1. Has writing been your hobby from childhood, or did it just come to your mind recently?

 

Well I'm 45 now (I don't know how that happened!) and I sent my first manuscript off to America from the UK when I was just 14. That's a long time... but it isn't all I've done with my life; I'm married, I have two kids. I'm also an aspiring screenwriter, poet, cartoon illustrator, song-writer, musician, composer, and computer game level designer. I spent a handful of years mapping for the Star Wars PC game Jedi Academy under my pseudonym of Several Sided Sid, building maps that were used as skirmishing arenas for the online gaming community. I really enjoyed it, got some great praise too - you can check my work out here:

 

https://www.facebook.com/SeveralSidedSid

 

I've written several full-length movie screenplays and some shorter scripts too, including a couple of sitcom pilots, and a movie adaptation of my novel THE EMPTY WORLD. I've written lots of children's stories, an absolute plethora of poetry and prose (both serious and nonsensical - I love nonsense!). A friend and I have been working on a tome of invented words for over twenty years now, texting each other silliness back and forth, and presently I've penned about fifteen hundred entries. (No, really!) Hopefully one day it will see the light off day.

 

Plus I write songs and music; I used to play bass and keyboards in a few alternative rock bands once upon a time, I appeared on stage a few times back in the nineties - thought I was gonna be a rock star way back when, but I had to abandon that goal when it started to interfere with my being a dad. These days my composing is restricted to GarageBand. Long live GarageBand!

 

 2. What motivated you to start writing?

 

I started writing stories when I was 7, when Star Wars first appeared in the world. Wide-eyed at the excitement it presented, I yearned to create something exciting of my own. Now science fiction is by no means all I write, but I have to tip my hat to George Lucas for starting me on my long and exciting path.

 

What was it Yoda said? "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny." Well, the same can be said for writing, I'm sure all writers will agree! It's in our blood.

 

 3. What is your book THE EMPTY WORLD about?

 

The initial inspiration for THE EMPTY WORLD came in the form of a delayed building site a few doors down the road from my house. The old disused car showroom had been torn down and a barren stretch of dirt had replaced it for four long years, during which time all the workmen did was dig one pit and remove countless tonnes of dirt from its depths. Then, suspiciously, the row of houses at the back of the site, which had a great view into the pit, all had to be abandoned after drilling on the site unsettled the foundations (reportedly). I managed to convince himself that something weird was happening right beneath my street. Perhaps it was a nuclear bunker they were building, perhaps it was something else...

 

Then I had a flash of inspiration - this would make a great story, about a young boy who lived where I lived, but right next door to the site, and his bedroom window was the only remaining viewpoint into the mysterious pit mouth, and he had noticed all these goings on, and had started building theories about what might lie beneath the site.... beneath his house! A boy who would stop at nothing to investigate.

 

But it had to be worth the energy. It had to be more than simply, 'I wonder what they're doing down there...'

 

So I thought and thought about it, searching for a plot - and then the obvious struck me: my character Danny's missing dad had managed to create a clone of Planet Earth, in a bid to save Mankind from eventual demise! He'd been laughed out of the military years before for claiming he was working on a process that would enable him to clone stones - which would in turn pave the way to a manufacturing revolution - but no one believed that 'non biologic particle multiplicity' was possible and so Danny's father Robert Ringrose had been forced to relocate to the tiny unassuming town of Sphagnum Moss, where he continued to work on his theories in total secret.

 

And in the safety of a secret research facility hidden beneath the purposefully delayed building site beside their house - the perfect decoy - Robert and his Team of renegade scientists had finally cracked the process and got it right. But they hadn't stopped at cloning stones. They had managed to clone the world, and Robert called it Segnimedia (the Empty World), a perfect carbon copy of Planet Earth (no people, no plants, no animals, just the world). Perhaps it could offer Mankind a second chance for survival once we've finally ruined the planet where we live.

 

So that's the basic premise. The story is told from young Danny Ringrose's point of view, as he investigates the building site and discovers the whereabouts of his missing parents and is amazed to find out what they have been up to. Danny has never known of Robert's real work, but has seen the miniature machine prototypes he has been working on and schematics in their house, never dreaming what his dad was up to. There's danger, enemies and a whole load of abuse in the form of his wise-cracking little sister along the way! It's a lot of fun.

