Ask the Author: Steven Campbell
Answered Questions (17)
Steven Campbell
Not sure where to begin. I recommend trying some new authors by browsing Amazon. I can't say what your tastes are and what will ring true for you, but I think a lot of good work flies below the radar. I try and browse around and discover something new or at least give it a try. You can preview most books in digital form and see if the writing style speaks to you. I'm reading Wild Cards series now, but I've kind of hit a bleh book that I'm kind of muddling through. I rediscovered the series after first reading it in the 80s. I didn't know who George R. R. Martin is then, and reading it now, you can see it predating some of the characters that would eventually encompass his Game of Thrones.
Steven Campbell
Well, I suppose this is a boring answer, but I probably would just stay here. It would be nice to go to some fantastical world/universe and see and do crazy things. But I'm just me. I'm a writer. If I went to Middle Earth or Hogwarts or nearly anyplace with magic or high tech or super mutants or something, I would be woefully outclassed. My knowledge of 21st century computer technology and fanciful clothes won't help me or impress anyone. And while I can maybe think of some places where I would be a big fish (Gulliver's Travels?) why go to a "bad" world just so I could be a big shot? Might as well try and affect change here where I know and care about people.
Steven Campbell
Anything can start out as the plot for a book. It just has to escalate and have problems associated with it.
Like I woke up this morning really early because my dog climbed on my bed and stuck his face under the curtains so he could sniff out the window. He might have done that because there was a burglar skulking down the street. That burglar might have been stealing the souls of sleeping people so he could sell them on the demon black market. If I woke up and followed him, I might have been pulled into a strange mystical mystery adventure. Where I found my own soul had already been taken and I have to confront the demon who bought it and try and get it back.
Of course, my dog could have just been trying to wake me up so I would feed him.
Like I woke up this morning really early because my dog climbed on my bed and stuck his face under the curtains so he could sniff out the window. He might have done that because there was a burglar skulking down the street. That burglar might have been stealing the souls of sleeping people so he could sell them on the demon black market. If I woke up and followed him, I might have been pulled into a strange mystical mystery adventure. Where I found my own soul had already been taken and I have to confront the demon who bought it and try and get it back.
Of course, my dog could have just been trying to wake me up so I would feed him.
Steven Campbell
Nick Charles and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934) movie. I consider it my favorite, ideal man/woman, husband/wife relationship. They tease each other, work with each other, joke with each other, and trust one another. There is a great scene when Nora opens the door on her husband Nick holding a young woman in his arms. He's comforting her. But this was a 1934 movie and it was a potentially racy scene. She comes in, sees them, and he makes a face at her. She makes a face back. There isn't even a moment of doubt that he's fooling around or something. Here is the link to it below.
https://youtu.be/h1h2XxnoC68?t=277
https://youtu.be/h1h2XxnoC68?t=277
Steven Campbell
Yeah. I'm working on the 6th book now, but I'm taking it slow. It should be out by late 2016 or early 2017.
Steven Campbell
Not for months. It takes quite a long while to read everything and get it right.
Steven Campbell
I never answered it and maybe that was a mistake. I view the books as from Hank's POV so if he can't know something it will never reach the page. You're not the first person to ask, but without spoilering tooo much. I'll say it was the only person who could, really. Someone wanted to make sure Hank wasn't distracted and he kept doing the job he was meant to do. That person also had the resources to keep distractions away from Hank.
Steven Campbell
I'm no sir, I work for a living.
I go a-z reading. I'm concentrating on word usage, readability, plot. I have a thesaurus open and a graphical word sentence outliner that works maybe 50% of the time.
I have my own quirks. How stuff appears on the page, matters. Having he said, she said back and forth also gets tiring. And that's another thing, I have to make it sound real because it will go to audio book. Like I just changed a sentence where four guards did something and it could be heard as FOR guards. So I changed it to five and no one will ever know.
