Glen R Stansfield

I have always had a vivid imagination and I think I wanted to tell stories from an early age, probably even before I could write. At junior school many of the pupils were encouraged by an amazing headmaster, Marcus Dearden. Every week we would do something called ‘composition’, basically, this was storytelling. For several of us, this became a competition to see who could write the best story that week.

Sadly, once at senior school, my focus was more on academic subjects than the arts. In fact, at that age, I didn’t understand why people would pay any attention to the arts when science was where it was at.

Having said that, I was involved with the local theatre, played guitar and sang in a band playing the working men’s clubs, and I still yearned to tell stories. I suppose the artist deep inside me was struggling to get out. Then of course, life gets in the way, work, family, etc. etc. I did attempt starting a novel in the nineteen-eighties and this would eventually become Fishing for Stones.

The interest in crime is something that has always been there. I am pretty much a rule follower, it was the way I was brought up. So, I wanted to understand why when two people find themselves in almost identical difficulties, one will turn to crime and the other will find a legitimate way to solve the problem. This drove me to take a degree in psychology and post graduate study in forensic psychology. Unfortunately, I still don’t know why, but I do have a better understanding of people, their flaws, and how they process the world we live in.

I don’t want to restrict myself to crime/thriller writing, and in fact, I have a WIP that is historical fiction, based around the origins of my family name, and I would love to do something in the Sci-Fi genre. I am also working on a fantasy crime novel, with a dragon and a female, human-like detective team.

I didn’t actually choose my female protagonist in Harry, she chose me. Originally, I was writing a white, middle-aged detective and the character didn’t like it. It turned out she was a black, middle aged detective. There is a saying, write what you know, and there is an element of that in my books, particular with aviation, and locations. But, the chance to explore characters, other than what you know is an amazing experience. No, I don’t know what it is actually like to be that person on a day-to-day basis, but neither do I know what it is like to be a dragon, or a dog, or a tree, all of which I have explored in short stories, either with my writing group, Bahrain Writers’ Circle or while doing online courses such as the MOOC I did with the Open University. In fact, Harry first appeared as a character in a short story while taking that MOOC. I liked him so much, I knew I couldn’t leave him as a short story character condemned to vanish into oblivion once the course ended.

Telling the story from a female perspective is not easy, but I have two secret weapons, my wife, Jess, and my editor, Sue. They will soon tell me if I am telling something from a male perspective, but I do my best to think about how the male and female experiences differ. Ultimately, I am an aging, white male, but I think the world has too many detectives like me, and as my wife is always reminding me, I never do things the easy way anyway.

I don’t set out to write a particular theme, they just evolve as the story progresses. With Harry, it was about homelessness and living on the streets. We all have to be conscious of the fact we are just a couple of bad decisions away from being homeless, which is a frightening thought. And, it is something that could be solved if society had the will to do so, but it doesn’t.

The theme which developed in Out of Darkness was the horrific trade in humans. Not the trade of moving refugees or economic migrants, but that of selling people into slavery and sex work. It is a huge problem, which again, if not solved, could certainly be addressed and reduced by governments and big business. There is not a single country that isn’t affected by this and it needs to have more public awareness. Next week it could be you, your partner, your children, or even all of you that could be affected, and if you think, 'oh that can’t happen where I live', think again.

I don’t want people to think my stories are only about these themes, because they aren’t, but I won’t shy away from the issues either. If I can, first and foremost, entertain, and then along the way, enlighten people with my work, I think I will have achieved something positive in this world.

I wouldn’t say there is a specific technique, but I suppose there is a strategy. My writing process is a mixture of pantsing and plotting. For readers who haven’t come across these terms, pantsing is telling the story as it comes to mind and plotting is exactly that. Ian Rankin said at the Dubai Festival of Literature that even he doesn’t know whodunnit when he starts writing a story, and I know other authors who plot to the point of knowing the colour of the carpet and curtains and which coffee bean their protagonist prefers.

