Charles Stross
Charles Stross
Charles David George "Charlie" Strossis an award-winning British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth18 October 1964
loss months six
I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s.
skills generations novelists
We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.
book writing technology
Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms - because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.
average careers long
An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!
attention magazines revolution
I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.
writing novel available
Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.
war believe writing
There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet?
rpgs gone teens
I was heavily into AD&D in my teens (late 1970s-early 1980s) but fell off the RPG habit in the mid-80s and have never gone back to it; my lifestyle today isn't very compatible with having a regular gaming group (too much travel).
firsts three novel
I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it.
tea keyboards drink
I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.
writing giving window
I write almost entlirely on Macs, because: Windows gives me hives.
book writing space
When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.
thinking style use
I have no policy, for or against: only a personal style. Which is to say, I use them when I think it's appropriate to; for example, an internal monologue by a locquacious and verbose narrator is more likely to be larded with adverbs than an exchange of instant messages between cops at a crime scene.
gaps rich poor
If I was a Marxist I'd call it the crisis of capitalism. Even though I'm not a Marxist, that seems like a not unreasonable term for the widening gap between the rich and poor that we're seeing ...