Chris Wright - A Multi-Verse Full of Secrets
Chris Wright, born and raised in Derbyshire, UK, is the author of Science Fiction and Horror, blurring the lines between what is real and what is imagined. His 'Survival' trilogy is a relentless journey into a nightmare world where nothing is ever quite what it seems. As our Author of the Day, he tells us all about his book, I am Auton.
Please give us a short introduction to what I am Auton is about.
Well, without giving spoilers away about the first two books (as this continues on from them), the best way to describe it that it’s about the continued struggle for a group of friends to stay alive, a struggle that spans dimensions and worlds. In this final instalment, they each lead their own separate lives, and are unaware of their other friends and have no memory of them. Their own personal stories are hijacked by a menace from the edges of reality that swoops in to wipe them out once and for all. Gradually each of their different lives are woven back together as they need each other and the mysterious Auton to survive.
What inspired you to write a survival trilogy?
Originally, it wasn’t going to be a trilogy. I had the idea for the first book sketched out in my head, so sat down and wrote that with the intention of concluding the story at the end of that. But after I had written it, I noticed that as I was originally writing that novel, that my own writing, my own creativity and fluidity of words was loosening up. At that point it had been around 10 years since I had last sat down and written anything, and they were just short stories filed away on an old discarded hard drive. I think that it took a while for me to get back into the flow, and after I had finished the first instalment ‘Survival’, when I read it back, I felt that there were so many more ideas and words in my mind to express the immensity of what the characters had been through. So, I decided to expand on the original, and bring out new situations for the characters to encounter.
This gave me a chance to think up unusual new creatures for the sequel ‘Fragments’, which in turn gave me the idea of making the ‘monsters’ in the story something unique, and I decided that they should be part of reality itself. I won’t give away any spoilers, but their new enemies are unusual and indiscriminate. The second novel gave me chance to have fun and see what my wild imagination could conjure up, also allowing me to flesh out the characters more, so that the reader gets more of a sense of their personality. The first book is primarily about getting the story told, and the second one is about having fun with the situations and characters I had created. I thought I had wrapped it all up nicely and that was going to be it, just two books; the original and the sequel.
Then I was discussing with my editor at the beginning of this year that I was going to start writing a new novel and that’s when he turned around and challenged me to write a third. ‘But, I’ve wrapped up the story’ I said. ‘There’s nowhere you can go with it?’ He asked. Well, there is always somewhere you can go with something, and so the seed was planted. I’m not one to back down from a challenge (I am already writing these bizarre books and self-publishing them, what is more challenging than that!). So off I went, gradually refining the story as I went on. It nearly went in a few different directions, but I finally decided on the one I wanted. I wanted to get more out of each character, which meant that I had to have the characters involved in their own situations for quite a lot of the time, to tease things out of their minds and get deep into the character’s heads. That’s why the final part is so much longer and encompasses so many different situations and ideas. By this third book, I was happy with my writing style, and had settled into a much better flow.
Why did you pick a multi-verse as the backdrop for your story?
In ‘Survival’, the first book, the multi-verse isn’t mentioned. It runs more strictly to a traditional Science-Fiction world, as that is all entire story required. The second book ‘Fragments’ takes a leap forward, and in order to create the situations that the characters were to find themselves helplessly thrown into, I needed something drastic to have altered. So, the multi-verse was opened up, and that allowed me to visualize strange and exciting ways to take the story even further. By the third book ‘I Am Auton’, the readers are now familiar with the multi-verse, and it then allowed me to take them on a ride through countless places, past, present and future. So, the answer really is that I chose the multi-verse as a backdrop in order to open up the avenues for where the second and third books were going to go.
Tell us about Gina. What makes her so special?
I would say that all the characters are special really. In this third book, she is just the first character to be introduced as we enter the story and are shown her unique existence. The first book began with Danny and the second book began with Brandon, but I felt that the third should start with one of the female characters. Gina is quite a cheeky and quirky character, small in stature, of Japanese heritage, but fearsome at the same time. Her quirkiness and cheeky demeanor are explored more in this book, especially in the second half of it. The female characters have played a large role in the entire story to this point. Gina, Sheryl and Monique are just as integral to how the story plays out in the first novel, as any of the male characters, and when you break it down are actually more involved. Without any of them, none of the characters would ultimately find themselves where they end up in book 1, and none of the story would happen the way it does.
