Michelle

Raven Hart is another author who has come to our attention on the forum, when her book, ‘The Vampire’s Seduction’ was mentioned in a vampire thread. Those of us who have read it really enjoyed it, and are eagerly awaiting the next book in the series, due out next March. Q. Paranormal novels appear to be popular at the moment, especially those involving vampires. Why do you think vampires have had a rise in popularity, and what made you choose them? A. I can only tell you why I love them, and I’m guessing I’m a pretty typical paranormal reader. I love vampires because they’re seductive and powerful, but tragic because they’re cut off from the grace of God, often through no fault of their own. They’re no longer part of humankind and are often conflicted because of their evil natures. They’re the ultimate outsiders. And who hasn’t felt like a misfit from time to time? That’s why I chose to write about them. I’ve always found them fascinating! Q. How would you pitch your particular vampire books to someone who hasn’t heard about them? A. I tell people that “The Vampire’s Seduction” is about two very different vampires-one southern aristocrat and one NASCAR-loving good old boy. They don’t get along particularly well, but they need each other to survive and to protect the humans of Savannah from the evil, un-human element that lurks in the shadows. The book has lots of horror, humour, and sex. Q. When you started writing The Vampires Seduction, did you always intend it to be the start of a series of books? A. Oh, yes, from the very beginning. Q. The Vampires Secret is due out next March, and the third book is already underway. Can you give us any clues as to what will happen to William and Jack in these next two books? A. Book two ends with quite a nail-biting finish (if I do say so myself), leaving someone near and dear to William and Jack in serious jeopardy. Book three has William travelling to London (with a brief but bloody detour), while Jack takes care of business at home, which is no small task. Major new characters are introduced in both books. Q. After you’re done with these two, do you intend to carry on within the same genre, or write something different? A. I hope to continue the Savannah vampire books as long as the readers want to read them. I also have a werewolf series fermenting somewhere in my brain and a more mainstream psychological, dark comic novel that is a few chapters along. Q. How long have you been writing.. what was the first story you recall writing, and do you still have it? A. I have been writing since I was a kid. I think I finished a mystery story in the ninth grade but I don’t know whatever happened to it. Q. You originally wrote with author Virginia Ellis.. is it easier to share ideas with another writer, or to write by yourself? A. It’s harder in some ways and easier in others. It was easier because you’re only doing half the writing and you can pick up on your partner’s ideas and build on them. It’s also harder because you have to coordinate what you’re doing so closely with another person. You can’t go off on any tangent that your imagination takes you on because of the effect it might have on the direction your partner is taking with her bits of the story. Fortunately, Gin and I communicated very well and liked each other’s ideas. We almost never disagreed. Tragically, as many of the readers may know, Gin passed away earlier this year from a cardiovascular problem. I miss her every day, but I know she would approve of me continuing the series. Gin and I alternated scenes. I wrote from the point of view of Jack and she from William. We completed book two before she died and from book three onward, I will be writing both parts. I know William’s voice as well as I know Jack’s thanks to Gin having made him so vivid, so I really haven’t had a problem writing both for book three. Q. How long on average does it take you to write a book? A. About six months, but I just recently quit my “day” job so I hope to get faster! Q. Do you enjoy reading for relaxation? If so, what are you reading at the moment, and what are some of your favourite books or authors? A. I love reading, and I wish I had more time for it. Believe it or not, I’m reading “The Vampire’s Seduction”! I know that seems strange but I need to remind myself of all the details that we set up in the first book so I won’t contradict myself in the third. For example, I don’t want someone’s eyes to change colour. Or worse! I have a famously poor memory. For example, I will get what I think is a brilliant idea for the ending of a book and when I go to plug it in my outline, it will already be there! As far as vampires are concerned, my