How do you process and deal with negative book reviews?
Well, you can learn from constructive criticism. Writing is always a way of encountering yourself, you are constantly learning. You change yourself, and your own writing changes (and improves, hopefully). I never respond to reviews.
What is the most challenging part of your writing process?
Well, as the writing progressed, the story became more and more complex, and it was quite a challenge to keep track of all the different strands of the story and the many characters and weave them together in a meaningful and exciting way. I hope that the readers will agree it worked out in the end.
How long have you been writing, or when did you start?
As a high school student, I realized that writing was something I liked and enjoyed. So I wrote for the school newspaper, then for the local paper, and later as a student for a large national daily newspaper. Then I wrote short stories that were published in anthologies. Over time I developed the idea for "THE SUPERFLARE", my first long novel. It was published in 2022.
How do you develop your plot and characters?
Well, I started with a basic idea of the characters and plot, but soon plot and characters changed and developed a life of their own. Then I followed them to find out where it would take me. After the story was finished I started to edit the result to make sure that the ends meet and everything is in the right place.
What inspired the idea for your book?
One day I was sitting ona subway train and looked around me – everybody around me was staring at some kind of digital screen. We are becoming more and more dependent on countless digital helpers - smart phones, navigation devices, laptops, iPads, tablets, smart TVs, smart watches, Alexa, Siri, Cortana, smart homes, Google, the Internet, and the likes. And I thought by myself - what if some catastrophe caused the digital revolution to collapse? What if all our digital devices stopped working overnight? How would people react if they were suddenly deprived of all their technical and digital helpers?
When I began writing THE SUPERFLARE several years ago, these thoughts were on my mind.
But what could cause such a catastrophe?
After a lot of research an idea started to take shape: A worldwide EMP, triggered by a gigantic solar storm, could do the trick. Based on this concept, I started to design possible scenarios that branched out and condensed more and more during the writing process. The story that would eventually be told in THE SUPERFLARE slowly began to take shape.