In my case, I often have the ending written first. It may be that I write a new ending as I go along, but that will be where the story starts in my head, then comes the beginning, followed by other parts of the story. This is where the strategy comes in.

I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop given by Linwood Barclay at the Dubai Festival of Literature and he said he employs the 'what if’ strategy. This was echoed by author, lecturer and story consultant, Robert McKee in one of his online courses I attended. Instead of this happening, what if that happened instead. One thing Robert McKee said was let the audience think, ‘oh, I know what comes next’, then pull the rug out from under them and make it something entirely different.

Fishing for Stones was first conceived in the nineteen-eighties. I realised how poor security was on the hangar where I was working at the time. Anyone who knew how to fly a helicopter could easily have taken one, and that is how the story was born. None of the original writing survived in the version I released in 2015, but the basic story is the same.

I decided the best way to use a stolen helicopter was to steal something far more valuable than the helicopter itself, but whatever it was had to be high value and low bulk or weight, which ruled out gold.

I may revisit this story in the future as it could certainly benefit from a rewrite.

Fishing for Stones isn’t related to the following books, although a couple of the original characters in Fishing are to be found in Harry, and one of those two appears in Out of Darkness. I used those characters because Harry, and some of Out of Darkness take place in the East End of London.

Harry, as I’ve already mentioned is as the result of a short story. This character appealed to me and I had to make him into a full story.

Like many people, I am drawn to police, forensic science, murder, and serial killer stories. One only has to look at the amount of TV programmes dedicated to these subjects to know that humans want to know more about the dark side of life. I have a strong sense of justice and I like to know the bad guys get caught. But it isn’t always black and white. The series Dexter showed the bad guy can also be a good guy if he is eliminating people who are really bad. This, I explored in Harry, without giving too much away.

It sometimes scares me that I can think up horrible ways to kill people, but I think everyone can have that dark side, it’s just that most of us never let it come to the surface. I’m not a big fan of Freud but I do think he was on to something when he suggested we had this dark mass of evil bubbling under the surface. We have to be pretty nasty as a species when we continue to kill each other despite our alleged intelligence.

I need to correct you here. Harry was published before Out of Darkness and is a prequel in the sense it isn’t an Invidia story. Out of Darkness is the first for the Invidia team so I couldn’t really include Harry as part of the series, hence the prequel label.

The cookbook came about as the result of writing an eighty-two week feature in a publication in Bahrain, where I was living at the time. I wanted to show that anyone can cook and ‘oh I can burn water’ is an excuse for not trying. I’m not a chef, have had no formal training in cooking but I know how to follow instructions. Once you learn to do that, you can cook. Your kitchen may be a mess at the end of it, you may have set fire to something, but eventually you will produce something edible. Surprisingly, the process is very similar to the way I write fiction in that it involves a lot of research, and as you can imagine, a lot of time was spent searching for recipes. I wanted to show that ordinary people around the world were making these dishes, and what may be exotic to us, was considered a normal dish to them, cooked by housewives or amateurs in the main.

The biggest difference in writing a cookbook is that it needs an index. The cross referencing main ingredients with the dishes took some time. The other main difference is the editing and keeping to a house style. Both myself and editor were sick of seeing this book by the time it went to print, and there are still some mistakes in it after hundreds of hours of work. Perhaps this was compounded by the fact there are two versions, the ‘western’ version and halal. Creating the western version meant going back through all the recipes, removing substitutions for alcohol and putting back the original ingredients as well as removing some of the other dishes and creating ones using pork.

I would much rather write a novel than a cookbook, although I have joked about writing ‘Around the World in Eighty Fishes’. My wife does not find this funny as we spent eighty weeks of researching recipes, buying and photographing ingredients, cooking and photographing the finished product.

