With Catherine Edmunds and Mark Iles but as with theirs this is a kind of peepshow into how I spend my day when I’m not being rushed to hospital or wrestling grandchildren.

The ding of my inbox disrupted a well-deserved snooze. It was that mistress of the arts, Cathy Edmunds, with an invitation, a beseeching, to engage with her in a blog tour. Does she think I have nothing better to do? She’s right. I am a link. I will be strong.
Cathy’s blog is at http://catherineedmunds.blogspot.co.uk/ do visit it, leave comments, buy her books. The next in the link after me is Mark Iles. Like me he writes science fiction but quite unlike my style. Just this week the characters in the first book in my ARIA: Left Luggage were accused of being too funny for such a horrific situation. The reviewer had not heard of graveyard humour or those situations where we use humour to overcome adversity. I don’t believe I overdo the humour. Indeed other reviewers say that infectious amnesia is more terrifying than zombies and vampires. You can’t win them all.
I am reminded of a quote by Isaac Asimov about his reactions to thoughtless reviewers: “From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.”

If you enjoy military science fiction you’ll definitely enjoy Mark Iles work and his blog is at http://markiles.co.uk/the-blog

Cathy Edmunds tells me all I have to do now is be a well-behaved pupil and answer the following four questions
1. What am I working on?
2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?
3. Why do I write what I do?
4. How does my writing process go?

1. What am I working on?
Mostly kid’s stuff. Why? Because my infant grandchildren have heard that I’m an author and have asked to know about my books. Well, you know they have too many naughty bits so I’ve been busy writing new books. Three in the last month, all in the Scoot and Red series where Scoot is a 5-year-old boy and Red is his dog. The Blue Ball, String Theory and Time Travel have been drafted, roughly illustrated and tested on Oliver, my grandson in Manchester. Then I go home and make edits before testing them on my granddaughters in Nottingham. In many ways it is like doing a reading from my novel to a literary gathering. There I was reading Time Travel with Scoot, Red and Penny when I’m rudely interrupted by the cook, who brandishes a pan under my nose and says, “Are these enough spuds for mashing?” My grandson tuts, but then asks me to start again. Yeah.
I’ve also been writing shorts for the Chester Library Fantasy Writing Group. The August topic is to write a fantasy with at least one scene under water. I’ve been waiting to make time to write this story for a few years. A colleague of my wife sailed his catamaran from Anglesey to the Isle of Man one night and hit an object floating just under the surface. It was a large container that had fallen off a cargo ship. Usually they sink but this one hadn’t. My imagination went berserk. Suppose it was full of people being smuggled? Dead or alive? Spooky and ripe for telling. On a holiday, I asked a member of the Manx Coastguard what they’d do if a semi-submerged container was reported to them. “Nowt lad, unless it was reported as still not sank 24 hours later in which case we’d go out and put some holes in it.” How unimaginative. My story is called “Voyage of the Silents” and it’s set in the warmer Mediterranean and is a short sequel to my Hot Air thriller – see blog post.
2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?
There are too many answers to this awful question. a) I don’t know because I don’t read enough of others in the various genre I write in; b) of those I read and admire I slip into, stylewise, and so risk not being different, except in an inferior way – probably. Eg for my thrillers I admire the humour of Tibor Fischer, the bizarreness of D Harlan Wilson and Ira Nayman, and the clever plotting of Michael Dibdin. For my science fiction I am probably more on my own, swimming or sinking in my own style of surviving an apocalyptic event. I admire but am not as black as for instance The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
3. Why Do I Write What I Do?
Who devised these hard questions? The answer for me is historical. As a pupil my teachers danced hysterically when I inserted adverbs and adjectives such as gnarled even though with contemporary fiction we rarely use them. My dad made me laugh and when I repeated his jokes at school, pupils and teachers chuckled. I found I could write jokes and wrote them for school review shows then when I left to go to Sheffield University I became one of the editors of the rag mag. Shamefully, I find many of my awful jokes still in existence. In spite of such shame I can’t help putting humour into even the most dire situations my characters find themselves in. I write science fiction because the world is too restricting for my wayward imagination. I write fantasy to escape reality and to explore alternative therapies to humdrumness.
4. How does my writing process go?
I didn’t think I possessed a pattern to my writing. When I held down a day job (teaching) I would rise early, bash out some words, save them to floppy disk (haha), print them at work and if the opportunity arose I’d edit the pages with the red pen I marked the kid’s work. Sometimes I cycled the long way home via a café, say in Farndon, have a cup of tea while editing. In the evening I’d have little time for writing because of marking and preparing school work until midnight. Once I became too deaf to control a class and was sent packing with an early-pension (yeay) I’d take on paid editing work, but it was easier as my own boss, to write when the mood struck. I don’t have a fixed time any more for writing. No need, because on my bike rides I’m often thinking of new ideas and can shuffle other editing work around. I’m often writing a short story, a novel, a non-fiction piece for a cycling magazine, blogs, and editing other people’s work. I’m also the house-husband and granddad. I don’t know if I work harder now than when I was in fulltime work but it feels like it.

Nelder links:
Links to buy ARIA and other of my books are on my Amazon author page
Geoff’s UK Amazon author page http://www.amazon.co.uk/Geoff-Nelder/e/B002BMB2XY
And for US readers http://www.amazon.com/Geoff-Nelder/e/B002BMB2XY
Geoff ARIA facebook is at http://www.facebook.com/AriaTrilogy and he tweets at @geoffnelder

ARIA on wikia is at http://nelderaria.wikia.com/wiki/NelderAria_Wiki