Chris Wooding
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Chris Wooding (1977 –) is a British writer born in Leicester, England and now living in Madrid. His first book was published at the age of twenty-one, and he has continued to write over seventeen more including The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray ,an alternative reality where London is partially populated by deadly wych-kin, and Broken Sky, an action fantasy with an anime style
His writing style is quick-paced and action packed, made notable by realistic and believable characters and an evocative descriptive style. He has won several awards for his books.
[edit] Various projects
Broken Sky was scheduled to be a cartoon series for years, but the idea was scrapped at the last minute. However, Wooding would like to convert the story into a series of manga. He will start it after the re-release of the Broken Sky series. Wooding is making an appearance in the film writing business with 'Nursery' which will be a psychological horror. There was talk about a Haunting of Alaizabel Cray movie, but it is still uncertain. He enjoys traveling the world and would like to turn some of his books into movies.
[edit] About the author
Chris Wooding was born February 28th,1977. His formative years were spent in a grim, squalid ex-mining town in the Midlands, where the crushing monotony of his surroundings fostered a need for escapism that he found in books. Possessed of a frighteningly sharp focus as a child, he had already determined that he wanted to be an author by the time he hit adolescence; and he had barely reached adulthood by the time he had achieved his ambition. He had a literary agent at eighteen; Crashing was accepted for publication when he was nineteen years old and released soon after.
Since it was scarcely possible to stop him writing anyway, the prospect of making a living by doing what he loved - instead of being forced to work at something he didn’t -sparked a fire under him and turned him extremely prolific. He spent the next few years writing feverishly around his English Literature studies at the University of Sheffield, producing a multitude of works across a range of styles, from teenage stories to horror to offbeat fantasy and grim political drama. Every one was published. By the time he left University, he was earning just enough to live on, and he took up writing full-time at twenty-one.
University had broadened his horizons from the somewhat sheltered existence in the post-industrial doomscape of his home town, and he began to travel. He spent months in the USA to see if it matched up to the world represented in the movies he had grown up with, after which he travelled to the Far East where he got lost in a Malaysian jungle, and later backpacked around Europe where he almost managed to starve on a train between Athens and Budapest. After that he went to Japan where he was only saved from a hobo-esque existence trapped in the impenetrable Tokyo subway system by a kind passer-by, and to South Africa where he witnessed one of his best friends being mauled by a cheetah but was too paralysed with laughter to intervene. His last trip was to Scandinavia, where nothing life-threatening happened to him, which was nice.
Now twenty-eight, he has published eighteen books and several short stories. The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray won him the Silver Smarties Award. His works have sold all over the world and been translated into many different languages, including Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Thai, Indonesian and Icelandic. He has also written two movie screenplays, both of which are in development and involving major Hollywood producers and directors. He is also developing an original cartoon series with a broadcaster in Canada.
Chris Wooding works as a full-time author in London. When he is not writing, he is generally to be found in the cinema, backpacking around other countries or touring with his band. He is fascinated by folklore, myths and legends, and the history and diversity of other cultures, particularly those of the Far East. He also learned not so long ago that his family tree can be traced back to John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, which has no bearing on him whatsoever but it’s kind of interesting anyway.
[edit] Books
- Crashing (1998)
- Catchman (1998)
- Kerosene (1999)
- Endgame (2000)
- Broken Sky series #1-9 (1999-2001) will be re-released as 3 books in 2008
- Haunting of Alaizabel Cray (2001)
- Poison (2003)
- Braided Path series:
- #1 Weavers of Saramyr (2003)
- #2 The Skein of Lament (2004)
- #3 Ascendancy Veil (2005)
- Storm Thief (2006)
- The Fade (2007)
- Malice (2008)
[edit] Crashing(1998)
Crashing is about a group of four friends, a party, and what happens to them there.