Besides writing, what other secret skills do you have?
Well it’s not so secret in the right circles, but I am a music producer and record label owner. I was a DJ back in the late 90’s in my spare time and around the mid 2000’s I began to start producing my own music; so have been producing for 15 years now. I set up my record label, Omni Music, in 2011 and it has been going strong ever since. I release experimental dance and ambient music from across the globe, with artists from as far flung places as Russia, South Africa, Italy and Mexico.
Did you plan from the start to make this into a trilogy? Or did that just happen along the way?
As mentioned earlier, it was my editor who challenged me. After the weirdness of the second one, I was surprised he even wanted me to, but the challenge commenced! I didn’t want to force anything as I did the second and third books. If I was to just re- tread the same old ground then it would be worthless, but to be honest it was impossible to tread the same old ground as the first one; certainly with the way it had ended. The main theme in the entire series is questioning what is reality for the characters, and each book had to have a different ‘monster’ to make it interesting (well, hopefully!). Questioning what reality is for the characters enabled me to delve into folkloric creatures, modern theories of reality and unthinkable creatures; basically anything that would give the characters a hard time.
Interesting cover. How did it come about?
Well, it’s along the same theme as the first two books. With the covers, I was trying to reflect parts of the story and once you read the books, you can understand what each part means. For example, the cover for Survival predominantly shows Shadow Figures, which anyone who has read it will understand instantly. That cover also shows strange bright blue tentacles along with what look like circuit boards interwoven in the background. Each of those elements are part of the story as it unfolds. When designing the cover for the second book ‘Fragments’, I wanted to keep that same theme, so the font’s and the colors stay largely the same, but the imagery is slightly different and this time features strands of DNA, a wormhole and on the back cover of the paperback copy there is a very faint view of a Nano Bot. Again, each element is within the book. It was natural to keep the theme for I Am Auton, and this cover features an eye, which stands for a couple of things within the book, one of which is Auton itself. It also shows binary code in the background and what appears to be a landscape simulated by computer code. Again, these are all things that creep into the book, along with many other elements. The overall idea for the book covers was to keep them mysterious, with the discreet imagery hinting at what lies within.
Does writing about surreal worlds and enigmatic scenes present any particular problems?
Only when I tie myself up in knots with my own enthusiasm! I will explain that properly in a moment. I let my imagination run wild while I am typing, and more often than not, all I have is an idea where a particular part of the story is going to end. I then have to figure out how to get there. Not the actual ideas, as I know them already, but specifically what is the character going to do with the other characters and how everyone is going to react. This is obviously the same problem all writers have of course; otherwise books would never be written! This is the part where if I am destined to, I will get writer’s block, because I know the end part and that is exciting me and I want to get to it, but what I write in the interim sometimes feel s flat. I want to keep it interesting, I don’t want one page to be feel ‘black and white’ and the next ten ‘color’ (If you understand what I am trying to say). Conversely most of the little situations in the book are just made up as I go along, I just type and then it flows into another idea and I then have to continue and keep it rolling. Examples in this book are David on the spacecraft that he thought was a planet, Gina in her art gallery and the odd things that happen after, Monique in her ‘seeing’ state, and Samir and his indeterminate state of being. All of them were little ideas I had that I just effortlessly typed away and improvised on. It’s these parts where I am having most fun, and that’s when in this book I temporarily tied myself up into a knot. I was having so much fun with what I was writing that I forgot to write one characters situation, thinking I had already done it! So, there is a part in ‘I Am Auton’ where the characters all ask where another one of the characters is, and Danny and Auton have to go and find them. I decided I might as well write it into the story, as it actually happened, I had completely forgotten them! Another problem is consistency, which can dog an author in a normal world situation, never mind an immensely rich and flowing multi-verse. Tiny details have to be carried on, and it took a lot of re-reading to ensure I hadn’t missed something in the third book later on that had been mentioned 200 pages earlier. Also, my eternal faux-pas is calling Auton a ‘him’ or ‘he’. They are no such thing! (I won’t spoil that one). I have corrected that more times than anything else put together!
Do you have a set of rules for your world? Is there a process you go through that helps define these?
