Jason Monaghan

I'm Jason Monaghan. I'm living in the north of England in Yorkshire and I'm a writer.

About half the time is actual writing, the other half is doing the research for the writing in the first place, to get all the facts right, and then I also spend a lot of time then editing, because once you've written a book, you need to look at it again and again, to things like check the spelling. So it's roughly half writing and half doing the other things.

As a writer, there isn't a difficult day. Every day is different. Let's say I get up, I read my emails in bed, and then I sit down at nine o'clock in the morning and I will write on my current book until about one o'clock.

So I'll write for three, four hours on the book I'm working on my computer in my study. And then in the afternoon after lunch, I might sit and do some reading, the background reading for what I'm working on. But I do travel a lot as well.

So some days I'm traveling, I'll travel abroad, I'll go exploring, but I'll take my laptop with me and then in the evenings or on the train or in the airport or in hotels, I'll be working on the book usually. So days can vary quite a lot.

I work on my own as a writer. The thing about writers is we work on our own. Every now and again, we get to interact. We're in writers' groups, so we get together, we meet, because we all work on our own. And so we all talk about what it's like to be a writer working on your own.

But I also work with editors. So when a book is finished or nearly finished, it goes to an editor, and the editor will read through it. I've got a lovely editor I work with at the moment.

She will read through the book and send it back saying, Jason, I'm not sure about this scene or that scene, or you need to explain this a little more, or you've said that once already and you're repeating yourself and things of that nature. And then I'll write on it again and it will go back.

And then the editor will say, you know, you can't spell this word or that word properly, please, please check it. So that's the editor is the main person I'll be working with.

And then there's also the publisher. So at the moment I'm working with a publisher. A book is going off in two days time. I met with her last week and again, she will explain exactly what she wants.

And I was asking to her things like, How long do you want the book to be? Is it all right if I have 99 pictures in it and things like that. So they're the people I'm mainly working with.

The best thing about my job is being able to just get away from myself.

And the book I'm working on at the moment is set in Egypt in 1926. And so during the mornings, I can imagine myself, I'm in Egypt in 1926 and I'm not in Yorkshire where it's cold and raining. I'm under the baking hot sunshine and I'm walking out into the desert and I'm solving a mystery. It's being able to escape is the best part of it.

And added onto that is when you do the research for a book as well, that can be quite exciting because you're discovering new things all the time. And sometimes it's just interesting and sometimes it's, wow, I'm having that, I'm putting that in the book.

Getting the book published. There are tens of thousands of books being written every year in English and getting a publisher to agree to publish my book, not somebody else's book, is the toughest part.

Sometimes, like the one I was talking about this week, I just sent it to publisher and they're, yeah, great, we'll have it straight away. Other books I've had have sat on my shelf literally for years before anyone's shown any interest in them.

So there's a bit of luck and there's a lot of perseverance in getting a book published. That is difficult.

Gosh, I wrote, I always wrote books. Well, no, start again. I always wrote as a child, I'd write stories.

And then as a teenager, I'd write longer stories, usually fantasy and science fiction, because that's what I was reading. And then once I was in my early twenties, I thought, well, I ought to write the sort of thing that's gonna get published. So I started writing mystery adventures, because they were the big thing at the time.

And I sent it off to somebody and they went, mmm, yeah, this is a bit, it's all right, you write well, but you're an archaeologist, you? I said, yes, I've been to university and been an archaeologist. Write me a mystery story about archaeology. And so I did. And so that's what my first novels were, mystery stories set in the world of archaeology. So that's how I got into it.

It was essential, particularly with that thing about I went to university, I studied archaeology, and then I did a doctorate in archaeology as well. And that gave me an awful lot of experience of traveling the world, lots of interesting facts.

I met a lot of interesting people. And when you sit down with people quietly, they tell you stories about their life and things they've seen. And these all give ideas for a novelist. So when I came out of university, I had a lot of stuff in my head. In fact, my first four novels are full of little bits of stories of things that I've done or my friends have done woven together into an actual story.

I hope to think that people are entertained by it and excited by it. I gave a lecture on Saturday and I've given three in the last six weeks to people, audiences of people on Zoom and live and they enjoy it and they get excited by it. And my readers sometimes write back to me.

And then of course, also I'm involved in radio and television sometimes. So again, that's part of the content going on. Telling people how exciting being a writer is or sometimes how exciting being an archaeologist is. So I'm hoping it makes an impact on the world, making it a more interesting and exciting place than it might otherwise be.

I think getting my first book through the post, arriving on my desk and opening up that box with my name on the cover and going, wow, and showing people and the family coming around that everyone touching it and then being able to give away a couple of copies to my friends. You can't really repeat that.

It fits seamlessly. Earlier on, I had a day job and I basically had to write around it. So I had a day job. I'd come home, write in the evening or I'd write at weekends. I don't do that anymore. So it fits seamlessly into my life. A lot of my friends are writers. They've all got the same sort of routine.

My house, as you can see, is full of books. It's organised for the writer's life. And it suits me to be working these sort of hours. I can go out for a walk if I want. I can lie on the settee and do nothing if I want, if I've run out of ideas, can go down the woods if I need to. How on earth are we going to get these people out of this tomb when they're stuck? I can go down the woods and have a walk around and think about it.

So the whole, flexibility of being a writer is lovely for fitting in with the job.

Depends how much younger... There was one point where I was tempted to like give up my job to write full time. And I think that was a mistake at that point, because I was actually quite young when I got my first book deal. And what I should have done at that point is carry on my day job until I'd sold enough books to actually support myself by writing. And that was difficult, I think.

Carry on with the day job until the point you can actually pay for your life through writing rather than do it the other way around.