It was written in the summer of '96, when I was nineteen and at home on holiday from University. I suppose this one came out of anxiety more than anything. At the time, I had a small circle of close friends that I'd grown up with in Leicestershire, and the previous year we had all split up to go to different Universities or jobs. Only a year had passed, but we were already losing contact, and it just hit me that even those friendships that seem set in stone are often so fragile it's ridiculous. Amateur psychoanalysis pegs this book as my solution to the problem; it's about a group of friends who are nearly torn apart by the events of one night, but in the end they forge stronger links than ever. I was really into Richard Linklater movies at the time and I loved the way he set them all in the span of a single night, so I figured I'd do the same. Most of the characters were based on those friends and myself, but I mixed up appearances and attributes so that none of them ever guessed; and besides, by the time the book came out two years later we didn't speak to each other any more, proving that fiction is probably a better place to spend your time than real life is.
This book got some criticism when it was released for not being hard-edged enough. It is pretty harmless, but then that was the intention. I didn't want a downbeat story at that stage; I needed a cheery one for my own sake. People expect a book about a teenage party to involve the protagonists taking drugs at some stage, but I didn't want to write a book about drugs; it's a boring subject and nowadays it relies on shock value or reader identification to limp its way from cover to cover. All the good books about drugs came out before I was born, and I think they pretty much covered it.
[edit] Catchman(1998)
Catchman is a story about a bunch of young squatters in a semi-derelict house who find themselves being killed off one by one at the hands of what they believe to be a quasi-mythical bogeyman called the Catchman. Unless of course the Catchman is only a story, and it's really one of them...
This was my second published book, and probably the one I'm least fond of. With Scholastic's agreement to publish Crashing in my second year at Sheffield University, I had suddenly been provided a post-graduation avenue to do what I had wanted to do ever since I could read, which was to be a writer. So I wrote. The first love of my teenage years was always horror, and Scholastic asked me to do a Point Horror book for them. I came up with Catchman.
This was intended to be something of an homage to the stalk-and-slash genre that eased me through the infinitely more horrible scenes being played out every day at my secondary school during my teens. Unfortunately, its original ending got rewritten several times as I couldn't make it quite work, and the final version ended up as something less than I had started out to create. I wanted a Murder Of Roger Ackroyd twist at the end, where the narrator turns out to be the killer, but I soon discovered that there's a reason why Agatha Christie has sold twenty crillion copies of her books and I haven't. I was still happily tapping away in the make-it-up-as-you-go-along mode that had worked with Crashing, but it didn't work here, and as a result I had to re-edit it a lot and ultimately change the point of the book. Catchman taught me to plan my novels before I get started on them. I've done so to a greater or lesser extent with every book since, which is why I think they're better than this one.
[edit] Kerosene(1999)
Kerosene is about a chronically shy kid named Cal, who only finds relief from his crippling condition by setting things alight. But when he unwittingly crosses two girls at school, they embark on a plan of revenge that ultimately sends him spiralling into pyromania.
This book was just pure catharsis. I was having a bad few months of it one winter at University, and some days I was just walking around like Cal does in the book, unable to meet anyone's eye. A lot of people found these passages particularly well-observed, which is kind of them; but I think I had an advantage, as I was in the unpleasant position of feeling that way at the time I wrote them. Cal was just an extrapolation: what would it be like to feel like that all of the time?
As far as pyromania went, I'd gone through the phase of torching all my toys with lighter fluid and matches that I think most pre-pubescant boys experience at one time or another, which probably cost me thousands in melted Star Wars figures and one burned original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue #1 (the Eastman and Laird version, not the crappy TV series spin-offs). Also, I was living in customary student squalor at the time, in an enormous room with no double glazing or heater, and the coldest winter in living memory was going on outside. Fire was something that cropped up a lot in my thought processes when I woke up with my breath steaming the air of my bedroom.
But the real payoff was the final section of the book, set in a blazing school. That school was modelled on my secondary: all the corridors that the pupils run through follow the same floorplan, all the classrooms are the same, and so on. By the time I was writing Kerosene, I'd been learning stuff solidly for about fifteen years, primary through to University. And I was sick of being educated. If burning my toys was a rite of passage, then burning my school was one too.
A little while after Kerosene came out, someone tried to set fire to my school in real life. I hope that wasn't my fault. It was just a book, y'know?
