CWD Member Interview - Catch Tilly

Most Thursdays this year we will be interviewing one of the members of Christian Writers Downunder – to find out a little bit more about them and their writing/editing goals.

Today’s interview: Catch Tilly 

Question 1: Tells us three things about who you are and where you come from. 

I come from Sydney. Up until this year I was always a bit scornful of S.A.’s lawful tendencies but since Covid19 I’m loving it. Lawful good people really come into their own in a pandemic. 

I get emotional. Like really emotional. I once had a lecturer tell me that if I got any more enthusiastic, I’d need chemicals. Combined with a generalized anxiety disorder it makes for a rollercoaster of a life. That’s where faith really helps. I once read that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt it’s control and I think that’s true. I’ve learnt to let go of any attempt at control and to trust God when I get anxious. That and prayer (mine and others) gets me through the dark times. And the good times are ‘dancing down the street’ amazing. It’s an amazing world we live in. 

I live in my imagination. I created a Facebook page for an imaginary person before I created one for myself. I can tell you the Hogwarts House for the mc of Shadowalker (Gryffindor despite being the Death Lord’s daughter) but I’ve never bothered to do the online test for myself. My second youngest daughter was named after a character on Meldin (where Shadowalker is set). 

And my name. I’ll tell you the story I don’t tell anyone. People ask me where the name Catch comes from and I tell them it’s an old nickname I adopted officially and that’s it’s based on the book Catch 22. And that’s true. What I don’t tell people is the person who’s nickname it is doesn’t officially exist. It was Danielle Warwick, the narrator of a book I started in my teens who—like me—loved the bitter irony of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 whose nickname I adopted. 

That’s who I am, a person whose real name belongs to an imaginary person.

Question 2: Tell us about your writing (or editing/illustrating etc).  What do you write and why?

I want to write genre fiction. I’d love to be able to write exceptional Mills and Boon. And not for the money, though that would be nice, but because I’d love to conquer the craft of writing to a formula and making it good. (It’s like writing a sonnet). I’ll do it one day. But what I write now is YA. I guess I’m stuck being a teenager (see above question on who I am). 

My two published books are both YA. Shadowalker was published by Stone Table Books in 2017 and the sequel Abomination is finished and will come out later this year (God and pandemics willing). Actually, you meet the four horsemen at the end of the second book, so I guess it’s topical. I wrote this because I wanted to share Meldin. I wanted to introduce people to four different types of dragon (five if you count Uriel’s ice cream eating cousin). To take them to regency balls and laser turreted castles and lifts made of Light and air and the bones of the dead. 

The second book is Otherwise known as Pig, published by Wakefield Press last year. And that one I wrote because I had to. It’s a violent, sometimes profane book about bullying with Christian themes (the turn around point is a book of martyrs and turning the other cheek). Christianity and the f-word, I never thought it would get published but I knew God wanted me to write it, so I did. Then, nine years later, Wakefield took it up and it’s a Glam Adelaide Pick of the Year and Katherine England at the Advertiser described it as ‘a brilliant novel. Lesson one as a writer: Trust God.

Question 3: Who has read your work? Who would you like to read it? 

I want everyone to read it, of course. Because Stone Table is a small press it’s hard to get books out into the general public so Shadowalker has been read mostly by people I know but I’m hoping with the ability to create an eBook and the increase in online purchasing we can get it out there more. So, if you’re reading this and you like dragons and laser swords and a girl who walks through death then check it out. (But if you are in Australia go to Booktopia, everyone else is shipping from America.)

With Otherwise known as Pig I don’t know who has read it, a number of teachers, I think but the people I really want to read it are teens. I want anyone who’s been bullied to feel validated and heard, to know there are people out there who do understand. The review I am most proud of is a 15-year-old who wrote ‘the sense of satisfaction was overwhelming for a novel’. And I want the rest of us to read it and feel compelled to act when we see injustice, to help create a culture that says no instead of yes to bullying. 

Question 4: Tell us something about your process. What challenges do you face? What helps you the most?

I must write in the morning. If I don’t my day is a waste of space. I don’t write fast so about 500 to 1,000 words in a day is good for me. My ‘day job’ is looking after my daughter (autistic, non-verbal) and she will usually leave me alone in the mornings, so I get quite a lot of time to write. 

I think my biggest challenge as a writer is how far I get into the character. When I wrote Pig I spent 10 months thinking (and swearing) as a 14-year-old boy from one of the roughest parts of Adelaide. It’s good for voice but it means I have to drag myself out of character to understand what’s happening from outside. It’s probably why I always write in first person (a challenge in fantasy).

