Philip is a British ex-pat who lives and writes in Greece.
1) Can you give us a brief bio?
I was born. I haven’t died yet.
2) When did the writing bug bite and in what genre(s)?
Although I didn’t see it that way at the time, my interest in writing dates back to a single-figure age. My great grandmother taught me to read when I was three, and more or less from then on I was a regular reader. I can’t remember writing anything specific, but I have clear recollections of scribbling stuff down. My first fiction sale was to Eagle comic in the 1960s, when I was about twelve. It was an attempt at humour, describing somebody getting into a hot bath as if were a torturous ordeal. I got five shillings for it. (That same discerning publication also bought a short story from one Douglas Adams at about the same time. His was better than mine.)
The lead story in Eagle comic concerned Dan Dare, spaceman extraordinaire, and his battles against the evil Mekon. But the thing that really dates my interest in science fiction back to the early 1960s is Doctor Who, the longest running television SF series in the world. The BBC recently released the reconstructed early episodes on DVD. I watched them and found I could remember whole chunks of dialogue, from when I was ten years old!
Bruce Holland Rogers and Philip Lees
In my early teens I had an English teacher at school who would occasionally bring in marking or reports to do during our lesson, so he wouldn’t have to do them at home, in his own time. He would tell us to spend the hour writing anything we felt like in our “Anthology” books. I remember writing a spoof of the Man From U.N.C.L.E., and something else called “The Advance of the Killer Moles.” Sadly, all that has been lost to posterity. (Historical note: the name of that English teacher was Bill Gates, but I doubt he was related to the other one.)
Apart from these and other early, occasional attempts at writing, I’ve been making serious attempts to write fiction for about ten years now. I’ve always enjoyed science fiction, so I write quite a lot of that, but I don’t really believe in “genres”. I believe in whatever works for a given story I want to tell.
3) When you started writing, what goals did you want to accomplish? Is there a message you wanted readers to grasp?
Hell no! I write to please myself. If I end up with something reasonably close to what I was trying for, then I like to share it. If that sharing is in the form of a publication, so much the better. But any “message” only gets in there by accident.
4) Briefly, tell us about your books
I have two novels completed and a third one started. The first novel, a mainstream historical mystery satire romance, needs more work. The second, which is soft science fiction, I think is publishable. I’ve approached a few agents and have had generally positive responses, but not quite positive enough so far.
5) What’s the hook for these books?
Here’s the hook for the second novel, working title The Changelings:
Pod is four and a half years old and in two days she will be married. She can handle that—she’s an adult, after all—she can even cope with the knowledge her father decides to pass on to her about the origins of their people, but then the aliens arrive and play havoc with her wedding.
The aliens are not so different, although they come in a bewildering variety of shapes and colours. Their leader, Lorienne Fairbanx, seems almost like a person, in spite of her unusual appearance, and Pod is intrigued. Pod’s friend Derrin has even fallen in love. But is Lorienne to be their friend, or their Nemesis?
6) How do you develop characters? Settings?
Characters either develop themselves, or not. Once I know a character’s name, I’m OK from them on. I suppose I tend to choose settings I’m familiar with. I live on an island in a temperate climate, and the setting for Changelings is a group of islands in a temperate climate. I made up most of the flora and fauna, though.
7) What’s the most unusual/most likable character?
The most UNlikeable character I’ve created is probably the male protagonist of my first novel, Clive Dotter. He writes really horrible poetry. Most likeable, I don’t know. I have a tendency to like my characters too much, even the bad ones, then I rewrite scenes to make them not so bad and all the conflict evaporates. I’m getting better at avoiding that, though. The most unusual character is probably the alien sex instructor who is the first person pov in a recent, very short story I wrote, which almost nobody except me understands.
8) Do you have specific techniques to help you maintain the course of the plot?
Not that I’m aware of. After the first novel, I developed detailed outlines for the other two, but I don’t always stick to them and I’m not even sure it’s a good idea (Stephen King says not).
Future Mysteries Cover
9) Do you have a specific writing style? Preferred POV?
I suppose I have a core “style”, but I like experimenting with different approaches to broaden my range. As for POV, that usually comes along with the basic story idea, so what I prefer is what works best in a given case.
