Intro
I LOVE interviews, but I also like getting the chance to add my own spin on generic questions, mainly to see how I compare with other authors. GoodReads has an array of questions that authors can respond to, mainly to give readers more context on the type of person you are and what compels you to do what you do.
How do you deal with writer’s block?
I mentioned earlier that creating some kind of routine is the best way to marginalize the idea of writer’s block. Pardon the description, but the concept feels a little like ‘creative constipation’.
What you’re doing in the moment that yields nothing (writer’s block) requires a proverbial ‘shake of the bottle’ to pump things out. Go for a walk (I’m a firm believer that nature feeds our sense of creativity). Go for a drive. Get away from the screen. Try a different project (maybe this one isn’t for you). Call a friend. Read a book – preferably by someone outside your comfort zone. Listen to music. Talk to your pet. Visit an art gallery or a museum. Take a bus and eavesdrop on conversations.
What’s your advice for aspiring writers?
It’s a trite statement, but WRITE.
Try to establish a routine for writing. Someone I idolize – Jeff Tweedy of Wilco – published a book called ‘How to Write One Song’. It’s short, sweet and the ideas can be applied to any kind of output you’re considering when it comes to the arts.
If you can’t write, OBSERVE. Try to get in the habit of thinking about situations and creating mental elaborations on the scenario you’re witnessing. What are people wearing? What’s their mood? What’s the weather like? Where are they? Why are THESE people together? What do you think they’re talking about?
Once you start the motor, it’s a little like Newtonian physics: a process in motion, stays in motion.
What are you currently working on?
A LOT.
I just finished up the bulk of updates with my website (billwittur.com) and I’m trying to get a number of promotional campaigns out the door before the holiday season draws to a close. I spent years pounding my head against the wall dealing with the LCBO. I’d place orders as early as August only to have them cleared from the warehouse in January. I felt like Homer running around with pumpkins to spare in November, but only now it was booze to unload in January when everyone had sworn off the stuff for a couple of months.
So, I want to try to get my books into the hands of as many people as possible and encourage them to generate reviews ASAP so that I can build a little momentum, especially for Extinction Event.
Obviously, these ‘jobs’ are a massive distraction from my love of writing BUT there’s a very clear light at the end of the tunnel right now.
As I tidy this stuff up, I plan to be a little more balanced with my time, splitting it equally between writing and editing a book that I actually wrote years ago (I shelved it because the self-publishing tools weren’t as friendly as they are today); recording and editing some music; and promoting what I’ve created to date.
OK. So What Do You Want To Be Working On?
I’ve got five projects that are always on the go:
- Revising the draft of my first, first book which I hope to release early in January. This is a fictional book about corporate espionage and a lead protagonist who screws up a lot. There will be LOTS more to come as draft chapters are posted for public comment and feedback.
- Adding content and context to the sequel and prequels for Extinction Event. I hope to have the sequel ready by the end of 2025 and the prequel a year later.
- Collecting all of my thoughts related to poetry and lyrics into a combined volume. I’m toying with the title ‘Loose Leaves’ for a volume of random poems that I hope to organize into songs.
- Recording. I’m working with a Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) and I’m hoping to bump up my confidence with recording and playing to a point where I finally get back to finishing a massive list of songs that I’ve started (at last count, I was at about 60+ drafts).
- Family and friends.
How do you get inspired to write?
I write every day. I would love to be more structured with my efforts, but the reality is that I sometimes feel a little like a fly at a picnic: there’s always some other object to grab my attention and demand a comment or thought.
- That said, I have at least FOUR habits that I try to stick to on a routine basis:
- Blogging – it doesn’t seem to matter what the topic, but I’m happy to share an opinion about many issues.
- Personal journal – I keep a personal journal with random thoughts about personal events and activities.
- Structured writing – this happens less often than I would like, but it always feels great to say ‘I’m going to write about this today’ or edit something or focus on discernable and planned output related to novel writing … and actually get it done.
- Impulsive writing – I’m a big believer in being inspired by the muses and I do NOT ignore thoughts when they pop into my head on a random basis. As soon as an idea comes up, I keep track of it, usually in a place related to the structured writing. In fact, the structured writing tends to encourage the impulsive results.
The more subjective component is ‘seeking inspiration’. I try to read as often as possible – the old school way with a hard copy – and make notes when something is written by someone else that I follow. When worse comes to worse, I go back to something like Jeff Tweedy’s ‘How to Write One Song’ which has dozens of tips about how to get things going when you’re stalled.
The good news? I’m rarely stalled unless I’m just being lazy.
Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?
Extinction Event started with being a commentary on my experience with going back to school as a mature adult. The central ‘launch point’ is when the main character (LP) discovers inconsistencies between analog and digital recordings, or ‘glitches’. When we were in our recording class, me and the rest of the class would talk about how these little weird noises and glitches might show up all the time, and we were being taught how to eliminate that stuff. However, I took the fictional part of this analysis and expanded on the ‘what if’ concept of secret codes or messages being hidden in these glitches.
At the same time (around 2022/23), AI was blowing up all over the place and I was also still feeling some of the social reverberations of the pandemic and climate change issues. One of the students showed me DALL-E and how you can create images based on prompts and I was sufficiently blown away. The really cool ‘zeitgeist’ part of this is that ChatGPT and AI were also being discussed in a mythology certification I was taking via Pacific Graduate School.
The more I thought about these bigger concerns, the more I realized there was an opportunity to explore the confluence of current events and carve them into a story.
There was more going on too:
- I was beginning to understand the ‘gaps’ that exist between human and animal communication. There’s the obvious ones like structure and tone, but then there’s the more obscure stuff like ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’ because we’re not even listening to about 90% of the availability sound frequency in the universe. Many animals communicate in sound ranges well above and below the human range of hearing. We’re missing out on massive parts of the conversation and we have to figure out how to tune ourselves in to what’s being said.
- The polycrisis is threatening the survival of everything on this planet.
- People were still struggling with the post-COVID life. Isolation, the social and economic costs and much more was lingering after the ‘all clear’ was declared.
- We’ve seen in the recent US election how politics, business and religion have become horribly intertwined and I worry about the state of democracy, especially as fake vs real news becomes more and more complex … and harder to identify.
- Per my comment above about mythology, it’s always been a source of inspiration for me and I planted as many Easter eggs in the text as I could.
Finally, as I alluded to above, I wanted to embed enough hints about a potential sequel and prequel for Extinction Event. I think there’s a lot of good, juicy weirdness that I can extract related to the Plutonian Council and I love the idea that LP was a DJ in the late 1980s / early 1990s in England and can’t wait to have him interact with celebrities that I wish I knew as friends. The sequel will deal with the trauma associated with how things change in Extinction Event.
Stay tuned – there’s LOTS more coming down the pipe!