanks for the nod, Cav and Fordy.

1. What is the working title of your next book?

It ain’t no working title, guv’nor, it’s called The Crash, and it’s out next June, so I better finish it. Technically, mind, it’s not my next book – I have Baneblade and Skarsnik out from the Black Library first, and then there’s The Death of Integrity out after The Crash, which is currently in the hands of the editors. But The Crash is what I am currently writing. And I am behind on it, so let’s keep this brief.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book.

I like books about planetary colonisation efforts that go horribly wrong. This book is about a planetary colonisation effort that goes horribly wrong.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Science fiction, planetary colonisation efforts that go horribly wrong sub-genre.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I don’t know yet, as I am still getting to know them.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A planetary colonisation effort goes horribly wrong.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It’s out from Solaris, God bless ‘em.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I am still writing it. I usually give myself three months to write a book’s first draft, but I redraft a lot as I’m writing, so what I end up with at the end of that is closer to a second or third draft than a first. Then I plead for more time, about a fortnight, to polish it up.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Hmmm. Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss, the Colsec books by Douglas Hill. There’s a fair bit of social commentary in there too, I suppose, but not so much as you might get in something by Charles Stross or Ian Macleod. But they are both more intelligent and well-read than I, so I’m sticking with alien space monsters.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Tricky one that. Lifelong immersion in SF that is neither Star Trek nor Doctor Who, I s’pose.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Alien monsters, how the continued entrenchment of plutocratic elements in our society might play out, a cool planet, and a frickin’ big twist in the tail. There’ll be fights, and some weirdness, and hopefully sequels. Hell, you might as well read the back blurb, mightn’t you?

The Market rules all, plotting the rise and fall of fortunes without human intervention. Mankind, trapped by a rigid hierarchy of wealth, bends to its every whim. To function, the Market must expand without end. The Earth is finite, and cannot hold it, and so a bold venture to the stars is begun, offering a rare chance at freedom to a select few people. But when the colony fleet is sabotaged, a small group finds itself marooned upon the tidally locked world of Nychthemeron, a world where one hemisphere is bathed in perpetual daylight, the other hidden by eternal night. Isolated and beset, the stricken colony members must fight for survival on the hostile planet, while secrets about both the nature of their shipwreck and Nychthemeron itself threaten to tear their fragile society apart.

It’s on US Amazon already, although how they know it will be 384 pages when even I don’t know how long it will be is a little freaky…

And now I need to tag some more people. I choose: Nick Kyme, Andy Smillie, and Matt Keefe.

SFX Anime Special and more

This is what I spent most of June and July doing; an SFX Special Edition (or Collector’s Edition, it depends who you ask) on anime! Printed upon its glossy pages you’ll find a figurative ton (because ink don’t weigh that much) of articles about a whole  host of new shows hot from Japan, a peek into Euro anime fandom, a profile of Toei animation, and some tip-top opinion from those who know anime well  – including the likes of Bristol-based hipster Tim Maughan, lady anime guru Helen McCarthy and long-time eastwards-looking  journo Andrew Osmond. Included also, a large number of very fine free gifts.

I don’t edit magazines very often now. To my immense surprise the majority of my income comes from writing books, but it’s extremely nice to actually leave my house and go into an office where there are grown-up people and not just children and animals, adults who are concentrating and being quiet. The chance to focus all my attention on something with no interruption for a couple of hours is so welcome, it’s enough to make me weep over Future’s Apple keyboards.

The magazine was out on 20th July. But I’ve been ill, ill, ill again, away, and have my parents in law here, so that’s why I’m writing about it only now. It’s also why I haven’t blogged for aaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggeeeeeeeeees. And why I’m well behind on my work, which has included:

• Prepping a new novel for a new publisher’s further consideration – more on this later in the year, I hope.
• Finishing and handing in my final draft of Skarsnik to The Black Library (whoop!).
• Waiting to hear if a certain short story has made it past the second selection stage for a certain well-known publisher of short stories.
• Falling horribly behind on my third book for The Black Library, which is about [REDACTED] fighting the [REDACTED], but I’ve got my gun sights trained on it now and will be blasting that task to completion ASAP. (Cripes, what an unwieldy and poor gun metaphor. I’m playing 40K tonight, maybe that will get me into a proper war head space).