favourites are L.A. Banks’ “The Vampire Huntress” series and Barb and J.C. Hendee’s “Noble Dead” series. My favourite overall horror writer is Phil Rickman. Some of my mystery/suspense favourites are Carol O’Connell, Dennis Lehane, Carl Hiaasen (a MUST-read if you like comedy), and James Lee Burke. Q. Finally, moving away from writing, where are your favourite holiday spots, and which country would you most like to visit? A. Where I live here in Georgia I’m only a six-hour drive from the Gulf of Mexico and a couple of hours from the mountains, and I like both. Gulf of Mexico beaches are beautiful but sadly have been decimated by hurricanes through the years. When I was young, I remember the sand was very white and almost fluffy in texture, unlike Atlantic beaches which are gray and hard-packed. As for the mountains, you can drive from my home to places like Cherokee, North Carolina, where you can see beautiful scenery and real native Americans. My most favourite trip ever was to London and I’d love to go back. I’m not just saying that because this is a UK-based board! Honest! I got to spend a week there many years ago when my cousin was in a foreign-study program at university (or “in college” as we would say over here). I think the Tower of London was my favourite part. Gotta love those ravens! Interview by Michelle Feb 2008

Carole is an international bestselling author, with a warm sense of humour that shines out of her books. Her most recent publication is Welcome to the Real World, and The Chocolate Lovers Club has just gone on sale in the UK. Q. I can’t think of a better place to start than chocolate! Tell us a little more about your latest book, The Chocolate Lover’s Club, which is due out in February in the UK, and August in the US. A. This is the story of Lucy Lombard and her three fellow chocolate addicts – Autumn, Nadia and Chantal. Together they form a select group known as The Chocolate Lovers’ Club. Whenever there’s a crisis, they meet in their sanctuary, a cafe called Chocolate Heaven, and with a cheating boyfriend who promises he’ll change, a flirtatious boss, a gambling husband and a loveless marriage, there’s always plenty for them to discuss! Q. Is chocolate one of your personal addictions? A. Do you know, when I started this book, I had just a passing interest in chocolate. I like to eat it – certainly! – but I wasn’t that concerned about where it came from or how it got to me. Now I’m a complete chocolate anorak! I’ve developed a taste for fine, dark chocolate – the richer the better. I have a little bit of Lindt 70% cocoa every day after my lunch. Yum. Q. Your current book, Welcome to the Real World, is set around the world of opera and tv talent shows. Do you watch any of the tv talent shows that are on, or do you avoid them? A. I adore them. I’m completely addicted to The X-Factor, which I think the US has as American Idol. I love the fact that you only have to watch five minutes and you’re completely hooked. I thought it would be a fun thing to base a book on – lots of opportunity for tears and laughter. I contrasted that with the world of opera where it can take eight years to train your voice to get a job in the chorus! People want instant fame now and, sometimes, it just can’t happen like that. Q. What can we expect next from you? A. I haven’t done a series before, but I’m writing a sequel to The Chocolate Lovers’ Club – called The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet. I had such fun with this subject and the characters of my book that I couldn’t let it end there! Maybe there’ll even be a third instalment. Q. Where do you get inspiration for all your storylines.. do they often come from your own experiences? A. Far too many of my storylines are from my own experience! I wish they weren’t! I’ve had a varied and full love life – which has given me plenty of material. Q. How about your characters, are they based on people you know, or do they live purely in your imagination? A. You know, you have to know your characters so much more than you know real human beings. Sometimes I borrow little characteristics, but I’ve never used a whole person. I do a detailed background history for all of my characters – I never use it in the books, but it helps me to get into them. Q. Some of your books have different titles when published in the US. Is this something you decide on, or the publishers, and can you tell us some of the reasons for the changes? A. The publishers do that and I hate it! I know my readers don’t like it either – it’s very confusing. Particularly when sometimes Amazon sells two different titles as a special offer that are the same book! Drives me mad. Sometimes though, the publishers