You know this game, but you may never have played it this way: Tag! You’re the author who’s “It” so you have to play the game by sharing your Work in Progress (WIP) or it’s straight to bed without supper for you. Alexandria Szeman tagged me, and these are the rules:
- Give credit (including the URL/link) to the person or blog that caught you when you were frantically trying to run away, slugged you on the arm, and thus made you “It”
- Play by the rules – no pinching, kicking, crying, spitting, or throwing tantrums – which includes posting the rules
- Answer ten questions about your current WIP, no matter the genre, because maybe we’d like to get to know you better (actually it’s only 9 questions as far as I can tell, since the 10th “question” is the next step)
- List five other authors or bloggers, with their hiding places (URL/links), so we can chase them down and make them “It” so the rest of us who are done playing can go in, eat our supper, and check out their other books.
1. What is the title (or working title) of your WIP book?Endless Possibilities2. What genre(s) does your book fall under (or brush up against)?Contemporary-gaming-geeky-love-Story (and if that isn't a Genre - it is now).3. Which actors would you choose to play the characters in the film version of your book? (should you ever get it optioned and actually get lucky enough to have principal photography started, the film made and distributed… well, you get the idea…)I have no idea, there's an awful lot of "me" in the lead character and therefore to suggest an actor to play me, might come across as slightly egotistical. The lead female, who confusingly you don't actually meet "in person" until over halfway through the book is an amalgamation of two of my friends and a young Swedish MEP and therefore she could be played by... actually, I have no idea... I really should have thought about this shouldn't I?4. What is the one-sentence Pitch for your book? A young man hides from his complicated real-world issues inside an online world which promises a huge reward to anybody who can beat the game's designer but when he meets a girl and finds himself falling in love it turns out the real-world and his gaming world are more intertwined than he could ever imagine. [That's a terrible sentence - far too long - it should be edited down - see - the whole novel, I fear, is like that at the beginning!]5. Will your book be Indie published, self-published, or represented by an agency and sold to a traditional publisher?I genuinely think the way I have written it would scare the be-jeezus out of any traditional publisher and they wouldn't know what to do with it. I always thought it would be eBook only, again, because of the way I've written it.6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?Forever. Embarrassingly. It took me two years to write the first 15,000 words, another year to write the next 80,000 and then, after another year gap, only two months to write the last 50,000 words. If you do the maths you will see that I got carried away and wrote a stupidly big first novel. I also became (I think/hope) a much better writer during that year gap. So I'm dreading the mega edit this book now needs - that's why I'm doing things like writing this blog instead...7. What other books in this genre would you compare yours to?See Point 2 - I don't think there is a genre for this - if somebody can identify some other Geeky boy-equivalent-of-chic-lit let me know, I'd like to read some!8. Who or what inspired you to write this book?They say - write what you know - I have a past that involves various Sci-Fi and comic conventions and online gaming, some things happened, other things I heard, other things I extrapolated. In the end though, I wrote a book I wanted to read.9. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?I've hopefully designed the book to be read in 3 minute chunks - so you can read it between Tube stops (this might not make sense to non-UK residents). I also spent quite a lot of time designing the game which underpins, and is interwoven into, the story, because I don't want any of the geeks out there to say "On page X you say dragons have the following abilities, but on Page Y, a dragon does this..." because those things really bug me too! (hence the need for a mega edit!)10. Thank god, I’ve finally run fast enough to catch five other authors (and any who don’t have a blog of their own to answer these questions are welcome to do a guest post on mine):I'm going to cheat - I want the rest of WordWatchers to stop having excuses to not write a blog and to do this one... 
John