There’s a bunch of other stuff going on, too. You can read as always reviews by me in SFX Magazine. In a few weeks, I’ll have an interesting announcement to make about a new job I’ve landed writing stuff for Australians. Lastly, if I said the words “Hammer”, “Bolter” and “soon”, all entirely unconnected to one another, you understand, would you be excited? You might be…

The Crash: a new book for Solaris

Last week, some of you might have seen an announcement from Solaris concerning my second book to be published by them. This is another of the projects I’ve been alluding to on this blog and Twitter over the last few months, but have not been able to speak about. Typically, the news broke when I was eyeball deep in anime moppets and monsters, editing SFX‘s anime special edition. I still am, in fact, editing the magazine, but I’ve a few fleeting minutes to blog about the book now and tell you a little more about it.

First up, here’s what Jonathan Oliver had to say at the Solaris website and When Gravity Fails, their editor’s blog

Unalloyed greed, markets dictating the will of humanity – when The Crash comes, nothing will be left standing.

In a topical science-fiction take on the world’s current economic woes, breakthrough author Guy Haley envisages a society in utter thrall to commerce, which must constantly expand to sustain itself. When a mission to the stars begins to go wrong, the fragility of human society and progress is exposed.

The Crash is due for release in July 2013, it is Haley’s second book for Solaris.

His first, Champion of Mars, was released in May this year and was described by SF legend Stephen Baxter as “a novel with an ambition on the scale of Olympus Mons itself, and it delivers. Recommended.”

“Guy Haley’s SF invokes in me the same excitement I had when reading Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg and Arthur C. Clarke’s works for the first time,” said Jonathan Oliver, editor-in-chief of Solaris. “His fiction is packed full of ideas while maintaining a very human voice. Haley’s work is complex, exciting and vastly entertaining and I’m delighted to welcome him back to the Solaris fold.”

The Market rules all, plotting the rise and fall of fortunes without human intervention. Mankind, trapped by a rigid hierarchy of wealth, bends to its every whim. To function, the Market must expand without end. The Earth is finite, and cannot hold it, and so a bold venture to the stars is begun, offering a rare chance at freedom to a select few people.

But when the colony fleet is sabotaged, a small group finds itself marooned upon the tidally locked world of Nychthemeron, a world where one hemisphere is bathed in perpetual daylight, the other hidden by eternal night. Isolated and beset, the stricken colony members must fight for survival on the hostile planet, while secrets about both the nature of their shipwreck and Nychthemeron itself threaten to tear their fragile society apart.

I have a big old thing for colony SF. I enjoy following bands of plucky frontier types struggling to survive on alien worlds, and I absolutely love colony ship gone wrong scenarios. The tougher the odds the better. In this loose category I’d include the Deathworld Trilogy by Harry Harrison, Grass by Sheri Tepper, some of Neal Asher’s books, Non-stop by Brian Aldiss, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, the Colsec trilogy by Douglas Hill (ah, good old Douglas Hill), Aliens, Avatar (still not seen it thought), Aliens, Pandorum, Red Fang by Philip Palmer… You get the idea, there are loads more. I looked at the theme of man’s expansion into space a little in Champion of Mars, but this is more of a BIG SF take on the concept – weird alien life, interstellar travel, exotic worlds, the works.

The Crash is ostensibly a standalone novel, and naturally a part of it will deal with the way I fear Earth might be heading – overpopulated, environmentally degraded, impoverished, with a small, new aristocracy who are fabulous wealthy, and the rest of us struggling to survive.

It’s also inspired by this famous quote by Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” And by the concept of “Spaceship Earth.”

However, don’t expect hundreds of pages setting out what I think is wrong with modern capitalism. Most of the story is about the fight to stay alive on an alien planet with limited resources. Ultimately, I want to develop a space opera series set in this universe, charting a future history where scattered groups of human beings shipwrecked on numerous worlds take differing routes to survive, and how the very diverse range of cultures these circumstances create eventually come into contact – and conflict – with one another. All very exciting, but I need to finish the first one before all that.