 

 4. How many hours do you spend on writing in a day?

 

It differs. When I'm in the zone I write whenever I can. You can often find me wandering down the streets at lunchtime typing new scenes into my phone notes, I once fell on my *rse because I walked straight into a load of abandoned planks just lying in the street! I used to read as a child in much the same way, following my mum and dad around the shops with my nose stuck in a book. I'm quite lucky from a writing perspective in that I get a fair amount of time by myself right now, when my wife is at work, which is invaluable to a writer really. On those days I'm not inspired, I feel guilty that I'm not writing!

 

 5. Do you read a lot of books?

 

Nowhere near as many as I'd like to these days. I'm so focused on my EMPTY WORLD series that whenever I get time to read, I invariably end up writing instead. But I've read enough books to know how it's done, and my time being nurtured by my Literary Agency helped a millionfold, so I'd rather write than read these days. That said, I can't even tell you how many books I've started reading in earnest, only to get distracted by writing my own. I imagine I'm not the only writer who can tell you that.

 

 6. What was the hardest part of writing this book and what process did you go through to get it published?

 

Gosh, it was so hard. I need to tell you all about it... and there's lots to tell so grab a coffee! Are you ready?

 

I thought once I'd laboured over the preparatory notes for three whole months and then spent a further eighteen months writing the actual manuscript (and rewriting it) that I had finished and all the hardest work was done. I couldn't have been more wrong.

 

As soon as it was completed (literally that day) I emailed the synopsis to several hand-picked agents I had chosen to approach from the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook, but I knew in my heart, as had happened with every other book or screenplay manuscript I had sent to so many people in the past, that it would meet the same fate... some interest if I was lucky, a few near misses, but in the end a big resounding NO.

 

To my delight a nice man at a London publishers (whose name I will respectfully not mention) who don't make a usual living from publishing fiction, excitedly replied to my email about two hours later, requesting that I send it to no one else and give them a week's exclusivity to make a decision on whether or not to publish my beloved book!

 

I was ecstatic... and proud... and hopeful...

 

My contact there even emailed the manuscript to his Managing Director who was currently at a meeting in America. The excitement grew and I waited about a week until the final decision had been made...

 

... that they wouldn't be going ahead with publishing my book :( I was devastated, of course, but familiar with the feeling. This had been the closest I had ever come to a yes and I had allowed myself to dare to hope. Oh well, my contact there said it was not his decision, and if it was up to him he would have said yes - this did lift my spirits and convinced me it was worth sending the manuscript out to others - or rather a synopsis and covering letter to be precise.

 

So I carried on submitting it to some of the agents I had chosen to approach, with a brief but exciting description of the book, expecting everyone to reply with a respectful refusal to read or to not reply at all. To my excitement the agent who became my agent emailed me back and said, 'Why don't you send over the first three chapters and I'll take a look?' This was really exciting! It was pretty much the most interest anyone had ever shown in all the many things I had been submitting, left, right and centre. So I sent him the first three chapters and sat and waited.

 

By this time I had been let go by my employer, who had relocated the call centre I had been working in and made everyone unemployed, so THE EMPTY WORLD wasn't just a hobby to me - more than ever before, my writing felt like my ticket to the future. The recession had just descended and work was very hard to find. I needed this to work for me. I needed it to.

 

So my agent replied a couple of weeks or so later, with frustrating, and potentially devastating news. He said that my writing was good, and everything that was necessary for a really good book was there, but I had made the classic mistake that every new writer makes: I had written too much. I once read that although every new writer wants to show how good they are and include every word they know, less is so much more and we should only put on the page what is absolutely necessary. This doesn't just apply to overlong sentences or unnecessary character history or whatever, but right down to lines of dialogue, facial expressions, anything which detracts from the pertinent point. If it's action, write what happens, if it's dialogue, have them say only what we need to know. My agent said I had written about three times more than I needed to and that it would need a hefty redraft before it was okay.

