Earlier this month I published the first of a series of novels about the first girl to live for 1000 years. I wrote the novel in about 4 weeks and it is just over 40,000 words. It took a few more weeks to get it proof-read, get the cover deigned, and get it uploaded to Amazon. But I consciously wrote it quickly. I have tried writing before – in fact, I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember – but I have found that the longer I work on a project, the more critical I become of my own work. Self-doubt creeps in and I start to think too hard about what I have written. And I find then I start to lose something in my writing that I like, perhaps that is even original. Suddenly I am in a vortex of despair and the more critical I become, the more I edit the work, and the less I like it. So on Mutation I wanted to finish the work quickly and now that it is finished and out there, I actually really like it. Maybe it will do well, maybe it won’t, but far more important to me is that I like it.
Certainly I must have been influenced by other authors so I decided to make a list of the main authors that I have been “into” over the last *** decades and who may have influenced me. Note that the years are the years I read them, not the years they were written.
1970s – Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, Dr Seus, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Michael Moorcock
1980s – Isaac Asimov, John Fowles, Milan Kundera, Iain Banks, Ian McEwan, HG Wells, Graham Greene
1990s – Arthur C Clarke, Robert Rankin, Tom Sharpe, David Lodge
2000s – Jonathan Coe, JK Rowling, Kasuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami,
I may come back and edit this list as I remember more from the past. This is the list as I recall it on 19th June 2014.
Millennium Girl 