Skip to main content

Karl Drinkwater - Four Way Interview

Karl Drinkwater is originally from Manchester, but has lived in Wales half his life. He is a full-time author, edits fiction for other writers and was a professional librarian for over twenty-five years. He has degrees in English, Classics and Information Science. When he isn't writing, he loves exercise, guitars, computer and board games, the natural environment, animals, social justice, cake and zombies - not necessarily in that order. His latest novel is Lost Solace.

 Why science fiction?

 My favourite books have always been any form of speculative fiction. As a child I began with ghost stories, which were the first books to make me completely forget I was reading. By my teenage years I was obsessed with fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Although I read literary and contemporary books, non-fiction, historical works, classics and so on, it is speculative fiction that I return to when I want escape and wonder. When I read reviews of my last book, the fast-paced novella Harvest Festival, I was surprised that a few reviewers called it science fiction. I never intended that. To me it is suspense, horror and action. But it made me realise that it was time to write a science fiction story. On the one hand I wanted to be able to look into issues of identity and fluid personality (which is how the Clarissa thread evolved), but I also wanted to take the tempo and mood of Harvest Festival and run with it across a longer tale. That required a scenario that involved a need for movement, quick thinking, and a goal that may not be obtainable, but with consequences for failure that don’t bear thinking about. Everything grew from that kernel.

Why this book?

 Last year I took part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and wrote drafts of a collection of contemporary stories exploring love and relationships. Towards the end of the month the book was finished, but I hadn’t achieved my writing goal – I needed another few thousand words. I decided to reward myself for my hard work, and write something that I thought would be a fun short story. I began Lost Solace. However, the book didn’t end when November ended – the story kept growing and changing. What began as a short story turned into a novel; the original male protagonist mutated from some kind of shallow Indiana Jones who plundered Lost Ships into Opal, on her more personal quest; the armoured war droid companion of my draft notes became a hi-tech suit and spaceship, backed up by Clarissa’s intelligence and a truly-forming relationship. I have never had so much fun writing. I would sit down each day, skim over some ideas for where the story might go, but then let it change direction whenever it needed to. It was a joy to write and re-read, and as a result that project took over from the short stories, which are still sat, unedited, a year later!

What’s next?

 I tend to have a lot of projects on the go. In 2018 I’ll be working on a new edition of one of my literary/relationship novels (2000 Tunes), which is a homage to Manchester and its music and people, set in the year 2000, when the main characters are determined to change their lives. I will get the NaNoWriMo short story collection finished and work with my editors to determine which stories to keep and which to throw away (I have around 120,000 words of short stories – only the best half will escape the cutting room floor). I will also get the first draft of my next book written. It will almost certainly be a sequel. If Lost Solace does very well then I will continue Opal’s tale without too many delays. However, two of my other books have been popular and fans often ask me for sequels (Turner and Harvest Festival) – so those are other options. Beyond that I have six other works plotted out and just waiting for me to get down to writing their first drafts. Two of those are sci-fi, three are horror, and one is literary/contemporary.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

 Everything about my fiction, especially seeing how each book is received, and writing the new ones. Usually I keep a folder for each future work and as I ponder ideas over a couple of years I keep adding to it – so by the time I come to write my first draft I have no shortage of characters, story elements, locations, ideas, scenes, snippets of dialogue and so on, which act as puzzle pieces to fit together as the narrative is shaped. Out of the thousands of files and links for each new work, I may end up only keeping and incorporating a handful of them, but the selection of material and the research involved is tremendously engaging. I also love letting my imagination have free rein so that I end up surprised at the unexpected, which feeds into my excitement for the project, and hopefully the writing itself. Another thing that helps is that I don’t write in a single genre. In some ways that is bad, because it makes it harder to develop a core audience; but on the other hand it means everything feels fresh and unexpected to me (and hopefully my readers), and I can also select the best mood, format and genre for the story I want to tell, rather than being too constrained by expectations and rules.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more