 

Being unemployed, I had time on my side and enough enthusiasm to roll Planet Earth a little closer to the Moon, so I wrote straight back to him and said I would cut it by two thirds and send it back. My enthusiasm must have excited him because he said he'd show me what he meant and sent me a redline showing his corrections, so I could see exactly where he thought I had gone wrong. Fired up by this, I made the changes I could stomach making to my beloved first three chapters and sent them back, accompanied by the next little chunk.

 

And this is how work progressed for the next few months. It was frustrating but exciting... probably more excitement than I had ever known creatively before. Finally someone was actually taking me seriously. I'd never really asked anyone to read my work before, I pretty much wrote my stories in a bubble, so I wasn't used to having my writing pored over, right down to the comma level. It was fun but it was exasperating too. At that point I just wanted to please, and I knew that he knew more than I did about how to make it right. But it wasn't just an exercise in proper sentence structure and thinking about what isn't necessary in a scene, he suggested I lose whole chunks where I had gone off on a tangent and followed the adventures of lesser characters than the hero. Not lesser, shall we say, just that I had to stick with my central driving force and follow that, to give the reader one focal point to follow. He advised this was especially important with a book that would be read by children as much as it would by adults.

 

It was akin to adapting a movie out of a TV series by the time we'd finished; the original manuscript stood at 728 pages, and by the time we had worked on chunks of manuscript emailed back and forth, losing bits here, adding bits there, me deciding to trust him entirely - because what he said was right - it was roughly half the size. But it was now definitely twice the book it had been!

 

Don't get me wrong, it was all my decision-making in the end... he suggested where it went on too long or where I should treat the reader to further explanations of the incredible science I had created in my world, and the machines that made this weird science possible, and I was free to agree or disagree with everything he said, but he was on a mission to have my book read like it was written by a seasoned author and I trusted him implicitly. I think the first time I ever deleted a scene it almost killed me. All those words lost! But now I love identifying bits of extemporaneous story matter that doesn't belong, absorbing the most important bits into their proper position in the story and axing the rest with a resounding plop. There's no better feeling than getting rid of something that was making the pages crowded. Anything you decide to delete is because it is an improvement, I have learned.

 

So we went through this process, my agent and I, me sending him story chunks and him sending them back as he saw fit, and after the pain and frustration subsided I realised it was the most enjoyable part of the process. I've since had other people, close friends and family, read my work, and as long as you trust a person's opinion, it doesn't matter who it is - everyone has a valid viewpoint on a story and no suggestion for improvement is an insult, or a waste of time. Nowadays I wouldn't want to write without a trusty second pair of eyes. You can be sure you've sewn up every scrap of plot hole... but what if the absolutely obvious has eluded you all along? Don't be an island as a writer. Reach out to those you know whose opinions you value.

 

So this process was long and painful and then enjoyable, and when we'd finally finished, when all the reworking and further explaining and waiting for replies was said and done, when I was preparing myself for submission of my far superior manuscript to the publishers... a second pair of eyes at the agency took a look. And said it couldn't possibly be submitted to a publisher in its present state!

 

I felt the whole world yanked from underneath me like a carpet. I needed explanation. The explanation was simple: we'd done a great job of identifying all unnecessary junk and scenes and characters and descriptions, we'd shortened the plot and made it jump more easily off the page, we'd captured everything I was hoping to capture with my very first draft. And all in the name of keeping a steady pace. Timing everything correctly. But in agent number two's opinion, one very simple rule (and probably the most important) had been slightly overlooked.

 

And that was suspension of disbelief. I can remember when I didn't even know what that meant. No matter how far-fetched a great idea is, so long as you present it in a way in which it can be seen to make sense... at least enough for someone to say to themselves, 'Okay, that would never be possible, but this is such a neat idea for a story, I'm totally prepared to overlook that and just enjoy it!' then anything will work. Think Back To The Future. As if. (Three of my favourite films by the way).

 

And there was one scene in THE EMPTY WORLD that agent number two felt stretched suspension of disbelief a little too far. That's okay, you might think, just change it. But that one scene was the springboard scene for EVERYTHING THAT CAME AFTER. Which meant a potential rewrite of the entire second half.

