tonyhealey.com

I started out writing a short story for a now-defunct anthology in 2012. The story, about an interstellar mercenary, was called ‘Frank’. I followed that up with further stories featuring the same character before branching out into several horror short stories.

I’d always wanted to write but to be honest, I’d treated writing as more of a hobby than anything else over the years. I had, once, wrote 30,000 words of a novel before realizing how horrendous it was and scrapping it. Since then I’d written the odd thing here and there, fragments, but nothing publishable. So when I finished the story ‘Frank’ it felt like a eureka moment for me. It took me about a week to write that little 4,000 word story, and another week or so of rewriting it. But I proved to myself that I could do it — I could actually sit down and write something people might want to read. Start at the beginning and get to the end. That basic lesson remains to this day, the realization of starting and finishing a project. Creating something from nothing.

I then decided to write serial fiction. I wrote the first part of ‘Far From Home’ as a 10,000 word episode and then worked with an editor to get it in shape. Working closely with an editor is one of the best things a new writer can do. There’s so much can be learned from what an editor highlights in the text. What they kick out and what they keep. The harder they kick your arse, the better you become. A good editor won’t let you get away with being lazy, with not giving something your full energy. A good editor will teach you to eliminate passive writing, and they’ll beat you over the head with the rules until you no longer need reminding of them. A good editor will also tell you when you’re doing something right, when you write something they find particularly moving, or beautiful. They will nurture you and inform you.

The writing of ‘Far From Home’ was a huge learning curve for me. By the end, ‘Far From Home’ ran to nearly half a million words in length in total. Readers took to it, too, making it a bestseller in the charts. I’ve since unpublished all those individual installments and just kept the omnibus on-sale. But I saw a lot of success with it back then, in the wild west days of independent publishing. However by the time I’d wrapped that up, I was exhausted with Science Fiction and looking to try my hand at something else.

I wrote several other pieces of short fiction, some novellas, then when I signed with my agent I decided to write a novel that might stand a chance at getting published traditionally. So in 2015 I began work on the novel that would become ‘Hope’s Peak’ . . .