Christina Sweeney-Baird, author of 'The End of Men' - Debut writer talks about speculative fiction, editing pandemics, and writing sprints.
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2021
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Christina Sweeney-Baird works as a lawyer. It's a busy full-on job, working all hours under the sun, and she had barely any time to write. Until a life-changing moment changed everything, and forced to her sit up, to sit down and write.
'The End of Men' is her debut novel. It tells the story of a pandemic that wipes out 90% of the male population. We talk about the idea, how she developed it, planned it, and at one point had to cut 30 characters from it. We also chat what it was like writing and editing a story about a pandemic, during a pandemic, and how she figures out the confusing aspects of genre and gets to the heart of the story.
You can get a copy of the book here - https://amzn.to/2Y047UF
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome along. It's a brand new episode of writers' routine this week, chatting to Christina Sweeney Baird. |
| 0:14.7 | She is a lawyer who writes around her work, just published her debut novel, The End of Men, which is a bit worryingly, listen to |
| 0:22.0 | this, it's set in the near future during a global pandemic where almost every man dies. Now, |
| 0:28.1 | we talk about writing and editing a book about a pandemic during a pandemic, how she coped with |
| 0:34.5 | that being all around her, being on the page and in real life every day. |
| 0:39.9 | Also, you can hear how much she thinks about genre, how she clears up the frequent genre confusion. |
| 0:45.2 | And she explains how something incredibly serious made her sit up and get writing. |
| 0:50.4 | I had a near-death experience, which changed things quite a lot, to be honest, when I was |
| 0:55.0 | 25, when I was nearly done with that first novel, and I'd already had the idea for end of men. |
| 1:00.9 | I had sepsis, I nearly died, and it was really intense, very scary, and that really did shift |
| 1:06.3 | things. And I suddenly became, I think, a lot more impatient with myself and kind of, I didn't think about it this consciously at the time. |
| 1:13.4 | But there is inevitably a thing of, oh my God, actually I don't necessarily have limitless time. |
| 1:17.6 | If I want to write this book, I need to do it. |
| 1:19.6 | And so from that point, I started to get a lot more intense. |
| 1:22.4 | There is more with Christina Sweeney Baird in this week's Writers' Routine. |
| 1:32.1 | Yes. |
| 1:34.1 | Hello, welcome along. |
| 1:34.7 | Welcome back. |
| 1:36.1 | I'm happy that you've found us. |
| 1:37.3 | My name's Dan Simpson. |
| 1:41.7 | This is Writers Routine, where we take a look inside an author's working day. |
| 1:44.3 | This week with Christina Sweeney Baird. |
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