It takes about an hour or so to do one chapter and there are around 75 chapters. I just get burnt out on it. If you read it all the way through it will like be a 10-11 hour book. But I'm reading the same sentences over and over.
My next edit will go to a professional who does a proofread with some light copyediting.
I'll then edit that and print it out with a full hard copy and check into a hotel somewhere and just unplug. Those are when i really cut out whole pages.
Grammar isn't science. A few of my quirks in style is that you will never see dialogue start after description. "Steven said." <--like that wouldn't exist. All dialogue starts on new lines because it makes it pop out. There can be detail after it and more dialogue within.
!" She exclaimed
?" she questioned
," she wondered
." Then she left.
Sometimes I do an arbitrary upper/lower based on the sentence preceding it. But it makes sense to me.
All of this stuff is in the computer of course.
Pre-Writing, I invariably put myself in a hotel somewhere to daydream. I'll get ideas and flesh them out. Major milestones. Then do a lot of walking to it coherent. Still, vast amounts of stuff changed. When I'm in the scene, I write what would really happen, now what I had outlined 3 months ago. I'm not even looking at that stuff.
I go a-z reading. I'm concentrating on word usage, readability, plot. I have a thesaurus open and a graphical word sentence outliner that works maybe 50% of the time.
I have my own quirks. How stuff appears on the page, matters. Having he said, she said back and forth also gets tiring. And that's another thing, I have to make it sound real because it will go to audio book. Like I just changed a sentence where four guards did something and it could be heard as FOR guards. So I changed it to five and no one will ever know.
It takes about an hour or so to do one chapter and there are around 75 chapters. I just get burnt out on it. If you read it all the way through it will like be a 10-11 hour book. But I'm reading the same sentences over and over.
My next edit will go to a professional who does a proofread with some light copyediting.
I'll then edit that and print it out with a full hard copy and check into a hotel somewhere and just unplug. Those are when i really cut out whole pages.
Grammar isn't science. A few of my quirks in style is that you will never see dialogue start after description. "Steven said." <--like that wouldn't exist. All dialogue starts on new lines because it makes it pop out. There can be detail after it and more dialogue within.
!" She exclaimed
?" she questioned
," she wondered
." Then she left.
Sometimes I do an arbitrary upper/lower based on the sentence preceding it. But it makes sense to me.
All of this stuff is in the computer of course.
Pre-Writing, I invariably put myself in a hotel somewhere to daydream. I'll get ideas and flesh them out. Major milestones. Then do a lot of walking to it coherent. Still, vast amounts of stuff changed. When I'm in the scene, I write what would really happen, now what I had outlined 3 months ago. I'm not even looking at that stuff.
Steven Campbell
Well, I don't consider them book "sets." But the 4th novel is nearly done its first draft. I make updates on my website http://www.belvaille.com or my facebook page http://www.facebook.com/HardLuckHank
Steven Campbell
Whispersync is something that Amazon does automatically based on the available Audible audio books. It's not anything I have control over, really other than releasing the audio books. The audio is out for books 2 and 3 on Audible.com.
But it's Amazon (which owns Audible) that does the Whispersync. If the books synch they synch. I don't know the software they use.
But it's Amazon (which owns Audible) that does the Whispersync. If the books synch they synch. I don't know the software they use.
Steven Campbell
I don't think there was ever a single factor that made me do it. One thing I wanted to avoid was space ships. I wanted to concentrate on actual people, but in really advanced technological environments, that becomes harder because the technology is the key factor. In Star Trek, it's really the ship that is important. If that same crew was on a junky space ship, they wouldn't be significant at all. Likewise, if you look at Star Wars, small ships run away from big ships--unless they have some stupidly large flaw built into them. Ships have been done in science fiction. And they've been done quite well.
I'm also not interested in hard science fiction. I have nothing against it and used to read it quite a bit. I could make up particles and make up languages and make up this and that, but it's really the story I enjoy, not how toaster ovens work in a science fiction universe.
