#WritersCoffeeClub 6 Aug
What sort of collectives appear in your work?
Current WIP: none, the Permanence is a crapsack empire, at the first sign of collectives existing the aristocrats would order an orbital bombardment.
Previous works … not many: the Laundry Files centres around civil servants, the Merchant Princes deals with perfidious nobles (and then a Leveller-descended quasi-communist state), and so on. Nearest I can think of is the found family in the New Management books.
#WritersCoffeeClub 21: What’s a mistake you see a lot of writers make when writing about people with your lived experience?
My lived experience is weird enough that I don't remember ever reading a story that seemed to relate to it.
#WritersCoffeeClub 8/21. What’s a mistake you see a lot of writers make when writing about people with your lived experience?
A lot of US writers get many details wrong when writing about houses in Europe.
Like, no, we don't have closets. No, we don't have AC. No, we don't have windows that slide up to open.
And no, we don't get two feet of snow in Germany in winter, either (unless it's high up in the mountains).
Always fun to catch those.
#WritersCoffeeClub Sep 7: What's something you thought would help your workflow, but didn't work out?
Getting a keyboard for my tablet so I could write on my that as well as my PC. Three broken keyboards later, I gave up. Either I'm very unlucky, or very bad at choosing keyboards, or the manufacturers of keyboards for tablets are cutting every corner they can.
#WritersCoffeeClub Jul 11 - Share a sentence you loved but couldn't make work.
"Skuld's salad days as a suicide bomber came to an end after her eighth successful mission, when she awakened in the reincarnation tank with orders to pursue a career in academia."
It's not her fault the novel didn't work in the end, but the implications of that opening sentence led to a much better spin-off novel!
#writersCoffeeClub 17 July: What's a trope you can't get enough of writing?
For me it's nothing being black and white, just shades of grey.
2. I could do with some help choosing my next project. My options are:
(a) A collection of up to 14 short stories. Mostly SciFi/Specfic. Although I tend to think authors like these more than readers.
(b) A portal fantasy where a female SAS soldier is transported to an alternate medieval fantasy world and forced to confront her real-life past. It includes a sapphic romance.
(c) SciFi where humans are forced to leave Earth for a new world, but it happens over hundreds of years. The first to leave are the last to arrive on a new planet. They find a frightening new reality where humans have tried to sustain capitalism without a lower class to prey on.
Thoughts? 🤔
I think I'm edging towards (b) 🙂
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#WritersCoffeeClub Jul 18 - Talk about how a work progressed from its initial inspiration.
I began a novelette in 1993 titled "A Colder War": I'd just re-read "At The Mountains of Madness" and it seemed to me that Lovecraft's horrors had become over-familiar, but would serve really well as a metaphor for the horror of nuclear annihilation during the just-ended Cold War that I'd grown up with. It ran on rails, subject to a four-year hiatus (I finished it in 1997).
It's okay to take long breaks!
#WritersCoffeeClub for 27th July 2026
27. What's a writerly growing pain you're experiencing right now?
Not sure "growing pains" is the right word after earning my living as a writer for 36 years, but I'm currently grappling with spinning up a whole new setting for one or more SF novels for the first time in over a decade and I can feel the rust flaking off my mental gears …
#WritersCoffeeClub Aug. 10: Do you reuse characters?
Only within a series in which they're recurring characters. I try hard not to do self-inserts or to recycle characters between different stories, but within the Laundry Files and the Merchant Princes series the same faces pop up because they're a shared setting and a multi-book story, respectively.
#WritersCoffeeClub Aug. 28: How do we defend ourselves as artists when the arts are devalued?
Counter-attack. Mock, belittle, satirise, and despise the individuals and movements trying to devalue art. And carry on making great art despite their idiocy.
#WritersCoffeeClub July 23. How much erotic content can a work have without being considered erotica?
If the focus of the work is on the erotic content, then it's erotica. If the focus is on something else, then the erotica is just there to add colour (or the author got the balance wrong).
#WritersCoffeeClub 26 Aug: What are good examples of texts written from a non-human point of view?