[edit] Endgame(2000)
Endgame is about the countdown to nuclear war, and its effect on a group of ordinary friends. Seven days in which they are forced to decide who or what is really precious to them. Seven days in the shadow of the bomb, and the clock is ticking…
This book is bleak. That's very much a product of its subject matter, however, as conversely I remember being particularly happy while I was writing it. It deals with two things that have always been pet dreads of mine: nuclear war, and the threat of conscription. The research involved in writing this novel taught me more than I cared to know about the effects of a nuclear bomb, most of which I've kindly shared with the reader just to ram the point home that we should not have them. But hey, I'm just an author, who listens to me? It's also about humanity's boundless capacity for stupidity, but then that goes hand-in-hand with any book about war I suppose.
Concurrent with my mildly obvious hatred for human conflict (and the politics that go with it) is the question that obsesses one of the protagonists in the book: what would you do if you were conscripted to fight and kill people in a war you didn't believe in? I wanted to represent the war on a small scale, to show how it might affect a few teenagers at home rather than soldiers on a battlefield. The conflicts of the superpowers are mirrored in the actions of the characters in the book. The little folk are just as cruel, petty and brutal as the governments that are squabbling over the Earth.
I don't have a great deal of faith in humankind as a species at the best of times, and a lot of it came out in this book. Humankind paid me back by not reading it. Whereas most of my other stories had spread to a good deal of foreign territories, Endgame didn't. I can't say I'm surprised. Nuclear bombs are so sixties.
[edit] Broken Sky Parts 1-9(1999-2001)
Broken Sky is the story of two mirrored worlds, the Dominions and Kirin Taq. It’s about a pair of twins who find themselves torn from the safety of their home and thrown into the conflict, and how they become key players in the battle for both dimensions against the despotic King Macaan and his daughter.
I still have a big soft spot for Broken Sky. It seems so long ago that I wrote it, but I can still remember the feeling I had when I first put fingertip to keyboard and rattled out those opening lines. It felt like the first book I wrote that was really mine, because I was finally doing in print what I had been doing on paper since I was about three: making up worlds and telling stories about them. For me, fiction has always been about escapism, and I’d always been somewhat constrained by the real world in my earlier books. With Broken Sky I just had a blank canvas to work on, and I had as much fun painting in the background as I did telling the story.
I wanted to write a book in the style of the anime videos that I was painfully obsessed by at the time. Japanese series like Vision of Escaflowne and the manga of Nausicaa Of The Valley Of Wind – the greatest graphic novel ever – had such a different feel to most of the Tolkien-derived fantasy prevalent in the Western world. I had begun to wonder why such obviously creative writers were still using elves and dwarves and magic swords as a template when it had long been done to death, and the Japanese fantasies – uninhibited by the shadow of Tolkien and deriving from different folkloric roots – were dazzlingly original in comparison. Broken Sky, in all honesty, was written because I wanted to script an anime series but I couldn’t write in Japanese, which pretty much put me out of the running. So I wrote it in text and in English, not knowing what I was doing, just going with what felt right. I adhered to the strictures of the genre in some aspects while some I just ignored, taking what I thought made anime superior to Western cartoons: the long story arcs, properly developing characters, strong emotional scenes… oh yeah, and everyone kicking the living shit out of each other all the time. Whatever I did, it apparently worked. It was the first of my books that really broke into the international market, and sold all over the world.
Broken Sky was originally intended as a trilogy of fairly sizable books. To some extent, it was a dry run for the lengthier ‘adult’ fantasy trilogy that I wanted to do, but which did not emerge until several years later with the publication of The Weavers Of Saramyr. I’ve always been something of a tentative writer, having burned myself countless times by attempting mammoth novels only to have them collapse under their own weight. With Broken Sky I wanted to see if I could hold a trilogy together and make it work; and I like to think that structurally, it’s very sound. There are dozens of principle characters and hundreds of thousands of extras, storylines spanning three years book-time and all sorts of interlinking monsters, organisations and geographical wonders. But it doesn’t creak too much when I kick it, and it holds water, so I’m happy.