I sat around thinking about how in wars like WWI and WWII we gave out a lot more medals. And one reason was because a single person could be called upon to do more. They could charge machine gun emplacements or run across no man's land. It was possible to be a hero in older times. In modern wars, we call air strikes and sit in tanks and work in platoons with artillery support and satellites. So I thought about how to make the individual a big deal again.
One, was to ground them on a single space station. Explore the city's dynamics. A city is a huge thing and pretty exciting. I also like violence as humor. Kind of like Pulp Fiction. Not slap stick, because if there is no fear, it's just silly. The problem is, if you get shot once, you're kind of done, funny or not. So I could either change the physics of the universe, change the technology so they didn't have advanced weapons, or make my hero somewhat invulnerable. I did the last two. The HLH universe has space ships but they have weapons that are about modern earth level, which isn't very realistic. And Hank can take a lot of abuse and keep going. And that led to quite a growth in his character.
I know this seems like an awful lot of thinking for a comedy series, but this is the stuff that went into it. Putting them on a city out in the middle of nowhere made the people important. A single person could change his whole environment. But that also led to the logical corruption of Belvaille. And Hank being Hank, led to the formation of his personality.
And it's funny but there's very little in the way of science fiction comedy. There's lots of fantasy comedy. But every time I say the genre everyone just asks if it's like Hitchhiker's Guide. A number of agents even told me that it couldn't be done because sci-fi readers are serious. So after a while I was so disheartened by that, I stopped telling them it was comedy. Finally, I said screw it, I think people can like science fiction AND comedy without their heads exploding and I self-published. I'm not buying any private islands, and crashing remote control sharks into each other, but the response from the books has been great.
I'm also not interested in hard science fiction. I have nothing against it and used to read it quite a bit. I could make up particles and make up languages and make up this and that, but it's really the story I enjoy, not how toaster ovens work in a science fiction universe.
I sat around thinking about how in wars like WWI and WWII we gave out a lot more medals. And one reason was because a single person could be called upon to do more. They could charge machine gun emplacements or run across no man's land. It was possible to be a hero in older times. In modern wars, we call air strikes and sit in tanks and work in platoons with artillery support and satellites. So I thought about how to make the individual a big deal again.
One, was to ground them on a single space station. Explore the city's dynamics. A city is a huge thing and pretty exciting. I also like violence as humor. Kind of like Pulp Fiction. Not slap stick, because if there is no fear, it's just silly. The problem is, if you get shot once, you're kind of done, funny or not. So I could either change the physics of the universe, change the technology so they didn't have advanced weapons, or make my hero somewhat invulnerable. I did the last two. The HLH universe has space ships but they have weapons that are about modern earth level, which isn't very realistic. And Hank can take a lot of abuse and keep going. And that led to quite a growth in his character.
I know this seems like an awful lot of thinking for a comedy series, but this is the stuff that went into it. Putting them on a city out in the middle of nowhere made the people important. A single person could change his whole environment. But that also led to the logical corruption of Belvaille. And Hank being Hank, led to the formation of his personality.
And it's funny but there's very little in the way of science fiction comedy. There's lots of fantasy comedy. But every time I say the genre everyone just asks if it's like Hitchhiker's Guide. A number of agents even told me that it couldn't be done because sci-fi readers are serious. So after a while I was so disheartened by that, I stopped telling them it was comedy. Finally, I said screw it, I think people can like science fiction AND comedy without their heads exploding and I self-published. I'm not buying any private islands, and crashing remote control sharks into each other, but the response from the books has been great.
Steven Campbell
I don't really get writer's block per se.
I find myself coming to sentences or paragraphs that I've butchered and I struggle to put them straight. And if it's not coming I'll just go away. Come back in 30 minutes from doing whatever and it's fine. Or come back the next day.
For writing my novels, I find it's good to switch projects now and then so I don't get burnt out.