feel that the titles won’t work in the USA. They thought A Whiff of Scandal was too nasty and changed it to The Scent of Scandal. A Compromising Position they hated and changed to Bare Necessity. I think I’ve managed to hang onto the rest of my titles. Q. You’re a very successful author, with many published books.. do you have a favourite? A. I do have favourites! Should an author do that? It’s like saying that you like one of your children better than the others! My favourite books are A Minor Indiscretion – this was the book that I felt I really found my voice. With or Without You – every now and again in an author’s life a book just writes itself, this was one of them. Welcome To The Real World – this also wrote itself. I love Let’s Meet on Platform 8 because that was my first book. And, of course, The Chocolate Lovers’ Club – I think this is my best, so far. Q. Congratulations on selling the film rights to two of your books. How is that progressing, and who would you like to see in the leading roles? A. I’ve sold the rights to For Better, For Worse and A Minor Indiscretion. They aren’t progressing at all! They’ve entered that big, black hole called development hell and I have no idea if they’ll emerge unscathed at the end. Hugh Grant and Johnny Depp would be perfect as any of my heroes! I wouldn’t say no to Keiffer Sutherland either. My leading lady would have to be Julia Roberts, simply because of the amount of bums she puts on seats. Q. Do you get time to read yourself, and if so, who are your favourite authors? A. I adore reading – always have! My favourite authors are Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella, Sarah Mlynowski (great teen books). I love Harlan Coben’s thrillers and always dash out and buy the new Philippa Gregory historical in hardback. But I have very eclectic taste and, frankly, read anything. Q. When you’re not writing, what else do you enjoy doing.. what are your other passions in life? A. My partner, Lovely Kev, and I enjoy travelling and we’re lucky enough to have been all over the world in the last few years – China, Nepal, Cuba, Italy, The Galapagos Islands. All over the place. Hopefully, we’ll continue to do that. We both love walking and cycling. I do yoga and aerobics. I like to cook, though I’m not great at it. That’s about it! Interview by Michelle Feb 2008

Gregory Maguire is the author of a range of books for adults and children. His novel Wicked has been transformed into a hit West End musical. Q. For those who may not have heard of you, can you briefly tell us a little about your books. How would you describe them? A. Some people say my books are retellings, and I think that makes me sound like a translator. What I do admit to, with great pleasure, is reintroducing people to familiar stories, often from childhood, with new information, a new spin, to show them that the old familiar characters are still full of juice and sass, the old situations still valid and even shocking. Q. I would imagine that you’re now best known for Wicked. How did it feel, seeing it as a stage musical? A. One of my first vocational hopes was to work in the theatre. When I was in grade school I wrote and produced plays that were put on for audiences in the school. I had no adult supervision but lots of adult approval, and early hopes for me were that I would go into the theatre. (Probably the hopes were that I would go away into the theatre, or into prison, or into the seminary…) So for WICKED to hit the boards as a big important musical was a kind of childhood dream come true, even if my original vision of the story was fiction (and at its heart my conception of the truest WICKED remains as a novel, not the lovely and fun play it has become). Q. How about your other books, are there others that you would like to see either on the stage, or on the big screen? A. There was some interest recently in putting CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER into an opera. I would enjoy that hugely! Indeed, once I thought it might be a musical and I began to write lyrics for it out of a benighted sense of privilege. CONFESSIONS was filmed by ABC TV for a movie, starring Stockard Channing and Jonathan Pryce, and I enjoyed that experience hugely, too. Q. What first triggered you to start writing, and what age were you? Were those early writings published? A. I came from a lower middle class family that was governed by strict and uncompromising parents. My dad wrote for the newspapers, and my stepmother, who raised me, was a poet. By example they showed an enthusiasm for and interest in the worth of good writing, and of reading as an entertainment, and so I wrote from childhood. My first novel