Literary Birthday – 14 June – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Happy Birthday, Adrian Tchaikovsky, born on 14 June 1972.

Adrian Tchaikovsky Quotes

1. Writing is a craft with skills that you can improve. (FAQs)
2. When I had a full-time job, I wrote in the evenings of a necessity. Since becoming a full-time writer, I’ve begun writing in the mornings, usually getting out of the house to a café or something similar. By around midday, I’ve run out of momentum, and in the afternoon I’ll get non-writing work done, like edits, admin and the like. (FAQs)
3. I am, by nature, a planner. Most of my books to date have started with a chapter-by-chapter beat-by-beat breakdown that I’ve mostly followed all the way through. The one thing I don’t generally set is the very end of the book, trusting to the trajectory and momentum of the narrative to show me what the most satisfying ending should be. (FAQs)
4. More recently I have started to experiment with other procedures. I still create the world ahead of time, in detail, along including societies, factions, religions, technology and the like. I need to feel that I have solid ground underfoot, and it ideally means everything that follows is consistent and fits with everything else. However for City of Last Chances I just created a cast of characters and let them get on with things, with minimal intervention, resulting in an interwoven mosaic structure that really suited the book. (FAQs)
5. I think the care I take in crafting a coherent and consistent setting before starting to write means far less retconning and editing in the second pass, because everything is drawing from the same well of inspiration. My first drafts and my submission drafts are usually quite close, meaning I seldom need to devote a long time to multiple drafts and revisions. (FAQs)
6. [Themes in my books are] communication, contact and empathy with the other. Resistance to tyranny, inequality and oppression. A philosophic or deconstructionist take on traditional fantasy and SF elements. (FAQs)
7. Every book feels like it’s the one that’s going to do terribly and consign me to the literary bin. Every bad review cuts. Despite everything, I still feel like the new guy waiting for people to tell me they were just humouring me all along. (FAQs)

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British fantasy and science fiction author. Tchaikovsky uses live-action role-playing games that assist with the numerous action and battle sequences in his books. He is currently involved with the LARP game Empire. He is best known for his Shadows of the Apt series, which began with Empire in Black and Gold, and for his Hugo Award-winning Children of Time series. Children of Time was awarded the 30th Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. He has won many more awards. He explores deep themes, such as artificial intelligence and alien awareness within epic galactic and fantastical settings. He has a deep interest in the animal world specifically insects from his studies in Zoology. His literary influences include Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, China Miéville, Steven Erikson, Naomi Novik, and Scott Lynch.

Source for photograph: DavidPMaynard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson
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