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<\/h2>\nHenry Neilsen<\/span><\/a> is an indie author from Melbourne, Australia. His full-time job is a sustainable design consultant in an engineering firm, where he models buildings and simulates their energy use to make them more environmentally friendly. When he isn\u2019t writing or working, he is a keen competitive rower who has competed at the Australian national championships. He writes speculative and science fiction, or at the very least stories with a speculative bent to them.<\/span><\/p>\n His new book, SPICE TRADER, is out now on <\/span>Kindle<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Smashwords<\/span><\/a>, along with other major ebook retailers. You can follow him on <\/span>twitter<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>reddit<\/span><\/a>, or <\/span>instagram<\/span><\/a> or subscribe to his <\/span>mailing list<\/span><\/a> for more updates on his work.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n SPICE TRADER is a novel that follows three friends who live a hedonistic lifestyle full of drugs and alcohol. One of them finds instructions to create \u201cSpice\u201d, a newly discovered party drug that isn\u2019t addictive and has no negative side effects. After a shocking incident reveals the dangerous lives they\u2019ve been living, they decide to start manufacturing Spice for themselves in an attempt to leave their self-destructive lifestyles. As it turns out, making the decision to leave isn\u2019t easy, and the demons of your past will come back to haunt you.<\/span><\/p>\n ELEANOR\u2019S MIND was my debut self-published work, a techno-thriller short story. It follows Eleanor, a woman who has been gravely injured in a car accident. She\u2019s had her mind transferred to a computer in an experimental procedure to keep her from going brain dead, but the team of technicians working to keep her alive don\u2019t really know what they\u2019re doing, and have to solve problems with her consciousness in real-time.<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s also SUNWARD SKY, an Audio Fiction podcast which follows Alyssa as she boards a spacecraft that maintains the ever-growing number of automated satellites in Earth\u2019s orbit. Space travel is a dangerous task that is now treated as menial labour, mainly due to a degenerative disease that occurs after too long in space. There seems to be a conspiracy aboard the spaceship, and each week Alyssa finds out more about what\u2019s happening with the crew. Season one is now complete, with the second season hopefully coming out late this year or early next.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In all instances, it starts with a scene. I usually just write this scene out, whether it\u2019s climactic, or a bit of exposition, or whatever it is. Then I have to figure out what the scene is there for, and who the characters are, and all the other stuff that goes along with the story. Once I have a rough idea of that, I start writing the book. I don\u2019t have a set structure, so the story will often wend away from the original idea, but that\u2019s fine. I find that if I try to force a narrative path too hard it becomes staid and less believable.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Don\u2019t stretch yourself! It\u2019s creatively exhausting, and burning yourself out by trying to crunch out thousands of words day after day is hard! Set a minimum word limit, but set a maximum as well, mine was 600-800 words per day. That way, if the writing wasn\u2019t coming along great I could just stop at 600, but if my creative juices were really flowing, I <\/span>forced<\/span><\/i> myself to stop at 800 words. That way, I was excited to get on the next day and keep writing! I know there are competitions where you are supposed to write large word counts in short amounts of time, and they can be great, but I always found them exhausting and I didn\u2019t enjoy it after a while. Limiting my output keeps me happy and engaged with the work.<\/span><\/p>\n Also, if you\u2019re self-publishing I\u2019d highly recommend releasing a shorter work first so you can learn the ropes of the self-publishing world and where you sit in it. It\u2019s big, and it\u2019s confusing, and it\u2019s a lot easier to stomach a stuff-up on a short story than your magnum opus!<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n DRUGS. Seriously, the amount of research I did into illicit drugs for Spice Trader is a little scary. My search history is definitely on a list somewhere! I looked up different combinations, what stimulants actually <\/span>do <\/span><\/i>to your brain, how drug trades happen, and all sorts of other little facts. There\u2019s a lot to know, and a lot I really didn\u2019t want to know. I do find out a lot of cool stuff though (for example, caffeine is a very close relative of cocaine. And caffeine makes you hallucinate very slightly!).<\/span><\/p>\n I do a fair bit of high level research for my stories, just because they\u2019ve often got a technology bent to them and I want them to sound plausible, even if they aren\u2019t totally realistic. I did stuff up a bit on the podcast; I was running behind so I made my best guess as to how GPS satellites worked and recorded that. As it turns out I couldn\u2019t have been more wrong, and I was contacted by someone on reddit telling me my mistake! I\u2019ve actually published a bonus podcast episode called \u201cErrata\u201d where I go back and poke a bit of fun at myself for all the stuff I got wrong in the first season.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are two ways to answer that question. The first is \u201cI don\u2019t\u201d. What I mean by that is I don\u2019t sit down and draft a map, or come up with items or complex backstories for things. In that sense, I don\u2019t worldbuild.<\/span><\/p>\n In the other sense, my worldbuilding goes back to theme. The world the characters exist in has to link back to the thematic character of the book, otherwise the world is basically decoration. There are a lot of very fun science fiction series (that I <\/span>love <\/span><\/i>reading) that have the former kind of worldbuilding but not the latter, and while there\u2019s a huge amount of lore and depth to the stories, there\u2019s not a lot of \u201cmeat\u201d to get into when you\u2019re trying to come to terms with what the story is trying to say. So when I go back to my second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) draft, I try to make sure that the world my characters are in, even if it\u2019s fairly contemporary, fits with the idealistic background that the story is built upon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ll talk about the main character, Pete, from Spice Trader. He\u2019s\u2026 a bit of a loser, honestly. He\u2019s quite a thoughtful guy, and he\u2019s not stupid, but he\u2019s lazy and he\u2019s just followed the easiest path in his life up until this point in the story. Whatever makes him feel good in the moment, he\u2019ll do, and as soon as he gets bored of it he\u2019ll abandon it. This has led him to a dead-end job and a dead-end life, taking party drugs and just living for the weekend. At some point in the book he realises he doesn\u2019t want to be that person anymore, but I think there\u2019s a realisation there that he can never really escape his past actions. The decisions he makes in his life mark him forever, and I think trying to come to terms with that is very difficult for him to handle.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n1. Tell us about your writing\/ published book(s)<\/b><\/h3>\n
2. How do you approach starting a new book?\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n
3. What advice would you give to someone wanting to write their first book?<\/b><\/h3>\n
4. Do you do research for your books? If so, what kind of research?<\/b><\/h3>\n
5. How do you approach \u2018world building\u2019?<\/b><\/h3>\n
6. Tell me about your main character\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n