The Promise of the Child by Tom Toner
What led you into writing?
I was fired/laid off from my job (that I was useless at, so fair enough), and I had an idea for a book. Once I’d had the idea, I wrote it in the manic way that Richard Dreyfuss builds his pile of mashed potato in Close Encounters.
How does a typical day look?
I work as an editor on the side, so half of it (or more) will be spent on other people’s chapters. For the other half I take myself off to a nice cafe at the end of the road to work on my own writing. A perfect free morning would be spent in the sun with a coffee and my notebook, worldbuilding. The potato madness is long gone (I hope).
In what ways do your characters test your abilities?
They test the worlds I’ve made for them, experiencing the worldbuilding firsthand to see if it works.
What’s your setup?
At the moment I don’t have a study, just a sofa and a coffee table – where I sit to write depends completely on what area of my back hurts that day.
What lasting effects have your favourite authors had on your writing and style?
Jack Vance, Iain Banks and C.J. Cherryh taught me to be playful in different ways. It’s so easy to forget how to play when you’re writing (and in life in general). When you remember, everything changes for the better.
What do you do for inspiration?
Watching nature documentaries is pretty useful when you’re designing exoplanet ecosystems. If I’m ever stuck I set myself the task of coming up with six different answers to the problem on the spot. So far it’s always got me out of the quicksand.
What repeating themes do you find yourself pulling into your stories?
I seem to be obsessed with the ocean (and beaches) in my books, but I almost never think about them in everyday life. Writing seems to dredge your brain for things you didn’t know fascinated you.
How do you wind down?
Writing, especially in notebooks, feels like meditation for me. After a day in front of the laptop screen I love to cook – it’s great to use your hands, and different bits of your brain. Going to the pub also works!
What sort of challenges do you regularly overcome while designing your world/setting?
I always have to ask myself HOW? and WHY? in the notes. Those two words are worth their weight in gold. Worldbuilding begets more worldbuilding, and HOW/WHY is the catalyst.
What are you reading at the moment?
The Ragged Astronauts by Bob Shaw, and Embassytown by China Mieville.
What’s the most useful advice you could give to an aspiring author?
Writing’s quite like painting – it’s made up of layers. All you need to do for a first draft is block in the colour and cover up all that white canvas. The smaller details – the fancy stuff – will come later, in the successive layers. Never try to get them down properly in the first layer, it’ll just hold you up.
Tell us about the book you’re promoting.
The Amaranthine Spectrum was my first trilogy (I’m in the middle of writing another group of standalone novels all set in the same universe that I’m not allowed to talk about yet), and took a long time to write. It’s set in 12,500 years’ time, in the 147th century, and follows a number of characters (many of them non-human), beginning on earth (the Old World) and gradually visiting the rest of the galaxy and beyond.