 

I was crushed. I was short of money and unemployed and desperate for a sale, thinking the past few months of blood sweat and tears spent slaving at a keyboard to meet the advice that would change everything for me was finally at an end, and I was given a new dilemma. The transitional part of the novel didn't work. I could have given in right there and then, I don't normally fight so strong, but this story and its sequels meant everything to me. I knew once they were published they would be a great success, so I buckled down and forced myself to fix it.

 

It turned out not to be so bad. Took a few weeks work to incorporate the changes, and if you're familiar with my book it concerned how young Danny actually ends up being underground when he least expects it, in his father's research facility that has been hiding beneath his garden all his life. I'd spent whole chapters just to get him there, whereas now it happens all at once, and to the story's benefit.

 

Once that was fixed, we were pretty much done. Everything - and I mean everything - was theoretically believable. Just another draft and all Easter weekend on the phone to agent number two, going through the manuscript word for word. Eventually we all agreed it was finally ready for submission to the hand picked publishers. This nicely coincided with me finding work so everything seemed on the up, as I waited for the offers of publication to come flooding in.

 

I was in for disappointment, in the form of some very nice rejections from some publishers. Silly me thinking getting an agent was a deal signed. I was learning the hard way that all my dreams were so much more elusive than I thought. The most annoying rejection letter, from a huge publisher indeed, informed me my book was well written and well plotted but their list was presently full in that particular genre, a comment which still has me tearing my hair out of an evening. (A metaphor. If that were true I would be bald. I'm not bald). Who hasn't got space for something they believe will sell well??

 

After the rejections, my agent gave me the most tortuous six weeks of my creative life. Here's how she did it:

She said, 'Make the book better.'

'Better how?' I asked her.

'I don't know. Just better.'

 

I couldn't believe it. I'd been through so many redrafts and such a lot of tears and frustration, and here I was faced with yet another setback. And this time I had to sort it out completely by myself. No one was going to be giving me any input. I had to turn a failing manuscript around, one which I couldn't understand why no one would buy, and make it something no one could refuse. So I sat and stared and thought and stared and sat... then stared and sat and thought and sat and stared. It took so much out of me, those six weeks. If I hadn't been so DETERMINED my book would be loved by anyone who read it, I probably would have given up there and then. Again. I'm not famed amongst my loved ones for perseverance. Except where my writing is concerned.

 

Eventually, after drawing a total blank as to what the story needed, I was able to get some distance from the story and look at it again - yet again - from someone else's point of view. I tell myself so many times that the most important part of the writing process is the time spent away from the page, in those moments when inspiration just kind of floats into your brain. (I've a whole theory on where inspiration comes from, by the way, but that's fodder for another story).

 

And then the answer hit me as to how to improve the story, and once it did, I had to incorporate the changes it caused throughout the entire manuscript, which meant knowing every sentence I had written and how everything would be affected by the change. Staying on top of that was mind-numbing... basically rewriting an entire book but by hardly changing anything at all, just being aware of all the things that had to change, even down to inner thoughts of characters at any point in the story.

 

Basically the young hero Danny had previously never known anything about his father being a ridiculed scientist, or any of his work, but it struck me the only feasible improvement I could make to the manuscript would be to have Danny well aware of his father's past from the outset, and in fact give Danny moments of inexplainable strength, where he worries his father's old work on the Human Enhancement Program for the military may have been performed on him at birth. This leaves Danny an unwitting superhuman, and far more able to deal with the truth of what his father has created when he eventually finds out.

 

This actually makes Danny a far more interesting and important character from the outset, and has gone a long way I think to involving the reader more deeply right away. I'm so glad my agent told me to 'make it better'. I never would have chosen to at the time... but I'm very thankful that she did.

 

Not that it got me published by a publisher. It went out again but still the same response. What was most infuriating was that I had no idea which publishers it had been sent out to and how soon these publishers normally responded, so I had to play the waiting game yet again, working on the plots for Books Two and Three while I tried to be patient. When the rejections did come back, still the same replies - everybody thought my book was well written, well plotted and well edited, some simply didn't feel it was in their genre (that's their prerogative) and nobody offered me a deal.

 

It was so disheartening. I personally think the major reason no publisher said yes at the time was down to timing, and unlucky timing at that. This was around 2010-11 and Twilight was all the rage, all you ever found on shelves was vampire stories; my agent even said, 'Wouldn't you like to write a vampire story?' but I think it was a joke. I actually have a great plot for a vampire story... but THE EMPTY WORLD is where I'm headed!