Scholastic decided to publish Broken Sky originally in twenty-seven parts as a serial; but this proved too unwieldy for bookshops to handle so it was scaled down to nine, with three parts for each book of the trilogy. There are plans to release it in the originally-intended format sometime in the future, now that J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman have proved that it is possible to release lengthy books in the young adult market and live to tell the tale.
Ironically – since it was born from the desire to write an animated series – Broken Sky went into development as an animated series. They’d even got to the stage of making trailers - which looked fantastic - but sadly the project has since died. Oh well…
[edit] The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray(2001)
The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray is a Gothic horror/fantasy about an alternate Victorian London overrun by the wych-kin, daemonic creatures that have rendered the city uninhabitable south of the river, and which stalk the streets after dark. When Thaniel Fox, a young wych-hunter, finds a mad girl wandering the streets in the middle of the night, he is moved by pity to take her home; and in doing so, he becomes embroiled in a plot that reaches into the highest levels of government, and into the darkest depths of the wych-kin's world.
This book, I think, is where I really found my feet. With Broken Sky I'd tested the waters of the fantasy world and decided I liked them far more than Young Adult fiction. After all, it was what I'd started out to do in the first place. Alaizabel, I think, is written in much more 'my' style as I wasn't playing to any genre in particular, and by now I was confident enough to give myself free rein and experienced enough to not screw it up. So I thought. Unfortunately I got a little overenthusiastic and wrote it waaay too long. I had to cut out about a fifth of the text and eliminate one of the main characters completely to get it into fighting shape; but in the end it got a pretty cracking critical response and won the silver at the Smarties Awards, so I don't regret a minute of it.
The story came out of the scenery really. I had just moved to London from Leicester (where I'd returned after Uni in Sheffield), and I absolutely hated it. I just couldn't get on with the Underground, the unbelievable amount of time it took to get anywhere, the sheer size and riotous expense of the place. The dark, perpetually foggy and dangerous city in the book was just an exaggeration of what I felt, and the rest fell out from there. It started as a riff on how much I disliked living in London, mixed in with a bunch of H.P.Lovecraft that I was heavily into at the time, and somewhere along the line it developed subtext, themes and even, dare I say, a message. This was my favourite of my books for a long time, until The Weavers Of Saramyr took top spot in my affections.
I was commissioned to write a movie script for The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray not so long ago, which at the time of writing is winging its way towards Hollywood. In the process of drafting and redrafting I changed the story around, mostly to make it work better as a movie, partly because I was tired of telling the same story the same way. The heart of it is still there, but the movie, if it ever gets made, will be quite a bit different from the book. That'll annoy any purists there might be out there.
I relocated from London back to Leicester before The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray came out, but unbeknownst to me the big city had its claws in by then, and my home seemed kinda boring in comparison. Finally I gave up and moved back to London again. I like it this time around. I've become numb to the bad points and I appreciate the good ones. But I still tend to stay north of the river.
[edit] Poison(2003)
Poison is a twisted fairytale fantasy about one girl's journey to reclaim her stolen infant sister. To do so she has to enter a world where humans are the lowest form of vermin, where a murderous pantheon of demigods plot and scheme to overthrow one another, and where someone is planning to do away with humankind altogether. But not before everything she knows as reality is turned upside down…
I had the idea for Poison when I was backpacking around the Far East. As sometimes happens when a book takes shape, it was the final scene that I first thought of, and I worked my way back from there. But even though I had the story in my head, it was over a year before I began actually writing it. The book that was to become The Weavers Of Saramyr was monopolising my time, and I was juggling that and writing the script for The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray. My deadline for Poison crept closer and closer, and then sneaked past and away, and finally I couldn't leave it any later so I began working on this in between editing drafts of Weavers and Alaizabel.
It's difficult to say anything about the roots of the story in Poison without giving away the entire point of the book. I didn't want to write another action-filled, breakneck-paced story like my previous fantasies. There was a very conscious determination with Poison to ensure that the lead character was utterly powerless in the face of her enemies, so that there was no question of being able to physically beat them. In Poison, the characters live on their wits alone, perpetually overmatched. I like that; much more like real life.
