Ask the Author: Darin Bradley
Answered Questions (8)
Darin Bradley
Not as of this moment. Audible has become a little more picky, so this one's not quite on their radar. Thanks for your interest, though!
Darin Bradley
Lord and Lady MacBeth, for showing us how to descend into Machiavellian madness and savagery with grace.
Darin Bradley
Bradbury! Asimov is too worried about the rules of the fight . . .
Darin Bradley
Sit in the chair with your fingers on the keyboard. Listen to some music--that's fine. But no Internet, no TV, no phone calls. Sit there every day for an hour and think about your project. You will write, or you will go insane. Either one is entertaining.
Darin Bradley
Finish the project. Even if it's terrible. Allow yourself to write terrible fiction, and then go and write terrible books. It's okay to throw one away--I did. Everybody needs training wheels at first, and the largest hurdle between yourself and publication is simply finishing the book.
Never compare your writing to what you read by your favorite authors. Those books have been developed, revised, and polished by an entire team of publishing professionals. You're one writer on your own; the important thing is to write honestly, and the rest will take care of itself.
Never compare your writing to what you read by your favorite authors. Those books have been developed, revised, and polished by an entire team of publishing professionals. You're one writer on your own; the important thing is to write honestly, and the rest will take care of itself.
Darin Bradley
I'm currently writing my third novel, Totem, which will be released in 2015. It's about an ancient city state with a religion affixed to its stone architecture. UNESCO has named the place a World Heritage Site, but all that stone is radioactive, and it's poisoning the inhabitants who worship it. When radiation abatement methods and foreign assistance result in an apartheid state, the inhabitants start going to drastic measures to define what remains of their ancient culture.
Darin Bradley
I'm always inspired to write, but I don't do it as frequently as other working authors I know. When I was a young writer in my 20s, I used to get up every morning and write from 8:00-11:00 am. I did it every day for years, and it taught me how to trust myself and how to sit down and produce content on cue. These days, I know not to force it, so when I feel that the idea I'm working on is ready to go, I sit down and hammer at it until it's finished, and then I'll go back into standby state until next time. I don't follow a particular schedule--I write when I know it's time to write. For me, good literature shouldn't just be easily machined day by day, not once you've trained yourself how to produce. I prefer a craftsman's approach to a line worker's.
Darin Bradley
I was living and working in Asheville, N.C. in 2009, and I was about a year out from the release of my first novel, Noise. I wanted to challenge myself to write something even more ambitious but still approachable to the general reading public, so I drew from some of my own experience. In 2007, I had just earned my Ph.D, and my wife had taken a position at a university in the Southeast. For a time after the move, I was unemployed, homesick, and directionless--and my head was full of all the cognitive theory and experimental fiction I'd read for my dissertation. From there, I developed a fascination with the idea of the "New Depression," and then the U.S. economy took a nosedive. The synchronicity inspired to consider how far things could go if the entire global economy collapsed. Cognitive repossession in a dystopian U.S. is what resulted.
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