for children was published in the US in 1978 and in the UK (by Chatto and Windus) in 1979. Q. Where else do you think your life may have taken you if you hadn’t become a successful author? A. Since part of my family is Greek, I had high hopes of running what in the States we would call a greasy Greek diner. I also had aspirations toward being an architect until I learned how much math one needed to master. I was very aware from earliest days that I wanted to be self-employed and in one or another branch of the arts, either as a painter or a musician, an actor or a novelist. The only branch of arts that seemed beyond me was dance, as I have the legs of a turtle. Q. You’ve also written a number of children’s books.. could you tell us a little about them? A. I began my career publishing books for children, and from 1978 until WICKED was published in 1995 I had published a dozen novels and picture books. None of them had made much of a splash. In recent years I have done a series of comic novels with titles like SEVEN SPIDERS SPINNING, SIX HAUNTED HAIRDOS, FIVE ALIEN ELVES, FOUR STUPID CUPIDS, etc. But I am proudest of a children’s book called WHAT-THE-DICKENS: THE STORY OF A ROGUE TOOTH FAIRY. It marries my affection and high regard for children with the themes and elements I have brought to my adult novels. It will be published in the United Kingdom sometime soon, I’m told. Q. Which do you enjoy writing more, books for adults, or for children? A. Writing for children is harder. Children are so bestial and impatient. With an adult audience I can linger lovingly over a description or a rumination, and know that if one reader doesn’t care for it, he or she will hang on until the next exciting bit, usually. A child reader has no such resources and no politeness to speak of, and will happily chuck the offending volume at my noggin and go outdoors and play instead. That makes me very skittish about writing for kids, and in some ways I think makes me try harder. Q. Out of all your books, do you have any favourites, or have you enjoyed them all? A. In that the commercial success of WICKED has given me the funds with which I could feel comfortable enough to adopt my own three children, WICKED has to be my favourite. But my newest books are the ones closest to bloom, so the sweetest in my senses. WHAT-THE-DICKENS, mentioned above, and this autumn’s A LION AMONG MEN. That said, readers have very much enjoyed CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER and I think next to WICKED it is the book most often cited by readers in autograph lines as their favourite. It is my second-to-WICKED bestseller, too. Q. Do you enjoy reading yourself? Who are some of your favourite books or authors? A. I’d be avoiding the obvious if I didn’t say I had been mesmerized by Philip Pullman’s HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy. Interestingly I have most often enjoyed reading English novelists—not always contemporary. Among my favourite books of all time are MISTRESS MASHAM’S REPOSE and THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING by T. H. White; QUEEN OF THE TAMBOURINE by Jane Gardam; UNLEAVING by Jill Paton Walsh; THE TOWERS OF TREBIZOND by Rose Macaulay; and THE REALMS OF GOLD by Margaret Drabble. I admire Amis and McKeon and that lot, but here are some recent favourites among American writers: Stona Fitch’s SENSELESS, Ron Hansen’s MARIETTE IN ECSTACY and HITLER’S NIECE, and Jess Walter’s CITIZEN VINCE. I also found Christopher Moore’s farcical LAMB oddly moving as well as a comic maelstrom of a novel. Q. What are you promoting at the moment, and can you tell us anything about what is coming next? A. I mention above A LION AMONG MEN, which is the third volume in the proposed quartet to be known as THE WICKED YEARS. The first three books are WICKED, SON OF A WITCH, and A LION AMONG MEN. I have just begun to sketch out ideas for the fourth and final volume. Interview by Michelle April 2008

He's on twitter - he's a very nice guy (likes horror books and films, and Dr Who! lol) and I think he'd make a brilliant Queen of Teen!

This is always a good place to start.. http://www.bookclubforum.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/6838-frequently-asked-questions/

Thank you - I'm really nervous, but it should be great. And I'll be reporting back of course, on all the YA gossip!

I have some exciting news - I'm going to an event/signing in London in May, with Tanya Byrne, James Dawson and Kimberly Derting - and then I'm going to have tea with Kimberly afterwards! Having already read a a book by Tanya and Kimberly, I decided to look up James Dawson, and I've started reading Hollow Pike, which is brill so far.

