Author interview: Stephen J Sweeney
02 June 2009
 |
| Stephen J Sweeney. |
FORMER Lehman Brothers IT programmer Stephen Sweeney was simply too determined to sit back and wait for a publisher to pick up his sci-fi "space opera".
So he went ahead and published his first novel, The Honour of the Knights, for himself.
"Ten or 20 years ago self-publishing was hideously expensive because you would have to get the books, do a massive print run of around 2,000 copies, and then put them in your garage or under your bed and try to sell them," he said.
"These days there are so many online services that offer printing that you can do it for next to nothing. The ISBN I bought cost me under £100. Once you have that, the book is available anywhere in the world. I saw my book on Amazon in Japan, which I found quite amusing."
Stephen did just about everything on the book, including the cover artwork on Photoshop, but he left one element to a professional.
"I hired an editor to have a look at it. A lot of work had to go into it.
"The mistake some people make with self-publishing is they will blankly refuse to get an editor, which if it's costs, I can understand - they can cost anywhere from a few hundred pounds to a few thousand. But my editor told me a lot of things that really helped."
Stephen says The Honour of the Knights, which is the first in his Battle for the Solar System trilogy, is not just for hardcore sci-fi geeks. He tried to make the book "human", focussing on human nature, greed and the lust for power rather than robots and aliens.
"It's a story about how a group of star fighter pilots, due to their involvement in a top-secret military project, begin to find out that there is a galactic conspiracy going on.
"There's a load of spin around that and governments up and down the galaxy are desperate to keep the entire story secret. But these guys begin to find out everything's not quite right and there is something very sinister about the whole thing."
The book's main protagonist, Simon Dodds, hails from a place distinctly in this universe, in fact, a small farm in County Cork, Ireland.
"I've taken the modern world as it is today and just shifted it 600 years, so there is space travel and things like that.
"But there are instances in the book where they are still using paper, for example. I just felt a lot more comfortable with that. I maintained the human element by keeping those types of things in there."
Stephen's inspiration for the trilogy came from TV shows such as Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 which "was a lot different to the sci-fi shows that came before it; a lot darker".
However, the driving force behind the author seems to be his father, Terry, who died of cancer a couple of years ago.
"Dad said to me, 'Don't do this if you're not going to get yourself a proper job as well. I don't want you to go to work in a cafe and hope that one day Spielberg will come banging on your door - get a proper job first.'
"I decided to write this book in 2006 and wrote this atrocious first draft. My dad turned around and said 'I really, really like this', and basically just kept on encouraging me.
"At his funeral everyone was saying he was actually proud of me for doing this. So I just thought, I'm going to finish this. I'm disappointed he wasn't able to see it in the state it is now."
This helped Stephen keep motivated during difficult times, which included losing his job as an IT programmer at Lehman Brothers last year.
"When I was working at Lehman Brothers I would print out some part of the chapter and take it into the canteen during my breaks and make corrections. After I was given my marching orders, while I was looking for a new job, I would get up every day and just carry on doing work on it."
He is still working, currently on the second book in the series, while also holding down a new IT job in the City.
"It doesn't have a title yet but I am currently in the process of revising it.
"I like to take my time about these things. I am getting the feeling this one is going to be a little longer."
Steve Madgwick