Originally the rule was to stay within the realms of what could scientifically be possible, maybe not yet, but one day, and Survival stays within the confines of that. But by the beginning of the second instalment, all rules were shredded away and everything and anything could then be possible. So, from that point on, there were no rules. My only rule was that everything had to have an explanation and things don’t just happen and are never answered, because I couldn’t live with that myself! Having no set rules allowed me to imagine the most bizarre circumstances and include them, and also incorporate a wide range of themes and ideas. A lot of my ideas come from paranormal and fortean themes, and blend popular Sci-Fi ideas, folklore and metaphysics as well as horror. I like the characters to be in situations where they ask grand and difficult questions. What makes them human? When do they stop becoming human? Is there more to reality than they can consciously process? When I am writing within the worlds I have created I keep an open mind, and that lets the story flow to places that are unexpected. It’s an occurrence throughout the books, so anyone sitting down to read them should sit down with no expectations, because the stories go off in very unusual places!
How long on average does it take you to write a book?
That has varied from book to book. The first one was the quickest and it took me roughly 4 months to write from start to finish at evenings, weekends and any spare time I got (even sitting on planes!). The sequel took a little longer, approximately 6 months, but a lot of that was down to having to move home, which disrupted the flow a lot. The final book took me a lot longer than that, as it had much more strands that connected and so the page count increased drastically from the previous two volumes. I started in February 2020, just before the pandemic and finally finished it at the end of October, so it was almost 10 months in my spare time once again. I then had an illustrator for Book 3, who drew the main characters involved in the trilogy. It was great to see them visually come to life, but the result was that it pushed back the publication date a little.
If you could choose one character from your book to spend a day with, who would it be? And where would you take them?
That is a hard question to answer, but I would probably say Mike. The reason being is that he has the same passions I have, as he loves the outdoors, nature and wildlife. We’d probably end up in a remote rainforest somewhere, hiking into the wilderness. Some of his experiences are based on things and situations I have found myself actually in, which made it quite easy to write about. There are quite a few situations with each of the characters where I reference something I have done, a bizarre situation my wife and myself have found ourselves in, or I make a nod to items or a character that is based on a real life experience or person. It’s hard not to be influenced by people I know and things I’ve done, as that gives me the richest insight into how the character would react or how a situation personally feels like. Being feasted on and turned into anti-matter is something I can only try and imagine though, that obviously didn’t happen!
What are you working on right now?
I’m currently writing a screenplay of the first novel ‘Survival’. I think that is the only book in the series that can be transferred to the screen without it looking like the writer has had a complete meltdown! That’s mainly because it follows a more rigid Horror/Sci-Fi format (while trying to avoid the obvious tropes). It is a steep learning curve though, as you have to look at it from a visual perspective. Even though one reader described Survival as ‘very cinematic’, the problem with books is that you can describe a lot of things, like a back story, in a simple paragraph, whereas watching it as a movie, where does this information come from? Is it spoken by a narrator? Or is it spoken by one of the characters? That is something I had to decide when re-writing it, as well as not introducing all the characters at once as I do in the novel. I need a main protagonist, which Danny undoubtedly is, but in a visual format it had to center around him more to begin with. The viewer is in an unfamiliar world with unfamiliar characters and they need something to anchor to in order for them to watch the story unfold. The descriptiveness of a paragraph would be off-putting in such a format in certain scenarios, so the story moves on and explains something else or introduces someone else fully later on. I also imagined actors in the roles, and it allowed me to alter the dialogue a little, and make it more like people actually speak in real life, back and forth and back and forth, instead of one character talking for twenty seconds non-stop. That’s fine in a novel, as characters having an exchange that jumps between them continually is unnecessary and looks messy. With two real people bringing it to life, it wouldn’t seem dynamic and natural to have it done that way.
After I’ve finished that I will start writing a new novel. I was thinking about asking readers of the first three books for a series of different events or situations and then I will go away and try and thread them into a story, adding in my own ideas as necessary. I have plenty of other ideas (mainly more straight forward horror or sci-fi, and not venturing off into bizarre realities), but I thought it would be fun, and also a great way to involve readers in the future.
Where can our readers discover more of your work or interact with you?
I can be found on:
https://www.facebook.com/OmniUKPublishing
https://twitter.com/uk_publishing
https://www.instagram.com/omniukpublishing/
All my books are available at Amazon, in paperback and in Kindle format. You can check my Author profile here that links to all my books:
https://www.amazon.com/Chris-Wright/e/B07N5MT37H
I can also be contacted by email at:
[email protected]