I think, as one reviewer commented, that it's a much more thoughtful book than its predecessors; there's a lot of deeper subtext and symbolism beneath the picaresque thrust of the storyline. It can be read one level as a weird, gruesome kind of fairy tale, but there's a lot more to it than that. I spent most of my time writing this novel worrying about whether anyone would 'get' it, or whether it would sound like some degenerate A-Level student's philosophical rant when it was all finished instead of the story it was supposed to be, but I think it all worked out fine in the end. I'm very happy with it, anyway. And at least I got to put all the folklore I studied at University to good use.
[edit] The Weavers Of Saramyr: Book One Of The Braided Path(2003)
The Weavers Of Saramyr is the first book of The Braided Path, a fantasy trilogy centring on the continent of Saramyr. For hundreds of years the ruling families of the empire have relied on the Weavers to knit them together, using their masks to slip beneath the weave of the world and communicate across vast distances instantaneously. They are the guardians of purity, rooting out the deformed and corrupt in body, preaching hatred and fear of the Aberrants that are appearing more and more often as a result of the strange blight that is creeping across the land. But unbeknownst to the Weavers, the Empress’s own daughter is an Aberrant, kept hidden from them while she grew, and the Empress will not give her up for anything, even at the threat of civil war…
Though I count The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray and Poison as ‘crossover’ books in that they would be just as happy in the adult market as on the YA shelves, this was the first of my books to be published on Gollancz and hence officially in the adult market. That this ever got written at all is in equal parts due to my agent’s wise insight and my own insane persistence in getting the bloody thing finished. Ever since I had started writing I had been alternating between writing books for Scholastic and making abortive attempts at adult novels that inevitably got out of control and collapsed. I think I had about three half-novels’ practice over the years between Catchman and Alaizabel before I began to write what was to become Weavers, none of which ever got completed. After Alaizabel I determined to stop mucking around and write an adult fantasy book, and I was going to finish it even if it meant I ended up back in the student-level poverty that I had just about got out of by that point.
The Cold Road was the result. I won’t tell you the plot, since I may use it again one day and I thought it was pretty good. Suffice to say that towards the end of the book, the protagonists came across a land where the Weavers lived, a horribly corrupt race who used masks to gain supernatural powers. But the masks ate into their sanity and befouled their bodies every time they used them, and were narcotic in effect, trapping them in a cycle of addiction. Power at a terrible price. I sent it to my agent, unbelievably relieved at having finally completed it (and it was easily twice the length of my previous efforts). She didn’t like it. I was mildly crushed. But she did like the Weavers. ‘Couldn’t you get more of them in?’ she suggested. Trouble was, after I got over my initial reluctance to change anything about the book, I agreed with her. The Weavers were the best thing about it. Unfortunately I’d constructed the story in such a way that it was impossible to bring them in any earlier without rebuilding it from scratch.
So I did. I tossed the original concept and rewrote the whole story with the Weavers as a starting point. Writing-wise, I think that’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and probably also the smartest.
I also rewrote the world that the story was set in. Whereas The Cold Road was a little more trad-fantasy, The Weavers Of Saramyr needed something different. The masks of the Weavers put me in the mind of the masks in Japanese Noh theatre, and everything went from there. Saramyr gained an oriental theme, based on a blend of ancient Japan, China, Persia and Renaissance Italy and not resembling any of them very much in the end. I wanted the characters to have rudimentary use of gunpowder to offset the traditional swordfighting and make the conflicts more interesting; rifles are commonplace but unreliable in Saramyr, an alternative to hand-to-hand weaponry but not an effective replacement. For the background, I used elements of Shinto mythology blended with traditional polytheism to put the structures of belief in place, and the story (most of which had already been set up in the process of writing The Cold Road) sewed itself together again in an entirely new skin. I believe it came out many times better for it.