And confidence. Do we all have that problem? That’s where I learn on faith. My faith that God wants me to do this. God’s faith in me. And my husband who had lots of practice reminding me I am a good writer and I can do this.

Question 5: What is your favourite Writing Craft Book and why? 

I tend to write instinctively and only stop and think when I run into problems so my favourite craft book (apart from Mr. Google) tends to be the one I’m reading. Right now, that’s the Master Classes on writing. I’ve just finished Neil Gamian and Margaret Attwood and am part way through Judy Blume. When I did my Master of Creative Writing, I relied heavily on Bell’s Write Good Fiction: Plot and Structure. 

I’ve just purchased Rosanne Hawke’s Riding the Wind and am about to pick up Mark Worthing’s The Sacred Life of Words and considering how much I learnt from them both at Tabor I’m expecting those to become my next favourites.

Question 6: If you were to give a shout-out to a CWD author, writer, editor or illustrator – who would they be?

That’s a hard one. There are so many people I’ve been blessed to know. My first list was nine people long, so this is the short one.

Rosanne Hawke:  God knew what he was doing when he put Rosanne at Tabor. I learnt so much from her about writing children’s fiction, she was so apparent in her faith and yet she never restricted her students. It was one of my proudest writing moments when I broke the HD barrier and received 85% for my first four chapters of Pig.  And to sneak in two more, I want to mention Claire Bell (who has the amazing gift of editing for both voice and grammar and who was so much a part of making Pig worth publishing  and Mark Worthing, who made poetry so interesting that I did advanced poetry and I am not a poet. And who also published my first book (thank-you).  

Wendy Noble: I really like Wendy’s writing and we share a love of intelligent, unexpected dragons. I also admire her tenacity. But I think the reason I wanted to shout-out Wendy was the way she writes. When asked: “why are the griven in your book so negative about everything?”, Wendy answered: ‘because that’s the way they sounded in my head’. Now that is a response I can relate to. 

Sue Jeffrey: Sue and I were born in the same year. We both did YA novels on bullying for our Master’s (same year) and were invited by Rosanne into CWA together. We then both started working on fantasy books. We both wrote short stories about underpants for the first Stories of Life and both won prizes. (Sue came first, and I came second). In the last couple of years, we’ve been working on different projects, but I still think of Sue as my writing twin. 

Question 7: What are your writing goals for this year? How will you achieve them?

Write more. 10 years ago my husband was geeking out and asked me what would writing at level 50 (a role playing term) look like for me. I answered it would be writing the books God put on my heart and let him worry about the rest of it. I keep needing to remind myself of that conversation and just write.

Question 8: How does your faith impact and shape your writing?

See above: God made me a writer; I am as sure of that as I am of any other aspect of my faith and when I write well it’s an act of faith, of letting go and trusting him. 

I also hope my faith does shape my writing. C.S. Lewis said when he started writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe he wasn’t trying to write Christian literature that’s just what came out. Allegory doesn’t seem to be my thing, but I want faith to come out in my stories. In Morgan’s response to a book on martyrs or in bones encased in crystal being slowly redeemed by Light. I don’t wrote ‘Christian literature but I hope and prey I write literature as a Christian. 

CWD Member Interview – Ben Morton AKA Morton Benning

Most Thursdays in 2019 we will be interviewing one of the members of Christian Writers Downunder – to find out a little bit more about them and their writing/editing goals.

Today's interview: Ben Morton AKA Morton Benning

Question 1: Tells us three things about who you are and where you come from.

I grew up in Whyalla SA, which is essentially a hot and dry city masquerading as a country town, where my friends and I camped out as teenagers to be the first three customers of the newly opening Hungry Jacks.

I first left home when I was nineteen to live over 300km from a free dinner at mum’s because I wanted to study ministry, preaching and theology and become a youth pastor, but I had to work as a t-shirt artist to pay back my fee debts.

I met my wife while studying and then teaching drama and creative writing at Tabor Adelaide and we spent a year teaching English in Japan together before settling back in Adelaide and having two girls (one more baby on the way as I write this).

Question 2: Tell us about your writing (or editing/illustrating etc). What do you write and why?