 

Eventually the agent who had discovered me unfortunately moved on from the agency and my relationship with the agency soon after ended, though on great terms, after I'd pitched various other ideas to them for my next book and written the first draft of a second novel (soon to be ready) and a psychological thriller screenplay (which is currently doing the rounds of the pertinent agencies and production companies). Both of these projects received a full critique before he left, which has really helped me on my mission to produce a final draft of each.

 

I wrote that second novel whilst in between jobs again, and it was as important to me for this to succeed as well, but when I returned to work, a writer I know there suggested I self-published THE EMPTY WORLD to Amazon. I hadn't heard of the concept, it had never been mentioned to me by my agent, as it was still a relatively new phenomenon for us independent authors. I dragged my heels and took my time, whilst completing the plot for Book Three: SPACE TIME ZERO and redrafting my thriller screenplay at least two times (the third draft under the excellent guidance of an independent movie producer).

 

Eventually I got myself in gear and researched what I had to do... and finally put THE EMPTY WORLD on Amazon for all the world to read. The response was delightful. People were finally reading and reviewing it - after all my hard work - and although it wasn't quite the outcome I had been chasing, ie. not traditional publishing, what mattered to me more than anything was the great support from the readers, and as long as they encourage me to continue writing... well, I've always said that even if I knew no one would ever read a book that I was writing, I'd still make sure it was the best thing I could write, because ultimately, I write for my own enjoyment, and I think an author always should. I think that passion shows in a person's writing... so there's no chance of me stopping writing yet!

 

As soon as THE EMPTY WORLD was on Amazon, my ex-agent was kind enough to put me in touch with the commissioning editor of a major children's publisher, who was so behind the novel and its planned sequels that he championed it to his International Office. This was all very exciting... yet again. However their ultimate decision was unfortunately not to publish, against mine and the commissioning editor's wishes, who had big plans for where to take the story. Once again I'd hit a brick wall, and now I'd learned that finding an interested publisher was still not a deal signed!

 

Since then I have submitted the book to a gamut of literary agents in the hope that it will land on the right desk. I'm still hoping that it will.

 

 7. What did you enjoy most about writing this book?

 

Definitely the learning process. I now know how to edit on-the-fly (I hope). I tend now to rewrite each scene as I write it, so when I come back to it, it's in a much better state than my scenes used to be before I had my agent. It's definitely been a huge help. Book 2, THE BIG BANG MACHINE, is largely written, and although it hasn't been professionally edited like with Book 1, I think it reads the same, as though it has been. Let's just say, I've learned from my experience!

 

 8. What are some ways in which you promote your work?

 

I often post teasers for THE EMPTY WORLD in relevant Facebook groups, and on Twitter too. You can find me on Twitter at @AndrewReeves_ and @SeveralSidedSid, and on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/emptyworldandrewreeves andhttps://www.facebook.com/AuthorAndrewReeves. I'm working on a book trailer at the moment and would really like to get some 3D artists on board to help me conceptualise the many locations and characters from the book. To this end I have posted a blog to attract their attention, I think it would be great to give it the feel of a movie... plenty of readers have said they can imagine my book on screen. It is certainly very visual, with lots of exciting machines and locations going on. I paid for advertising once and it didn't exactly harness the desired results in terms of sales or attention, so I'm sticking with Facebook and Twitter to try and grow awareness for my work.

 

 9. Do you find that these add to or detract from your writing time?

 

Definitely detract, although I do enjoy the work I put into delivering the perfect teaser, and it never ceases to help me see a new angle for the way promoting the book can go. I really want to get the book out to young adult readers and always welcome suggestions on how best to achieve this. Though it falls into the young adult market, it's mainly been read by adults so far who have enjoyed reading it as much as I have writing it. It's a cross-over from young adult to adult because of the many serious issues that it deals with behind all the excitement and fun and action that it brings. I think all the best books do.

 

 10. What do you do in your free time?

 

I've heard of free time. What is it? Lol. I try and find the time to write, around being a husband and a dad :)