Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m a Canuck who studied biology at a graduate level in university. I’ve used that knowledge of the natural world to write a couple of books with biological themes: the first was speculative fiction and the second, a romantic comedy.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My MSc thesis in evolutionary biology was on mate choice in animals. I took the things that I learned there, combined them with elements of comic books and cartoons and came up with Rule of Seven, a romantic comedy that looks at one man’s quest for love in the modern world.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I write the first draft with a pencil or a pen, and specifically I like to use fountain pens. I know that there’s all sorts of writing software that helps you plan out your novel but I like to be able to just write on paper and scratch various notes in the margins in a different colour of ink as I go along. I like to think that the software in my head can make sense of it all once the first draft is done and I’m typing it into the computer.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
I like a lot of science fiction authors: Christopher Priest, Philip K Dick. Ed Abbey the novelist and essayist wrote passionately and beautifully about the natural world. I love the Iliad and the Odyssey maybe because the writing is so different from anything modern. It’s all passion and drive–those people believed. I also like reading rock journalism and album reviews. Music is an almost indescribable thing and yet when it is done well, it’s quite magical.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a couple of things: my love of music has me writing a speculative fiction book about a band whose music is so beautiful it can affect time; my love of old cartoons and comics has me writing another spec fic about secret messages contained in MAD magazine.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I retweeted a graphic recently that listed a consumer advertising trust scale. At the top was family and friends, obviously a limited promotion pool, but below that was a category called influencers, which in the book world must mean the book bloggers and book tubers. Online reviews also had high trust. I guess those are your best promotion tools.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Writing is a battle between the part of you that thinks that everything you write is great and the inner critic that tells you everything on the page is garbage. I find that my inner critic has a mouth on it like Donald Trump. You know how The Donald always speaks in absolutes when he’s putting things down: it’s ‘the worst’ or ‘completely terrible’. Like the real DT, try not to listen to that guy when he’s having a bad hair day.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
For writing it’s: “Never leave the reader on safe ground.” Philip K Dick.
What are you reading now?
I always like to have a few books going: right now it’s the SF novel Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts, Life On the Edge, a book about how evolution uses quantum mechanics and Going Clear about Scientology because it’s so bizarre that there is an entire religion based on the work of a science fiction writer.
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?
I guess I’d take VALIS by Philip K Dick because it’s one of the books I like to re-read. I find something new in it each time and it also makes me laugh and humor would be in short supply if you were marooned. Maybe the Iliad and the Odyssey because those people were tough and you’d need that example to survive. Also my father was a boat builder so I’d grab one of his old books on the subject to help me get the hell out of there because being a writer I’d be all too aware of the irony of dying of dehydration surrounded by vast quantities water.
Author Websites and Profiles
John Tuckerman Website
John Tuckerman Amazon Profile
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