Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I am, as per my own author bio, a Chinese-Canadian author who someday hopes to do this for a living. I currently reside in Toronto, Ontario but I spend most of my time time travelling between two opposite points on the globe on business with my wife Jeane, sometimes accompanied by a giant orange tabby cat. In my spare time, I have maintained the same great love since childhood for stories told through every medium imaginable.
My first book, going on 300,000 plus words, was never finished, though I plan to see it through eventually. If anything, it may be my own Monte Cristo in the making. My second, an epic fantasy called Eye of the North Wind, has since then gone on to find a publisher, and is currently doing the rounds. My third, written for young-adults, is undergoing submissions as we speak. The Lynchman’s Owl then, marks my fourth foray into the same battlefield, this time under the guise of self-publishing.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
The Lynchman’s Owl – a monthly serial of standalone stories concerning the adventures of a masked steampunk superhero made to come out of retirement twenty-years after he has hung up his hat.
I owe this particular piece to the enduring works of Sir Arthur, whose Holmes series I still hold up as the first in its class of worldbuilding examples from humble beginnings. What he has done with a few novels and a score of short stories which has since then become common parlance, I hope to imitate with my own work in the same field.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Mine is the unusual by being utterly mundane. Others have their strange quirks, their stories of long evenings and hard sacrifices for the craft they love. I, as somebody who has come into a considerable inheritance this early in life, is allowed instead the luxury of treating this hobby as a normal day job – even if pennies are at the moment its only incomes. I write from 9 to 12, allow myself a small siesta after lunch, and pick up until clocking out in the early evening. At the risk of inspiring jealousy in my peers I must comment that I have very little to complain about with this arrangement.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
I draw from the enduring works of those who had come before. I count amongst my teachers and mentors Dumas, Tolkien, White, Conan Doyle, and the Bard himself. If, however, you must restrain me from digging up any more graves, I should also like to point out that King, and more recently Clarke, have done their share in pushing me down this path. If you are noticing a pattern I think it is because I despise above all else bland, everyman’s writing with no distinction in style and tone, like wine watered down until it becomes flavorless, colourless water.
What are you working on now?
The Lynchman’s Owl series – a monthly serial of standalone stories concerning the adventures of a masked steampunk superhero made to come out of retirement twenty-years after he has hung up his hat. It draws inspiration mostly from the Sherlock Holmes serials in the Strand magazine back in the day, with each ‘issue’ more or less a complete story in its own right, but also contributing to an overarcing narrative. Read as a whole, it becomes several novels dealing with specific periods in the history of the Lynchman’s Owl; seperately, you would still have a small adventure to call your own.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I have a blog, and associated social media sources which to date I am loathe to make use of. All in all I prefer to let my writing do the talking rather than spend all my time talking about my writing. But therein also lies the flipside of that coin in that you can write the best story that ever existed, but would it still be the best story if no one ever knew it was there at all?
Do you have any advice for new authors?
As a new author myself I suppose it would be almost impertinent for me to recommend anything. You would not, after all, ask the blind for directions – but I suppose if there is anything I have learned in the little time I’ve had, it would be this: Not all styles will be to all people, and despite the common good sense advice that one should never dismiss criticism offhanded, one should also strive to keep to their own course wherever possible. After all, an enduring follower is the one who will inevitably come in second-place at best, whereas the man who is committed to striking out on his own might eventually become the first in his class.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Keep writing.
The ones who say, forget about marketing and just keep writing are the ones whose advice I hold to heart as the most cherished. While I understand it is a necessary evil to wear two hats – that of the creator and the salesman respectively – I, for one, only want to write and to keep writing.
What are you reading now?
I have recently tried the Last Wish, the first book in the Witcher series, which was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Its sequels, however, were much more difficult to get through. It seems in the process of building a bigger world we lost some of the mystique with its smaller predecessor that the world was too big to fit between the pages. It is a common problem I identify with more modern writings – nothing is left to the imagination anymore, despite this medium being particularly well suited to just that.
What’s next for you as a writer?
To endure. To strive. And finally to persevere. Luckily this is one career where one tends to only get better with age, and with any luck (or absence of unexpected bad-luck, as it were), I shall have years and years yet to make something of myself.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
The complete Sherlock Holmes series for its inspiration of the intelligent; the Three Musketeers for its sense of adventure that I might need; the Count of Monte Cristo to envision what I might do to my enemies on my return; and at last the Once and Future King to remind myself that all stories are eternal, and mine will as well some day be told (hopefully before I have to eat the pages to sustain myself on this island of yours, which for the life of me I don’t know why I would be on in the first place, for I, as someone who cannot swim, rightfully detest any body of water large enough to drown me in).
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