Run away! Don’t do it! Seriously, though, I warn aspiring writers this will dominate their lives and they must be prepared for this. You will solve a plot hole in the middle of the night, a character will pop into your head at the most inopportune moment, plots will reveal themselves when driving, and yet you will sit in front of your computer staring at a blank screen. It is the most infuriating, difficult, frustrating thing you can do with your life - but, when someone tells you how much they have enjoyed you work, it is a fantistic and rewarding experience. Oh, and don’t think it will bring fame and fortune because the odds are more in your favour if you buy a lottery ticket.

I thought there would be more time to write, and technically there is but I seem to have lost some of the drive since coming here. However, we have decided not to stay, or to be more exact, failure to sell our house Scotland has determined we cannot stay, so In July, we are moving back to Scotland.

I do feel that apart from renewing my subscription to HM government's, 'make all people poor’, scheme, I will once again be near writing opportunities and able to attend literary events, something sadly lacking in Panama

The two that stand out for me are becoming a member of Bahrain Writers’ Circle and the many visits to the Dubai Festival of Literature.

The BWC is an amazing group of talented people. Although the membership does change as expats come and go, there is a core of people who have remained members and provide tremendous support. It is a non judgemental group who support writers of all genres and abilities. I became a member in 2014 and will remain a member as long as I am writing. On that note, I have decided to stop writing on a number of occasions but come back with renewed vigour after meeting these people. I have made lifelong friends there and I can’t thank them enough.

The Dubai Festival of Literature allows members of the public a chance to meet with authors, hear about their writing, their lives, and ask questions. It also allows people like me to attend workshops and learn more about the craft of writing. I have to say that every writer running these workshops, and therehave been some big names, is incredibly supportive of those of us who are much further down the pecking order. It is refreshing to be in the company of experts in their field and have them treat you as an equal.

Independent authors are growing in numbers. Some are leaving trad publishing to become Indies because they have more control over their work. It is proving harder by the day to get a traditional publishing contract. Traditional publishing is a business and needs to make a profit, so they want well known names on the front of their books in order to sell a lot of books. Nowadays, they want you to already have a following and by my thinking, if the Indies have already done that, why should they then hand it all over to a trad publisher to profit by?

Of course, the opening up of publishing to anyone who wants to, has resulted in many badly written and edited books and a number of scam artists. That said, there are some phenomenal writers out there who couldn’t get past the gatekeepers of the trad publishers, and let’s face it, writing is an art form and people have different tastes. The gatekeeper is one person and the world is many people. Whatever you write you will find an audience. I think mine is still hiding but it is out there.

The biggest problem, I believe, is AI. In its present form it is not good at writing novels, but it will improve and the publishing business will seize the opportunity to have a machine working for the cost of its electricity over the cost of a flesh and blood author.

This is where I think the future of Indies will lie. There will be the readers who will read anything as long as it is cheap, even if a machine wrote it, and the ones who want a real story written by real people. I can see traditional publishing having to evolve to accommodate the changes whereas the Indies will continue doing what they already do and belting out some absolutely cracking novels.

Entertainment. First and foremost, I want them to have been entertained. It is a tremendous privilege to be allowed to take up someone’s time with something you have created. They have invited me in and now I mustn’t disappoint them. Anything after that is icing on the cake and not the reason I write.

At the moment, my main project is getting my wife, myself, a dog and two cats back to Scotland. After that I am taking a break from the Invidia series and working on a heist story ,which will be set in modern day London and ancient Egypt. I still have the historical, and fantasy novels hiding away in the background of my computer.

Once I’m back at my desk (it’s in storage right now) I expect the heist novel to be ready by the end of the year, all being well.

I joined late 2017, and I’ll be honest, I’ve not been as active on the site as I should be, although I have been there more since the release of Out of Darkness. I find that I struggle with the promotion side of things, particularly the online part. I am much better in a face-to-face environment such as a book fair or author signing, but I am remiss in promoting online content. To me, it is like spinning plates, there will always be a couple of plates about to topple off the pole and I think I may have too many plates on the go. I promise to do better if you promise not to shout at me.