10) Share the best review or a portion that you’ve ever had
“…crisp and interesting.” The worst was probably “…a far cry from deadly good,” but the story in question got an honourable mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Anthology for 2009, so I can magnanimously forgive the reviewer for that.
11) What’s the most unexpected thing that’s happened to you as a writer?
Getting a story included in the Writers of the Future anthology, volume XVII, in 2001, and discovering I’d won an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood for a one-week writers’ workshop.
12) Have you participated in other writers’ workshops?
I organised one myself, in Crete in 2005. One of the instructors was Eric Witchey, whom I’d met at the WoTF bash in Hollywood, and the other was Bruce Holland Rogers, who’s won a couple of World Fantasy awards, among other things. Both great guys, and everybody seemed to think the workshop went very well. I certainly got a lot out of it. For me, one of the main benefits of both those workshops was getting the feeling that I belonged to a community of writers. I’m still in touch with a lot of the people I met there.
13) What are your current projects?
Over the last couple of years I’ve been getting a new house built and moving into it, along with all that that entails—conferring with engineers and builders, making a million choices, financing and so on—and I’ve been forced to put my writing on the back burner. One of my new year’s resolutions is to get back into a regular routine of writing and submitting.
14) Where can folks learn more about your books and events?
From my website: http://www.philiplees.com
15) What type of writing do you do?
I do a lot of scientific writing and editing as part of the way I earn my living. In fact, I’d been doing that for a number of years before I started writing fiction on a serious regular basis, and I realised it had given me a very good grounding in the mechanics of the writing process—grammar, sentence construction, and so on. Its like in music, where when you learn an instrument you have to spend a lot of time doing exercises, practising scales and so on. Moving from science writing to fiction was like taking the leap to improvising jazz. But all that time spent practising pays off.
16) What is the best thing about writing?
The hours. No, I’m kidding: the money. Seriously, I mentioned the Writers of the Future thing before. One thing they do is they have an illustrators’ contest that runs in parallel, and each published story has an illustration. They sprung this thing on us where all we writers walked into a room where the prize-winning illustrators were waiting and all the illustrations were hung up in a row. I spotted the one that went with my story very quickly (despite some misgivings about what if I’d got it wrong, how horribly embarrassing that would be, etcetera, etcetera—anyway, I’d got it right) and I met the illustrator who’d done it. One of the great moments of my life, and one of the most moving. Here I was in Greece, and I’d written this story, and someone in America had read it, and done an illustration, and she’d picked up all the essential main points of the story and put them into an image, and it spoke to me the moment I saw it. So the best thing about writing is that communication, and the rare moments when you have it confirmed.
17) Is there a specific time of day that you write?
No. I like nothing better than to get up in the morning and know that I have the entire day to work on my fiction. But the necessity of earning a living (see above) means that it doesn’t happen very often. So I tend to clear my desk of all the outstanding work obligations, clear my mind too, then get to the fiction in whatever time is left.
18) What is the most interesting book you ever read?
There is no “most”, but two of the more interesting books I’ve read this year are Darwin’s “Origin of Species”, and Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, both of which had major anniversaries. Each represents a leap of human intellect in understanding the universe we inhabit and our own place in it. In both cases, the author’s joy and awe at the process of discovery pervades the somewhat dry scientific text. Of course, both of them were vilified by the society of their day.
19) Favourite authors?
I’ve been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick over the last couple of years and I love his writing—his best stuff, anyway. There are so many writers whose work I’ve enjoyed, though, it isn’t really fair to single anybody out. My reading tastes veer wildly and unpredictably between such extremes as William Gibson and P.G. Wodehouse, passing over everything in between.
20) Any parting words of advice for writers?
Give it up now, before it starts to get really difficult. The more of you there are out there, the more submissions there are ahead of mine in the slush pile. Give up now and get out of my way.
ceremonies you don’t understand or make-up, shadows sneaking up on you may not be shadows, and other equally horrific nifty lessons.
One character who is very powerful for me at the moment is my black magician, James Edward Guillaume. He is deliciously flawed, and from his skewed point of view, has a lot to say about contemporary South Africa, especially with regard to alternative spiritualities and subcultures. Highly irreverent, he purposefully sets out to shock people, landing himself in a lot of trouble. Added to this is his narcissism, although he does redeem himself somewhat in the second novel.
He’s a large man, relentlessly optimistic, violent and caring. And not always too bright either.