What’s your favourite colony story? Let me know!

Black Library News

At last! I can tell you about some of the very exciting things that I know about and that you don’t, or rather didn’t know until now!

Today I can finally reveal not one, but two of my Black Library novels. In case the picture above doesn’t give it away, one is Skarsnik, about the infamous night goblin warlord.

I’m a big Warhammer fan, as you might know. I started playing in 1984 with the first edition of the fantasy game. That’s right, when there was none of this new fangled Warhammer 40,000 business and Toughness values were represented by letters. I was 11. I’m now 39, so I’ve been playing for 28 years. And I still play. I love it. (Playing for so long puts on odd perspective on things – I bought myself a little birthday gift on Wednesday, a box of plastic bikers for my 40k ork army. I’ve wanted these for ages. To me they are “new models”. They came out five years ago).

I’ve always been a massive greenskin fan, leading orcs and goblins since day one. For years they lost, but the last half decade has been kind to my green minions and they now win more often than not. It helps that Skarsnik himself is my army general. Want to see my army list? Here it is.

Skarsnik’s Stabbas

(I date all my army lists when I draw them up. This is the most recent variation on Skarsnik’s army, but it really doesn’t change that much. The last game I played with this was 7/5/2012. It represents but a small proportion of my greater goblin horde. No, I don’t have any orcs in my army, although I have Ruglud’s Armoured Orcs prepped for painting because they are very cool. Other orcs can go feed my squigs. Literally).

Naturally I was well up for it when Nick Kyme at The Black Library suggested I write a novel about Skarsnik. Nick worked for me when I edited White Dwarf magazine, now I kind of work for him. A strange reversal, but a fruitful one. Our earlier association means he knows full well how much I like my goblins.

I’ve put up a page on Skarsnik here with a brief breakdown of the plot, so I won’t repeat myself, but I will tell you some of what I am trying to do with the story. A lot of people see goblins as funny, comic relief characters (why, just check out The Black Library’s own blog post to see how prevalent this attitude is). Granted, they are funny, but they are also vicious, wicked, baby-eating horrors of the first degree. “Ooh! Look at the funny goblins”, gamers say. Yeah well, you wouldn’t want to be bound to spiky stick in a stinky cave with a lot of them standing around you. They’d have knives, and they’d be laughing. Not so funny now, are they?

Come to think of it, you probably don’t want to face mine on the battlefield either.

So, I wanted to capture both sides of this character. You’ll see how amusing and horrifying goblins are as we watch Skarsnik trick, wheedle and stab his way from sporeling to king of Karak Eight Peaks. For non-goblin fanatics there is plenty of skaven and dwarf action, with a little bit of the Empire thrown in. Truly, Skarsnik is a cornucopic fantasy delight.

Now to the other project. Sharp eyes might have seen this on Amazon. Yes, I’ve also written a Warhammer 40,000 novel called Baneblade. It’s about the tank of the same name. Although I wrote this book quite a while ago, and it is actually out some time before Skarsnik, the arcane nature of publishing dictates that I can say only that it’s about a young lieutenant of a noble house who joins a veteran baneblade crew. And that’s your lot.

By the Emperor, there’s more! I’m also writing another book for BL called [REDACTED] about the [REDACTED] and the [REDACTED] who must [REDACTED] before [REDACTED] and the [REDACTED] is [REDACTED]! I’ve not finished writing that yet but I’m having a lot of fun with it. More later when I am free to talk.

Of course, none of this is out for a while, so why not (blatant plug time! Please forgive me, I have to eat) check out my Richards & Klein books. A buddy-cop adventure series set in the 22nd century that pairs a dour, ex-military German cyborg with a wiseass super computer in a trenchcoat. Click here for more on both books, and free R&K short stories “The Nemesis Worm” and “Ghost”. You may also like Champion of Mars, an epic tale spanning millennia from the next century to the far, far future of the Red Planet.

There are further free short stories here on the site (of varying vintage, so perhaps not me at my best, but still interesting). There are some others you can buy if you wish at The Angry Robot Trading Company.

