I am an Australian writer who has worked as
everything from a lawyer to a teacher, professional actor, health project
officer, and even a pizza delivery boy. I am now semi-retired and tutoring in
my spare time to pay for my writing addiction. I’m a keen astronomer and hiker
and love travelling to wild parts of the world where I can hopefully get lost
and have a few adventures. I’ve been writing most of my life but it’s only been
in the past few years that I can dedicate myself to the task. My writing is mostly
in the science-fiction and horror-fantasy areas, although I do have a novel Plato’s Cave which I guess could be
described as science-philosophy, if there is such a genre.
I love telling stories – or, more
correctly, I love people reading the stories I have to tell. As an actor, I
believe the most important part of a performance is the audience. With writing,
it’s the reader. If the reader isn’t having fun, the writer is letting them
down. It is the writer’s duty, as I see
it, to entertain the reader. Having said that, writers must also be true to
themselves and write what they believe in. It’s a fine balance, but any art
form is a risk.
I write in the mornings, because I work in
the afternoons and evenings. So it’s up early, usually after setting myself a
particular scene to write. I am fortunate enough not to have a family as a
distraction, so I can put in a few hours fairly uninterrupted each day and then
worry about other things. I also spend time researching, as a lot of what I do
is historical, and I am obsessed about getting the facts right.
For me the hardest part of writing is
getting ideas. I can toss and turn at night wondering what the next scene is in
my current project. I’m not much of a planner when it comes to plots. Part of
the fun of writing for me is finding out as I go what the story is. If I knew
the story from the beginning I would have little incentive to write it, so I
start typing and the ideas then flow, which is a dangerous way to do it I
guess. I do have what I call ‘set pieces’ which are events that I want to
happen in the story, but I’m not always sure how to get there. Usually the
ending is worked out pretty much the way it’s going to happen, but the
beginning and the middle aren’t always so clear!
At present, I am working on a series for
Permuted Press, The Jabberwocky Book.
The first instalment, The Red King,
is due out in December this year. It’s a mash-up, putting Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and
Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
up against a supernatural serial killer stalking Edwardian London. It’s been a
lot of fun. The second book, An
Unkindness of Ravens, also takes its central theme from the Lewis Carroll
and L. Frank Baum books. The third book brings the characters forward to the
First World War. They are definitely not children’s books, though. The characters
are all grown up and face totally evil adversaries.
I have another book out there. Plato’s Cave http://www.amazon.com/Platos-Cave-Russell-Proctor/dp/147930879X
is a humorous look at the meaning of existence and mankind’s eternal (and no
doubt ultimately doomed) attempt to make sense of it all. Set in contemporary
Brisbane, my home town in Queensland, Australia, it describes three days in the
life of a young woman who encounters some very strange inter-dimensional
goings-on, and who ultimately has to face the uncomfortable possibility not
only that she just might have something to do with it all, but that it’s her
responsibility to sort the mess out before the world ends.
I have other projects in the fire. Days of Iron, also with Permuted Press,
is about terrorism in the future, about a terrorists attack seen from the
terrorist’s point of view. It will be followed by a sequel, Shepherd Moon, which plans to take
terrorism to the ultimate level. Another project in the planning stages is a
series about a race of time-travellers engaged in a civil war.
More information about me is on my website,
www.russellproctor.com and my
Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/writerproctor.
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