[edit] The Skein of Lament: Book Two of the Braided Path(2004)
It’s very hard to find anything to say about this book that won’t include plot spoilers, because while each book of The Braided Path can be read alone, they are actually three acts in one continuous story and far too interlinked to allow me to talk about events in the second book without revealing what happened in the first. Even if I flagged the spoilers up I suspect people would peek anyway. So I’ll keep this short and vague.
Suffice to say that Skein widens the scope of the conflict introduced in Weavers and provides answers to some of the questions raised in Book One. We get to meet some new players in the game as the action spreads out of northwest Saramyr and off the continent entirely. The stakes are higher, the scale is bigger, and in Skein we begin to see glimpses of what the Braided Path sequence is really about. And it’s not what you think…
This is the longest book I’ve ever written thus far, due to the various intersecting plotlines, but surprisingly everything fell together very neatly for me in the creation of this story, and it was a smooth and easy ride compared to the protracted and awkward breech-birth of Weavers. You never can tell with books.
Oh, and one last thing: it’s pronounced skayne, not skeen. Just so you know ;)
[edit] The Ascendancy Veil: Book Three of the Braided Path(2005)
As with The Skein Of Lament, I’ll keep this synopsis brief so as not to blow the surprises (and there are many, oh yes).
This is the concluding chapter of The Braided Path trilogy, and the one with the biggest explosions, naturally. The land of Saramyr is tipping into apocalypse, and the principal players in the trilogy have to face what they have become. The secrets of the Weavers are unearthed and the truth is far worse than anyone had imagined. The greatest conflict the continent has ever seen has reached a head, and only blood can slip the knot. The question is, will there be anything left when the smoke clears?
The Braided Path trilogy took me about three years to write, but I had to get it out of my system. I’d always wanted to write an epic fantasy as they were the first books I really fell in love with; but of course I wanted to do it my way, because by the time I grew up I was pretty bored with dragons and wizards and was wondering why everybody uses stock monsters and the old Dungeons and Dragons system of elf/dwarf/goblin, instead of using five-headed acid-spitting photovores that can iridesce their way through space-time – ie, something faintly original. (I did have several better ideas than that, but I deleted them cos I want to use them myself later J) TBP is an attempt to do something original within the trad-fantasy structure, ‘cause it’s a genre that is flailing its way toward the nearest tar pit to become extinct if people don’t stop writing the same book over and over again.
So TBP is done, another ambition fulfilled, and it’s on to other things. By which I mean Halflight. And I’m really off the leash now...
[edit] Storm Thief (2006)
Orokos is a city of chaos. For as long as anyone can remember, the city has been lashed by probability storms, that change anything they touch. Streets are rearranged, children turned to glass, rivers break their banks. Nothing is stable. Everyone is vulnerable.
Rail and Moa: two thieves from the ghettoes. Rail’s been bitter at life ever since the Storm Thief stole his breath. Moa just wants to get away, to a land where things are better. But there is nowhere else other than Orokos, and the city won’t let them leave anyway.
Then they find an artifact: a device that opens doors. Something that anyone in the city would kill for. And it will lead them to the dark secret at the heart of Orokos…
Storm Thief is another light romp through daisy-filled pastures with… wait, wait, no it’s not. It’s a grim dystopia where our heroes cling to life by their fingernails. It’s about order versus chaos, about the storms of adolescence, about hope and hopelessness. And it’s also about love and dreams and hope and sacrifice, and how even in the darkest places you can find a light.
Storm Thief wasn’t an easy one to write because the enclosed world of Orokos was quite a task to build in my head. Everything had to make sense: the history, the economy, even how they managed to feed themselves. As usual, while writing it I got to a point where I wished I’d never started, and I wanted to run my hard drive over an electromagnet and never think of Orokos or Rail or Moa again because they had given me so much grief. And also as usual, I got through it, and when it was finally done and I got the bound copies I decided that I loved it again. Getting through that bit in a book, that’s the part that separates the men from the boys.*
Since I finished Storm Thief in February of ’05, my book output slowed a little as I’ve been working more in other fields: screenwriting and comic-book writing, mainly. I like to try new things and different formats of writing. Keeps me fresh.
