- HOW LONG DOES A BOOK TAKE TO WRITE
- Never less than a year. Then I shelf the MS leaving it to ferment another year while writing a second MS. I wrote Global Raider 20 years ago but had no luck with publishers. One of them turned it down saying America did not have pilotless bombers and if they did, the USA would never use them to bomb Afghanistan. Because I always believed in the book, last year I dug it out and rewrote the story to concur with present time, injecting the meticulous details and structure I require for all my work. Like good wine, manuscripts should be allowed to mature until perfect.
- WHAT ARE THE HARDEST SCENES TO WRITE
- Scenes describing sex and I don’t mean porn or bondage, that’s lust. I mean the intimate participation in the union of love. This involves mental and emotional description as much as physical. Are both giving, is one giving and the other taking? As the portrayal of love usually involves principal protagonists, their reactions to love making must be within character and the storyline.
- WHAT INSPIRED ME TO WRITE GLOBAL RAIDER
- Having spent 7 years in the military I have always been interested in the advancing technology of weapons. Since the fall of the sword to arrows, then musket and cannons, it has been weaponry which decides battles. The more advanced the weapons, the more chance of winning. If Global Raider had been around 30 years ago many wars might have been prevented by taking out the principal bad guy in round one. America is close to this with the development of the top secret SR 72.
- WHERE IS YOUR FAVOURITE PLACE TO WORK
- I have a house in Portugal overlooking my vineyard to forests and mountains beyond. Sitting at my desk this is the view I see from the window. On shelves around me are reference books, dictionaries and encyclopaedias from 1887. But the most beneficial item is silence. Silence allows a writer to retreat into the mind’s imagination and gather words. That’s the place I like best.
- DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR OTHER WRITERS
- Always carry a notebook and pen. Ideas pop from the recesses of the mind and unless written down immediately are frequently forgotten. Books are like a construction, built word by word, sentence by sentence. They are polished, re-polished, fine-tuned, edited and proof read. Writing takes time, planning and determination. Without it you go nowhere. It got me to number 3 in the Amazon bestseller list. It did not keep me there but Global Raider might place me at number 1. I don’t write scenes too graphically. In your face reality puts many readers off. If you are uncertain about anything in your MS, think it over a month or two then go back.
- WHAT IS YOUR NEXT PROJECT
- I am currently working on a series called The Mind Traveller for 10-15 year olds. Writing for adults must stay within the confines of reality but for younger readers the writer can let the imagination rip. In The Mind Traveller, Rosie, a feisty 14 year old, travels into Mind Space, to places allowed by quantum physics and parallel worlds. There she encounters white and dark angels, demons, dragons and creppins, even the 17th century British Navy. After that it’s a crime thriller in which a young woman’s search for £2.5 billion hidden by her father from a criminal family.
- WHAT IS MY OPINION OF EBOOKS VERSUS PRINT BOOKS
- I love books as objects, there is something emotive about clasping a well written book, seeing them lined up on shelves. All my reference books and literary classics are printed. Crime novels I hold on ebooks, the ebook is here to stay. You can download from Amazon at a quarter of the price while sitting in your armchair. Ebooks are a great invention, but printed books will always hold their own.
Go to James McKenna’s author page on Amazon http://tinyurl.com/c9ultl3
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