"Excession" by Iain M. Banks tries to tackle a vastly superintelligent AI as the viewpoint character, as do some of the other Culture novels. And a whole lot of C. J. Cherryh's work goes there—consider "The Pride of Chanur" as an easy way in.
(And my own "Saturn's Children" and "Neptune's Brood" are told by post-human protagonists, long after humanity is extinct.)
#WritersCoffeeClub 11 Aug—When were you last a student?
July 1990, the month I got my Master's Degree (a conversion degree for science graduates transitioning into computer science—roughly equivalent to a Comp Sci BSc). Before that, in 1986 I graduated with a BPharm then did post-graduation training to register as a pharmacist.
Guess what? I've been a full-time writer almost continuously (three years in software dev aside) since late 1990! (Technical author, computer journalist, novelist.)
#WritersCoffeeClub 24 July. Should a reader be forewarned about any and all erotic content, no matter how small?
No!
It's the reader's job to curate their own boundaries. Books don't leap out and grab victims then force words into the reader's head: a reader has to deliberately keep reading and can stop whenever they feel like it. So any harm is self-inflicted.
#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 12 - What’s the last museum you went to? Did it inspire you?
The Dornier museum near Friedrichshafen!
Here's a photo of the gate guardian. Bearing in mind that I write SF/F, what do you think I made of it?
#WritersCoffeeClub July 28: What's something about your own work which needs some polish?
Everything!
You never stop learning and never stop trying to improve. Right now I'm wrestling with the deep structure of a complex braided-viewpoints-and-intercut-timelines novel, but I'm also worrying about character depth and worldbuilding along the way. And when published it'll be something like my 34th novel.
#writersCoffeeClub 13 May: 'if writing was not your "thing," what would your "thing" be?'
Probably TTRPG design. I was very much into that side of things from about 1979-1983. (Am even responsible for some of the classic D&D monsters.)
NB: I haven't gamed in 40+ years at this point.
#WritersCoffeeClub 13th Aug Do the arts appear often within the works you write? Which ones?
Rarely. I write SF/F that usually deals with "big issues"—politics, espionage, economics. So my protagonists aren't creative artists: they make take in a movie or play games in their spare time, but that's not the focus of the fic. Occasionally I use a culture's privileged arts as a way of indicating their biases, but it's background, not foreground.
#WritersCoffeeClub July 29, Is there something you want to write, but don't think you yet have the skill?
Romance. (Ducks and runs.) No, seriously, it's deceptively difficult!
More seriously, I'm about 35 novels into a publishing career, SF/F is a broad enough field to have given me opportunities to FAFO widely, and becoming more skilful isn't my biggest problem at this point.
#WritersCoffeeClub 30 July: End of the month roundup: How well did this month go for you?
July was mostly spent on vacation, doing museums and eating out around various bits of the Netherlands and Germany.
I got back to work (writing) in the last week, and am attacking the WIP one more time, to make requested edits.
#WritersCoffeeClub 10 Sep: What's something you believe about writing which can't really be proven?
I believe editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden was correct when she opined that in any written work of SF or fantasy, the author redefines the language they're writing in to accommodate the concepts in their story. (Kinda-sorta the inverse of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.)
#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 14 - How often do you reread what you’ve written after it’s "done"?
I can't bear to re-read my work once it's done.
Because the process of *getting* it done requires so many re-reads that I'm sick of it by the time it sees print!
Current WIP is on its third draft, so probably its 5th-6th read-through. When it's sold it'll inevitably get editorial change requests, then copyedits, then I have to check the page proofs. I'll have gone over it 6-9 times before publication.
#WritersCoffeeClub 31 July: End of the month roundup: What will you do differently next month?
Not go on holiday for 24 days, for starters!
(I'd like to be able to afford to, but instead I'm going to stay home and work.)
#WritersCoffeeClub Aug 15 - What’s something you recently learned about your own work?
Nothing recently, but that's because my last novel came out eight months ago and it was the finale of a long-running series: my new series won't be in print for at least a year or two.
Mind you, I did figure out how to encapsulate the theme of my WIP last week, which makes the rewriting easier: aristocracies cannot exist without child abuse.