Rebecca was born in Toronto, Canada in July 1982 but was raised – and still lives – in West Yorkshire, England. She has two published novels, and is taking a year out to travel before she writes her third. Q. You have two published books at the moment, can you briefly tell us a little about them both. A. Lucy’s Monster is a dark tale of an A-list celebrity couple’s fall from grace, with un-medicated schizophrenia and drug abuse playing major parts in the storyline. I experiment with my writing style with each novel and in Lucy’s Monster the reader and writer feature as characters themselves. Eleven Terrible Months, my latest release, is a realistic ghost story. In 1998 a family of five moved into a haunted flat and lasted 11 months: two years later three of the five members write up their personal accounts of what happened to them during that time. It’s as warm and funny as it is scary. Q. How long have you been writing, and how did it feel when you first saw your book published? A. I have been writing novels continuously since I was seven years old. I still have each one, even when I used to think ‘said’ was spelt ‘sed’! I have always wanted to be a published author and seeing my work all bar-coded and professionally made for the first time was an emotional turning point for me… I stopped feeling like a good-for-nothing and thought ‘maybe dreams do come true if you want it enough’… it still hasn’t worked for the EuroMillions though. Q. Where did you get the ideas/inspirations from? A. I write about whatever I most want to read/find out about at the time and the story tends to grow from two main subjects. I enjoy experimenting with writing styles and creating something different. Q. Aside form your own experiences, what extra research did you have to do? Is that something you enjoy? A. The research into mental health for Lucy’s Monster was difficult at times but I still enjoyed it because I wanted to learn. The research for Eleven Terrible Months was easier because a lot of it was based on my own experiences. It depends on how willing the experts are to help and I faced a lot of red-tape when it came to researching young offenders institutions (which features within the account of one of the characters) but I got some great advice in the end! Q. Are your characters based on people you know, or are they a combination of various traits? A. Some are, some are totally fictionalised. Because Eleven Terrible Months is set in my locality (Yorkshire) and about a down-to-earth family, I was able to take a lot from people that I know. I also wanted to base this one around those I love because it’s a book that’s very personal to me and it felt right to include them or their experiences in it. I interviewed some friends about major storylines that were based around them and in other bits I fictionalised loved-ones’ experiences without telling them, so they’d read it then think ‘ey up! That’s about me, that is’… in a good way! Q. How about the ‘celebrities’ in Lucy’s Monster.. are they based on anyone? A. They are!!! But when people tell me who they picture playing the parts of the three major characters in a film, it’s never the same as who I originally modelled them on! Who are they…? I’ll tell you if you tell me who you think! Q. What prompted setting up your own publishing company.. do you enjoy it? A. When I finished Lucy’s Monster, I was planning on sending out details to publishers until a man I worked with said: ‘why don’t you just do it yourself? It’s only marketing.’ I have worked in marketing for eight years and did quite well for the companies I was working for so I thought ‘well if I can sell refrigeration then surely I can sell something I feel so passionately about,’ and bought a stack of books to see if it really was that simple… it was! So I did six-months worth of research then set up Dog Horn Publishing and never ended up approaching an outside publisher. I love the creative freedom I get with being in charge of my own books but the long hours can be tiring. I’ve been doing this (along with a full time job) since March 2004 and am now looking forward to moving onwards-and-upwards and letting somebody else do the business side of things. Q. Your books are limited editions, with E11even Terrible Months being a gorgeous hardback. Can you share what was behind this decision? A. Money, space and time constraints mainly, but releasing limited editions has worked in my favour with the collectors market because when I do become a famous author these ones I’ve done myself will be quite valuable. I say ‘when’ and not ‘if’ because it’s my calling and if you don’t believe in yourself then who else will? Q. With regards E11even Terrible Months, do you think readers can still enjoy the book if you don’t believe in ghosts? A. Absolutely. One of the characters is very sceptical and acts as the sceptics ‘voice of reason’, for those that don’t believe in the existence of ghosts and spirits. The book’s not just about ghosts – it’s also about family life, teenagers growing up and the general thoughts of three very normal people, who were thrown into this extraordinary situation. This could be YOUR family and it could happen to YOU in your next house, whether you believe or not! That’s what I think is so scary about it; it could happen to any of us. Q. So where are you going next, what else do you have planned? A. I am taking a year out to go travelling and then writing my third novel for release, which I have pretty much already written in my head. As for Dog Horn, I am handing the business over in February 2008 so I can concentrate fully on my writing from now on. I am very proud of my little publishing house and the way I broke into the industry but Dog Horn’s too small to take my work to the levels I want to achieve and it’s time to really get this thing on the road! I now have an agent in New York who deals with everything outside of the UK Commonwealth so fingers crossed for overseas success too. Watch this space and remember my name, because I’ll never stop writing and one day I know I’ll get there. Like the British winter weather, ‘I can feel it in mi bones’! Interview by Michelle Feb 2008 Review of Lucy's Monster here. Reviews of E11even Terrible Months here and here.

