Chinese Whisperings welcomes the third of our new writers, Tony Noland, to the stage. Three appears to be a semi-lucky number, as Tony is also the third writer in The Yang Book…

Tony likes to write about people and their emotions – hopes, fears, regrets, confusions, joys – the whole range of what makes life vibrant. From a genre standpoint, this tends to put him in the box marked “literary”, although his zombies, sex robots, mutant cows and reluctant wizard apprentices might disagree!

Call Tony “cross-genre”… that sounds so much better than “confused”, doesn’t it?

He has two novels in revision;  he’s not quite sure yet what his book will look like, but he’ll  know it when he sees it.

Asked if he’d ever written collaboratively, Tony answered:

I’ve done a number of collaborative writing projects.

Recently, I did a serialized nanofiction story with a fellow Twitter (@Shadow_Wrought). It was a science fiction piece called “#OIA: Orbital Insertion and Assault”, where we traded tweets back and forth about a bunch of space marines who run into some trouble. Very Heinleinesque!

I also contributed to the “12 Days” anthology in 2009, edited by Jim Wisneski. In that collaboration, each of the twelve days of Christmas was assigned to two writers, who independently developed a story based on that theme – a partridge in a pear tree, two turtledoves, etc. It was fascinating to see how that collection developed as each day’s stories went up on the 12 Days website. The writers were working within a common theme, but the stories themselves varied widely in genre, style, voice, length, etc.

So what really fascinates Tony about Chinese Whisperings:

…how much more interconnected it will be (compared to 12 Days); each collaborator will draw from and build on the work of the previous writers. We’ll all be writing stories set in the same general environment, in the same genre of fiction, and the stories will be of comparable lengths. As a reader, I’m excited to see how each of us will approach this, and to see what kinds of stories get told! As a writer, I’m rather looking forward to the shop talk – solid technical discussions of how the stories function, the mechanics of why characters are the way they are, the nuts and bolts of fitting the stories together into a coherent landscape.

I’m also looking forward to the friendship and community among all the writers. This has already been partially fulfilled, since being part of the Chinese Whisperings 2010 anthology is what prompted me to get a Facebook page.

Read Tony’s full bio and enjoy more of his writing at Landless: a writing, sailing, westward.

Tomorrow the next of our new female writers steps up, as we introduce Claudia Osmond.