Ask the Author: Patrick Heffernan
Answered Questions (6)
Patrick Heffernan
In a word: muses. Or I guess it was them. I've always liked mysteries and one day I sat and wrote out a scene involving dismembered parts of bodies ... I played with it for a day and liked it. Four weeks later it was ready for beta reading. That little tinker is pretty much Chapter One of "Pieces"
Patrick Heffernan
Sometimes by the prosaic. Sometimes the muses bring me a tale and tell me to get busy putting it on paper or they'll bite. There's an upcoming collection of novellas related to Nothing Left to Lose ... call it NLtL 1.5, I guess ... one tale in it involves an attack on a cruise ship. That tale was inspired in my head when I took a cruise back in 2011, but I don't want to give more of that away ...
Patrick Heffernan
A whole bunch of stuff. There's a comedy I'm playing with. There's an apocalyptic novel. I'm working on sequels to "Pieces" and "Nothing Left to Lose" as well as a companion novel to "Greywalker" about the character Eleanor. And Artolo and Elinia out in Botusia are calling my name, so I'm trying to reconstruct a Gospel of the Keeper sequel. I had about 35,000 words of that sequel written in the ago, but it all went up in smoke in a computer crash. But the larger elements are still rattling about in my mind. I also have a mystery-romance coalescing back there involving Lieutenant Julie Braley of the Rio Azul Sheriff's Department, for those who remember her and the tragedy she endured.
Patrick Heffernan
Dispense with the word "aspiring." If you're writing, you're a writer. It's kind of like that time Yoda ate Luke's ass. There is no try, there is do, or do not. Besides, isn't "try" really a nicer way of saying "fail?" I repeat: If you're writing, you're a writer.
Also, find good people to help you market your stuff. Get it out to beta readers. Typos hide best from their parents. It's their only chance at survival. And don't take it personally when a beta reader points out a fuckup or a typo. Don't hate yourself for it either. Just because you're the omnipotent god of that novel you wrote, the truth is, out here you're still human and as error-prone as any other human.
Also, find good people to help you market your stuff. Get it out to beta readers. Typos hide best from their parents. It's their only chance at survival. And don't take it personally when a beta reader points out a fuckup or a typo. Don't hate yourself for it either. Just because you're the omnipotent god of that novel you wrote, the truth is, out here you're still human and as error-prone as any other human.
Patrick Heffernan
I get to entertain myself all the time with these spectacular mind movies. I get to create places and people in them, and direct all that goes on therein. That's really awesome when I stop to think about it.
Patrick Heffernan
Writer's block is a curse but also a blessing. It's killed some of my stories along the way and killed them ugly. But maybe it's a form of Darwinism. I just published my fifth novel and the sixth will be published in a few months, but there are probably a couple dozen permanently in the graveyard in a Potter's Field under a headstone that says WRITER'S BLOCK KILLED THEM! BEWARE! or some shit like that. But maybe those stories deserved exactly that fate.
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