Sue is a popular children’s author, with many books to her name.. the full list can be seen here. She also writes some of the Rainbow Magic books, under the name of daisy Meadows. Q. You’ve been involved in writing an amazing number of children’s books, so how did it all start? A. I have always loved writing, ever since I was a child. I always made little books and magazines and tried to sell them to my younger sisters, so I guess I was an early starter in that respect! My first proper job after leaving college was in publishing – I worked at Random House as an editorial assistant for the children’s books department. I gradually took a greater role in editing the books, which in turn helped very much when I came to write one myself. More to the point, I learned invaluable lessons about the editor-writer relationship, the way the publishing process works and who all the best agents were. I wrote a teenage novel (Rough Diamonds – now out of print), signed up to an agent and off I went! Q. Your latest series is about Oliver, a wizard.. can you tell us a little more about it? A. The Oliver Moon series is about a young wizard, his parents and baby sister, and various witches, wizards and eccentric teachers at Magic School. Having magical characters gives you plenty of scope for action and adventure – so far, Oliver’s faced a spell-off with the boastful new boy in school, tackled a load of vampires at the haunted house museum, met a werewolf on holiday and taken part in the Broomstick Olympics, to name just a few of his experiences… Q. Do you enjoy writing a series of books about the same character(s), rather than a singular book? A. I’ve written a lot of series so far, with some new ones coming soon – but I’m just about to start my first stand-alone children’s novel in years, and am really looking forward to it. It’s great to develop a set of characters over a series of books, and throw them into all sorts of adventures – you get to know them very well after a while – but a one-off story has popped into my head recently which I’m really keen to write. It’s quite different to the more humorous stories I’ve written before – more creepy, tense and atmospheric, I’m hoping. Q. Which has been your favourite to write? A. I’ve got a new series coming out in August with Orchard Books about a naughty prince, Prince Jake, and his rumbustious royal family. I’ve had great fun with these stories and loved thinking up all Prince Jake’s wicked deeds. The publisher has found a great artist who’s really captured Jake’s cheekiness too…I can’t wait to see the books in print now! Q. What is the next series that you have planned? A. I’m currently working on a new series for Usborne which will be out next spring. It’s a six-book series about a girl who makes friends with a group of mermaids and has to help them in a series of adventures. I’m about halfway through this series, so that’ll keep me busy for a while… Q. The Sleepover Club series became a TV series.. what was it like seeing it on the screen? A. I must confess, I haven’t actually seen any of the TV series! My eldest daughter has discovered my Sleepover Club books though and is now working her way through the rest of the series, so I might see if I can find a video for her to watch. A story of mine called Explorer Trauma is going to be on Jackanory Junior on CBeebies in a few weeks’ time though… and I am VERY excited about that! Q. Do you find having young children yourself helps your writing? Do they help you make up stories and people? A. Yes, to both – definitely. I have three children aged 7, 5 and 3, and they give me all sorts of ideas – the things they say, their likes/dislikes, things that make them laugh/afraid… Sometimes they even help with the titles of stories if I’m stuck which is very handy. I always roadtest my stories on my children, too – partly because reading anything aloud is a great test of its quality: you can hear if the dialogue sounds realistic, you get a better feel for the pace etc…and if my ‘panel’ start wriggling and fidgeting, I know I need to prune down a boring paragraph and get on with the action… Q. Do your children enjoy seeing and reading books that their mum has written? Do they enjoy reading? A. All three of my children love books and I’m always very proud when they pick up one of mine out of choice (rather than have me force it up on them!) They also take great pleasure in handing out loads of my books whenever their friends come round… which is very nice, although my shelves look rather depleted these days. My eldest loves writing her own stories now and often gives me tips – “Mum, I was thinking, you could start off a mystery story like this…” Q. How about yourself? As a busy mum and writer, do you get time to read for fun? What have you been reading lately? A. I make time to read for fun – it is such a key part of my life, I couldn’t cope without books. At the end of a busy day, a bit of escapism is exactly what I need. I’ve just read When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson, which I thought was brilliant. Beautifully elegant writing, very funny, great characters