1) Who are you? What do you do?
Thomas: I'm Gabriela's husband, first and foremost. Her love is a defining issue in my life, because that is where I draw the inspiration for my writing from.
I am a reader. I've always enjoyed reading. I was taught to read by my mother and brother when I was four years old. It is one thing that has been the one constant in my life, reading. Whether reading for pleasure or reading for information, I enjoy the act of reading.
I am also a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in a country that has a desperate need to attain a higher level of national proficiency in the globalized world in which we use English as a lingua franca. Those two roles, husband and EFL teacher, define my life.
2) What is your writing process? Do you follow a regular routine?
Thomas: Great question. My writing starts in my head, as I visually begin to "see" a story develop and take form, before I begin to write. However, I begin to write before the story has reached full clarity, because it is in the writing itself that I will know where the story should go, based on what emerges as I write.
I write continuously, just getting the initial story written. I go like that until I finish, just writing, until I'm finished. That's when I go back and read the story, again trying to see if the story is the one I wanted to tell. When I'm happy with the story, I finally turn my attention to editing.
3) What are the most important elements of good writing? According to you, what tools are must-haves for writers?
Thomas: When I'm being a good writer, I'm a Storyteller, an African "griot", someone who has verbal knowledge of a story that needs to be passed on to another generation. Thus, my writing resembles a spoken story, which makes it easier for me to write and a reader to follow. In essence, it is essential to have a story that needs to be told, and you are passionate about telling that story as best you can.
A must-have for a writer is support, as writing is a lonely, time-consuming process. In my case, I have the love and support of my wife, Gaby, who understands me and lets me transform her support into perseverance, to stick with what I'm doing.
4) What motivates you to write?
Thomas: Fame, fortune and glory are secondary. Primary is that I offer someone a story which helps them to enjoy a moment of tranquility and peace, caught up in a story that I've written so well, that it seems like the story was written only for that individual reader.
5) Do you ever suffer from writer’s block? If so, what do you do about it?
Thomas: When I start writing too soon, before enough of the story has materialized in my inner vision, I "get stuck". So I try to "see" the story, revisualise it, and that usually works for me. If I'm not sure about it, I just stop writing and listen to some music, usually something by Celine Dion, for a while. As I said before, for me, the challenge is getting started. Once I'm writing, I usually get in a flow from that point on.
6) Do you have any advice for other writers?
Thomas: Write about what you know and like, your own experience of life. And then let people read your work. Many people. Experts and friends, strangers and co-workers. Accept all feedback you get, try to learn and grow from it. Always be trying to write the perfect story, the perfect book, the perfect novel. You'll never achieve that goal, but you will have lots of improvement that way.
7) What is the message in your book? What are your readers’ reactions to it?
Thomas: Celestial Games is really, at its core, the story of an old man and his son, in a time and age when everything was possible. For this, the rebirth of life on Earth was necessary, to metaphorically represent that life sometimes gives you second chances, both the deserving and the undeserving.
Sometimes your decisions are wise ones, and people prosper, and sometimes we fail to thrive and prosper due to bad decisions. It's never the failure that's important, but the fact that you get up and continue to try, again and again.
That's the message: never give up - keep trying. If you do that, the ultimate victory will always be yours.
8) Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?
Thomas: I had fun doing some research into "creation myths". Every society on Earth tries to explain where we came from, how life on Earth began. Nowadays, our beliefs are scientifically grounded on the one hand, yet peacefully co-exists with the religious vision we are given in our various religions on Earth.
In other words, we hold incompatible, contradicting explanations for life on Earth in our minds simultaneously. This allows me to offer a mystical, mythological world view as a triangular piece to these contradictory concepts. The reader then is given a question to consider: why not? In the end, it becomes more of a, "How do we know, what we know?" kind of philosophical encounter.
9) What are your current / future projects?
Thomas: From here, Celestial Games will become a novel, using this first story as a Genesis-like prologue. With me, past is prologue, and Celestial Games: The Philosopher's Stone will require the reader to have knowledge of what happened in Celestial Games: The First Gold if they are to make a connection between lost gold and the alchemy that the Philosopher's Stone will be dealing with.
Broadly speaking, I hope to be finished in another three months. I confess the novel is not yet clear enough for me to make much progress, but a lot of charachters are appearing to me almost daily. The challenge will be bringing work and writing into harmony, as this is a rather complicated story, and I want to tell it well.
10) What book(s) / author(s) have influenced your life and writing?
Thomas: Dickens and Shakespeare are the writers I admire. Dickens had a story to tell, a wrong to right, something dark to bring to the light. I admire the way he treated the social topics of his time.
Shakespeare found ways to say things that had never been said. He was well-read, and always did his research, so much so, that even today we still debate if he was one man, a different man, or many men.
That's good writing. It keeps me from always taking on the same genre, because diversity makes you unpredictable in any genre. Unpredictability means that you have a possibility of telling a common story in an uncommon way, and that is enjoyable for both reader and writer.
Interviewer: Thank you, Thomas.
Thomas: You're welcome.
**End of Interview
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