#WritersCoffeeClub 16 July: What's a trope you'd like to see subverted?
Trope subversion itself. It's become so much of a cliche these days that we need to go meta on its ass!
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#WritersCoffeeClub Sep 13 - What do you need to do before you sit down to write?
Caffeine. I burned out on coffee decades ago so it's strong breakfast tea, and I brew it by the litre and drink it from a thermos: I need at least one litre to jump-start my head, usually 2-3 by mid-afternoon.
#WritersCoffeeClub 10 July: Share a bit of written word that drives you wild. What speaks to you about this?
This may be a British/American usage mismatch, but "drives you wild" to me means"makes me angry", although I gather it means exactly the opposite to our transatlantic cousins!
And today's hashtag prompt is itself so poorly grammatically composed that it drives me wild.
#WritersCoffeeClub 22 July: Are the limits of what is considered 'erotic' more or less universal?
Ha ha nope! Not even within our own culture and time, never mind other species.
#WritersCoffeeClub 26 Jul: Do you have other works waiting in the wings? How many?
I do this for a living; I don't generally discuss unsold work in public (but I'm currently working on spinning up a space opera setting with at least two books in it). I have a career's worth of unfinished projects behind me: when I get through this final redraft of the WIP I'll probably pick up an unfinished novella from a couple of years ago and push it past the finish line.
#WritersCoffeeClub 25 July C&R: What are your techniques to escape a corner you’ve written yourself into?
Everyone: Have you tried this?
I'm partial to Raymond Chandler's advice: "when in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun". Failing that, the old pulp serial standby: "with one jump, he was free!"
But really, the best solution is to break the frame that dictated there should be a corner for you to be in. Expand the picture, add context that removes the obstacle.
#WritersCoffeeClub 23 August: If no one read what you write, would you still choose to write?
Yes: I wrote compulsively for years with no or very few readers. These days I am old and tired and I write for a living, so if people *stopped* reading what I write I might well get demotivated enough to give up (but I'm probably unemployable for anything else).
#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 …
Edited 106d ago
#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 10th Oct: Do you have a guiding principle as a writer? What is it? (Or why not?)
Two principles: I write to maximize my income and I write to maximize my readership. (This is because I am a full-time author but also I want to reach and entertain as many people as possible. Which indirectly leads to increasing income as more people buy my books.)
I have more ideas than time to write them. So I prioritize projects that my agent can sell and that I find interesting.
#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.