Right, you’ve been good and read my pleading for you to buy my books. In return, please feel free to ask me anything about anything – including these hot, newly announced BL titles – in the comments. Games, journalism, GW, Mantic, SFX, White Dwarf, whatever. I will answer what I am allowed to. Think of it as an interview by you, if you like.

If you’re into wargaming, you might want to follow me on this blog and/or on twitter, as there will be another announcement on the little toy men front soon. Plus there’s all the SF/Fantasy/Horror reviews, interviews, features and so forth you get regularly on this site. On twitter you might have to put up with a bunch of stuff about dogs, beer, social issues, the environment and children, but I do talk about gaming, SF and writing sometimes.

Thank you for your attention. Guy out.

Ray Bradbury: Farewell to a giant

I’m going to be one of a bazillion bloggers writing about Ray Bradbury today, and I probably won’t be saying much new, but he was an important writer to me and I want to say something.

I’m not much moved by the cult of fame. Like a lot of modern life, it really, really annoys me. Many celebrities don’t do much by way of justifying their exalted status. Authors in general do more to deserve approbation than some of our planet’s famed sons and daughters, toiling away on their own, but even they can be less talented than they believe, and can let their success, should the fickle vagaries of fate bestow it upon them, go to their heads. You’ll not see many posts like this from me.

Ray Bradbury was one of those who thoroughly deserved the plaudits heaped upon him, and more besides. He was one of the loose handful of SF writers whose work transcended their favoured genre and can genuinely, whole-heartedly be described as art.

Bradbury apparently had a great love of life, but what always stays with me from his work is the sense of melancholy at life passing that it evokes. Long summer nights giving way to autumn days, the bittersweet exchange of childhood for adulthood, of youth for middle-age; the thrilling slip of experience as it runs through our hands, inevitably dragging time and, ultimately, the cessation of experience behind it. Naturally, the brassy light of apple days is predominant in works he wrote later in his life, but it was always evident. Something Wicked This Way Comes epitomises these feelings for me, whose teenage hero literally sees his childhood end, as does the Martian Chronicles, where the venerable Martian civilisation has to make way for something new, as do all things in their due time.

This was a powerful message for my teenage self. I read many of his short stories and novels in the late ’80s as my own boyhood ticked closer to its conclusion. They infused my own utterly indulgent and somewhat risible sense of adolescent sorrow with a touch of nobility.

Bradbury was one of the great prose stylists of 20th Century American fiction. He had a knack for phrases that stick long in the mind, and a powerful way with imagery. There are moments from his work aplenty that have taken up permanent residence in my head – A man planting trees on Mars and an automated house’s valiant attempts to survive post-apocalyptic Earth in The Martian Chronicles. Alien guns that fire bees (bees!) from the same. Calliopes, a carousel of wishes and the balloon-borne Dust Witch sniffing her way over town in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the warped writing and chemical tang on the air encountered by returning chrononauts in “A Sound of Thunder”, Guy Montag discovering reading in Fahrenheit 451. And of course that golden sunlight.

Bradbury died yesterday, on my 39th birthday. I never met him, but I did speak to him on the phone. I tried to arrange an interview with him while on a US trip, from the LA offices of Alliance Atlantis who had produced Ray Bradbury Theater. This was in 1999, and he had not long before suffered a stroke. If I recall correctly, it was my foolish insistence on a picture (magazine policy, but a more experienced me would have known to disregard it) that prevented our meeting. Such a wasted opportunity, and one I will forever regret. Still, I feel privileged to have spoken to him at all.

My book Champion of Mars was very much inspired by Bradbury, although my talent (I’m cringing inside even using that word in relation to my own work) is like a molehill to his mountain. He’s one of the writers that opened my eyes to the fact that books could be far more than just entertainment, and how truly magical writing can be. If it weren’t for him and others like him I wouldn’t be a writer at all, and I’ll always be thankful for that.

I don’t have any reviews or pieces about Bradbury’s work directly, but here is a review of the 1980 TV mini-series The Martian Chronicles. I loved it as a child and loved it again recently, although Bradbury himself famously called it “boring”.