I have to be having fun or I'm going to take a break. If I'm not having fun, no one reading it will be having fun. You can be pretty certain if something funny or stupid happened in my writing, I was sitting here smiling when I wrote it.
I find myself coming to sentences or paragraphs that I've butchered and I struggle to put them straight. And if it's not coming I'll just go away. Come back in 30 minutes from doing whatever and it's fine. Or come back the next day.
For writing my novels, I find it's good to switch projects now and then so I don't get burnt out.
I have to be having fun or I'm going to take a break. If I'm not having fun, no one reading it will be having fun. You can be pretty certain if something funny or stupid happened in my writing, I was sitting here smiling when I wrote it.
Steven Campbell
Writing.
My life before I was a writer and now was nearly identical. Writing was always my passion and I've been doing it for...a long time. So it wasn't much of a transition.
My life before I was a writer and now was nearly identical. Writing was always my passion and I've been doing it for...a long time. So it wasn't much of a transition.
Steven Campbell
You're going to suck for a long time. It's okay to suck. Write what you enjoy writing. As humans, we're capable of doing nearly anything. I tried writing every different genre when I was younger to see if I could and to experiment. I found myself always injecting humor into anything I was doing because it's what I, as a person, most enjoyed and what I found easiest. Like I tried writing a horror screenplay once and it ended up being a horror parody and I hadn't even set out to do that.
Don't try and be a writer because you want money or fame. There are vastly easier ways to get both. People write because they are Writers and they have to write. Even if I wasn't putting it down on a page, I would be constantly daydreaming stories. Just get it down.
One question I think everyone should ask themselves is this: Imagine if you were visited by the future you, from your deathbed, tubes and hospital gown and old as hell. That future you comes to visit you and says, "I've been given the opportunity to travel back in time from the moment before we die and tell you one thing. You will NEVER sell any writing. You will NEVER be recognized for writing. You will go through your life and earn nothing but ridicule or indifference at the best. This will happen and you cannot change it. Do with this information what you will." And the future you vanishes. And you know, with absolute certainty that that is true.
Would you still write?
Think about that hard for a minute. Or a few minutes. Or a lot of minutes. Write because you have to write. Because you love to write. If you make those your reasons, you will never be bitter about your choice. You can always call it a hobby, a joy, a side job, or whatever.
Don't try and be a writer because you want money or fame. There are vastly easier ways to get both. People write because they are Writers and they have to write. Even if I wasn't putting it down on a page, I would be constantly daydreaming stories. Just get it down.
One question I think everyone should ask themselves is this: Imagine if you were visited by the future you, from your deathbed, tubes and hospital gown and old as hell. That future you comes to visit you and says, "I've been given the opportunity to travel back in time from the moment before we die and tell you one thing. You will NEVER sell any writing. You will NEVER be recognized for writing. You will go through your life and earn nothing but ridicule or indifference at the best. This will happen and you cannot change it. Do with this information what you will." And the future you vanishes. And you know, with absolute certainty that that is true.
Would you still write?
Think about that hard for a minute. Or a few minutes. Or a lot of minutes. Write because you have to write. Because you love to write. If you make those your reasons, you will never be bitter about your choice. You can always call it a hobby, a joy, a side job, or whatever.
Steven Campbell
Hard Luck Hank - Prince of Suck. I'm also laying some groundwork for what "may" be the 4th book. I'm just not sure if I can pull it off.
Steven Campbell
I'm not sure inspiration is the right word, but books, movies, comic books, living life. I find that doing things that are boring and rote is great inspiration because your mind wanders, inevitably, to your book. Like driving a familiar road, taking a shower, trying to go to sleep. One of my big tricks I learned a long time ago is I will check myself into a hotel. There's nothing to do and I don't know the city and I don't have any of my things, so almost immediately I start thinking about my writing. It's very productive.
Steven Campbell
I like short stories because they are relatively self-contained. Delovoa is a character I like a lot and I knew he would have great potential, especially to describe the universe outside of Belvaille a bit more.
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