This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
A writer’s room is as much a mental space as a physical place, I like to think.
The first great writer I read properly was D.H. Lawrence, who (like me) hails from Nottinghamshire, and who spent the last 10 years of his life on the move – no mean feat for the 1920s.
I consider the writer’s life, with its occupational freedom of location, a constant blessing. I’m particularly drawn to volcanic islands, where mountains meet sea. There’s something about the containment of energy in these places – its pressure and release, which I find incredibly stimulating for the writing (vs. editing) phase of bringing a book into being.
As the photo shows, I’m writing this from the black sand beaches of Santorini in Greece, where I’m developing a new romantic drama about a man and a woman fighting over an exquisite, ancestral property. But I don’t want to give too much away yet!
I wrote my first book, The Woman Who Stopped Traffic, on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, another volcanic island. It is a thriller not dissimilar from Dave Eggers’ latest novel, The Circle. It synthesized ten years of experience accumulated on the West Coast of the States, working for Amazon.
The next book I’ll publish will be a novella-length corporate thriller set in Luxembourg, where I finished up at Amazon. Of course, it will be coming out on Kindle!
Meanwhile, I’d better keep going with this romantic drama. The one disadvantage of a place like this? Very few good excuses for not writing…
You can find Daniel Pembrey’s first novel, The Woman Who Stopped Traffic and follow him on Twitter @DPemb