Ask the Author: B.P. Marshall
Answered Questions (6)
B.P. Marshall
No such thing. Oh, alright, you can sometimes find yourself stuck with a problem to solve, and may not be immediately able to crack it. Tell your brain what the problem is, where the solution may lie, then do something else while your brain tackles it. At some point later on, reapply yourself and your brain will generally come up with something. Any idea, no matter how rubbish, can be your starting point for a slightly better one, and a better one after that. Ultimately, if, like me, you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer, simply imagine what a clever writer would do, and then do that.
B.P. Marshall
Right now, with a debut novel freshly published, the best things are the kindness of strangers and other writers. An openhearted 'I loved your book' filled me with surprise and delight.
B.P. Marshall
Read lots, write lots and have fun with it. If, on the other hand, you yearn to be published, put aside 10 or 20 years, ensure you have a wealthy partner or a healthy trust fund, and start writing terrible, unreadable stories, making mistake after mistake, until one day, out of the blue, people deem them readable.
B.P. Marshall
A different sort of war story - three standalone novels set around the Pacific, telling three different stories about the Pacific War.
B.P. Marshall
Once you pass a certain point in your writing career, the voices never stop. Characters pop up and wave, demanding stories; stories emerge from the clatter and bustle of everyday life demanding to be told.
B.P. Marshall
The Last Circus on Earth was inspired by Russian Folk tales, pirate novels (including one I'd just written), Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (my working title was 'The Pricking of Thumbs' in homage to Bradbury), and all the current frontier sciences involved in ethology, consciousness studies, socio- and neurobiology. Plus I wanted to travel to the future to see how things turn out.
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