Earlier this week I ambiguously tweeted that I’d written to Ludovico Einaudi. He’s the composer of, among many other beautiful piano pieces, The Waves.  I didn’t mean that I’d written a letter to him, though that’s how it came across. I only meant that I’d listened to his Islands album whilst writing. It’s some of the best writing music I have.

I tend to listen to music whilst working on my books, and was overjoyed to find Stephen King does the same, as he notes in his fascinating On Writing.  Whilst King prefers ‘loud music – hard rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ‘N’ Roses and Metallica’, I prefer soft stuff – instrumental, electronic, classical…  Music that I wouldn’t usually spin in the car or that I’d learn the drums to.  Background music, I suppose, though I don’t want to mislabel any of the excellent albums below as merely sonic wallpaper.

I remember far back into my childhood when I dreamed of writing novels.  It couldn’t be that hard, I reasoned.  I could write a page every night after school, and more at the weekends.  It would be just like reading a book: I’d find out what happened as I went along.  And for the record, I still think there’s mileage in my idea of an alternate medieval universe in which everyone is accompanied by their own gargoyle, but I’m learning now there’s a lot more to writing a novel than one seed of an idea. In fact, how to write a novel is a multi-faceted question.

I’m not a fan of fan fiction.  I think using characters that other authors have put their love and imagination into is cheating and disrespectful – especially (read: inevitably) when the writing isn’t as good as the author’s own.  There can’t be much reward in it either – fan fiction isn’t part of the original story and is therefore in no way ‘real’ or ‘true’ to it.  I don’t see the point in it other than as a writing exercise, and even then it’s a half-baked activity – the characterisation and interplay between different characters has been established for you. But maybe it’s time for me to consider the genre in a new light. Maybe it’s time for a fan fiction review.

Getting my teeth into The Black Library

Recently, however, I read one of Jack Yeovil’s The Vampire Geneviève stories; Geneviève Undead.  Jack Yeovil is a non-de-plume of Kim Newman’s; he uses it when he writes for The Black Library, the publishing wing of tabletop wargames behemoth Games Workshop.  The Black Library publish stories set in the fictional universes of their Warhammer and Warhammer 40,00 games.