I mostly write and teach speculative fiction because I find the fantastical environments to be a more interesting place to tell stories and explore ideas. I enjoy writing poetry from time to time as well, and I like to write a good mix of adventure and humour. I also use my writing, editing, typesetting, illustration and design skills to run a small business that makes use of modern publishing methods to turn unpublished writers into published authors. I call what I do assisted publication because it has many of the benefits of self publishing and also of what used to be called vanity publishing, but avoids most of the drawbacks of both. I am excited to give writers the opportunity to see their hard work become available to their audience without having to impose the barrier of a great deal of financial expense (which, let’s face it, writers mostly don’t have a lot of money).

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Question 3: Who has read your work? Who would you like to read it?

I wrote a Y/A speculative fiction novel entitled Playing God and an anthology of fantasy poems and stories called The Tale of Alathimble Spaide and Other Such Nonsense, both with Stone Table Books, which have gained a little traction in local geek culture. Most of my published works are collected in nearly every edition of the Tabor Adelaide anthologies entitled Tales from the Upper Room or the two anthologies published by my writer’s group Literati, If They Could Talk and Something in the Blood. Those have mostly gone out to people connected in some way to family and friends of Tabor, Adelaide. I have published Morton’s Anglish Fictionary (with my own label, Immortalise) which has a small local following in and around Adelaide. I really intend for my books to be read by people who love the sorts of things I love, fantasy, sci fi, language play, adventure and a good laugh.

Question 4: Tell us something about your process. What challenges do you face? What helps you the most?

I haven’t got a solidly laid out process. I mostly start with an idea I want to explore and create characters, conflict and an environment to fit it. I only ever plan fairly loosely, but I usually have a pretty good idea where I think a story needs to end, even if I am not sure about all the steps to get there. I like watching my characters figure out how to achieve their goals. I find that I enjoy creating characters a little too much and often want to add too many of them and give them too much attention. I also like them too much to let them struggle at times. I discovered in the process of my novel that the advice I had been given about skipping a bit and telling a chapter a bit further on in the story was really good advice that I should have paid attention to earlier. Skipping ahead to a part of the story that is beyond where you’re stuck and then backfilling later is a good way to get past a blockage.

Question 5: What is your favourite Writing Craft Book and why?

I haven’t read a lot of writing craft books, and it’s hard to pick just one of the ones I have, so I’m going to cheat a bit and choose two I haven’t read. A favourite youtuber of mine has recently published a book based on the writing tips from his channel “Hello Future Me.” On Writing and Worldbuilding by Timothy Hickson is high on my agenda to read next. His tips are always well thought through and have solid and well analysed examples from quality media. I love watching his videos and always benefit from re-watching them. I also recently did typesetting for Rosanne Hawke’s Riding the Wind, which I haven't read properly yet, but I have a very good idea of the content from working on it. Rosanne has so much practical experience and such a lovely and humble way of sharing the things she has learned. She was a great teacher in person, and I value her advice a great deal.

Question 6: If you were to give a shout-out to a CWD author, writer, editor or illustrator – who would they be?

There are so many folks in CWD who are friends and have been at some time a student or a mentor to be, and it’s hard to pick one person, but I know that Wendy Noble has a third book in her wonderful Beast Speaker trilogy coming out soon. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the first two, and I hear Dragon Home is going to be a good ending for the set.

Question 7: What are your writing goals for 2018? How will you achieve them?

I am currently working on a series of spec-fic dungeonpunk-esque novellas in which a group of solo characters each go on a similar mission in the same place at the same time but with little or no actual contact with each other. I want to create the stories so each solo mission stands alone, but their plot events interact so that they each enhance the others. I am in the process of applying to Flinders to undertake a cross-discipline PhD in creative writing and theology, partly because I am fascinated by the ideas I’m exploring, but also so that I can incorporate the creation of these books into my study and unapologetically spend whole days working on them.

Question 8: How does your faith impact and shape your writing?

There are two answers to that. The first is essentially monkey-see, monkey-do. God has created me to be creative. He is a world-builder, and so am I. I am fascinated by the complexity and simplicity and interconnectedness of everything God has created, and I try in my much oversimplified way to explore what he does by doing it too. The other is that I have been created to be a communicator. I discovered fairly early in my spiritual journey that Jesus has placed in me a deep passion for that moment of realisation and understanding. I love to see it in myself, but I love even more to be the one who helps someone else to reach it. I can tell someone some truth I have learned, and it becomes knowledge they retain or forget, but if I can, through my creative work, help someone to discover a deep truth for themselves then they own it. It grows in them and forms part of who they are. That makes my heart sing.