Update from our Dr Gavin Wallace Fellow 2021
Since hearing that I was the Dr Gavin Wallace fellow for 2021 I have been in the amazing position of being able to immerse myself in four completely different planetary environments while working from home. Research, reading, writing, and remotely following events in our own world is all feeding into my science fiction quartet, and the collaboration with Creative Scotland has inspired ideas through conversations with Literature Officers Katalina Watt about contemporary science fiction and Viccy Adams about societal inequalities, narrative structure, and even childcare.
As well as being able to focus on my writing without juggling other work commitments or struggling to travel — that uninterrupted time to write itself feels revolutionary — I have used part of the professional development funding to access digital voice coaching with Cathleen McCarron. This has made a huge difference to the way I approach digital performances and recordings, as well as feeding into my creative practice through physical awareness and enhancing the way I think about written language as embodied and spoken. And a conversation with Philippa Cochrane from Scottish Book Trust about new types of digital events has given me fresh ideas about sharing my work and the varied processes and importance of storytelling itself.
While working remotely over the past five months, the first two novels of my four-book series have taken shape and now exist as full first drafts: on a planet slowly recovering from environmental collapse a small community live without ownership, law, or technology, until a stranger arrives to question the careful balance of their conflict-free existence; and thousands of light years away, advanced technology saves some and leaves others to die on a planet suffocating from extreme air pollution, raising question about the reach of human empathy, what we see as disability, who is considered of value, and why. As the stories connect, they challenge each other about democracy and its failings, anarchy, love, and the constant (and evolutionary) interaction between the needs of individuals, their society, and their planet.
But my writing process involves rapid bursts of creativity followed by years of careful editing, and this is particularly true for long-form narrative spanning multiple novels. I learned about writing multi-book narrative through my recent folk horror crime trilogy, The Burrowhead Mysteries, the third and final book of which will be published next year. The first two books of the series recently had blog tours, where you can read more about When The Dead Come Calling and Where The Missing Gather and what reviewers such as @DaisyHollands and @twilight_reader thought of them.
And finally, I am about to start Coaching For Creative’s Refreshing Your Practice programme as part of my professional development, along with a group of other brilliant writers based in Scotland. Being fully remote and digital, as with all my work this year, it will be a highlight of the cold winter here in the highlands while I research the third book of my quartet, in which I’ll be exploring quantum entanglement as a means of connection across the vast distances of space.