and plot. I am still thinking about the characters a week or so after finishing, which is always a sign of a good book for me. I’m currently re-reading Great Expectations – I want to brush up on it before I read Mr Pip, so that I get all the crucial references! Q. You’ve also written some books for adults.. how does that compare, and which do you prefer? A. Ooh, you can’t ask which I prefer – it’s like asking which of my children I love most! I write women’s fiction under the pseudonym Lucy Diamond, and started my first novel Any Way You Want Me soon after my second child was born. I have quite a close age-gap between my first two children – twenty months, and I found that first year of looking after a baby and toddler and juggling their different needs really exhausting, definitely the toughest year of my life. I joined an evening class and started writing about my feelings in the guise of a narrator – how I adored my children but felt that my own identity had evaporated, that there was nothing left of me except this knackered, hapless mum. I found it so liberating being able to write about adult feelings, rather than fairies, wizards, schoolgirls etc that the novel just fell out of me and all but wrote itself. It’s also a joy having the space to develop a set of characters and plot over 100,000 words rather than being restricted to a tighter length for children’s books. But then again, nothing – nothing! – compares to the satisfaction gained from reading a new story I’ve written to my own children and them saying, “Oh, I really liked that, Mum!” Interview by Michelle March 2008

You can read my review here - it starts slow, but is very much worth it.

John Connolly is an Irish author best known for his Charlie Parker Mystery/Crime Fiction series. After finding success in a whole other genre with his dark novel “The Book Of Lost Things“, John produced a second Fantasy novel in 2009, “The Gates“. Here John tells us a bit more about it... Q. When did you decide you wanted to write novels, and how did it come about? A. Without wishing to sound like one of those dreadful kids who came out of the womb dancing, I’d always written, ever since I was a boy. It just seemed a natural progression from reading stories to trying to tell stories of your own. I pretty much stopped doing any creative writing at all after I went to college to study English – which is odd – and then went into journalism, where I got pretty frustrated after a while, and returned to fiction. The first thing that I began writing was the prologue to Every Dead Thing, so that’s how it began, I suppose. Q. What authors did you read growing up, and who most inspired you? Can you name a particular book that left an impression on you? A. Enid Blyton was the first author whose work I ever read unaided. I remember reading a Secret Seven book and sounding out the difficult words phonetically, so that for years I thought ‘cupboard’ was pronounced ‘cup-board’ instead of ‘cubburd’. My mother must have thought that I’d metamorphosed into Little Lord Fauntleroy. After that, it was anything I could find: novelizations of movies (my generation’s equivalent of rewatching movies on DVD); ghost stories of every stripe; Alistair Maclean books; H.G. Wells; John Wyndham. I came to mystery fiction quite late. I was probably well into my teens when I read my first Ed McBain book, but then only really read Ed McBain books. It took me a while to branch out. In terms of my own writing, Ross Macdonald was a bit influence on me, particularly The Chill. Most mystery writers are either Ross Macdonald or John D Macdonald fans, but rarely both to the same degree. James Lee Burke was another writer who hugely influenced the way that I write in terms of demonstrating that mystery fiction doesn’t have to adhere to that pared down, sub-Hammettian prose that seems to be the default mode for a certain type of mystery writer. After that, we’re looking at Dickens (Bleak House), P.G. Wodehouse, and all sorts of odd people. Q. On to your own work – generally what do you find to be the easiest and most difficult aspects about writing a novel? A. The first chapter or two will always be easy, as you’re writing in the first rush of enthusiasm. The rest are hard. If I were to go around and look at all of the unfinished manuscripts that have been left in drawers by budding writers, I guarantee that most would be abandoned somewhere between twenty and forty thousand words, as that’s when most writers hit the wall and start doubting the value of what they’re working on. It’s a natural part of the creative process for most writers, I think, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with when it occurs. That first draft is always a long, difficult haul for me, as I write very slowly, and I don’t plan my books out. Rewriting I love. I don’t tend to go back over what I’ve done until I’ve finished the entire draft, and by that stage I know that there’s a book there, and all it needs now is to be honed. Q. Where did your ideas and inspirations for “The Gates” in general, and characters like Samuel and Nurd in particular, come from? A. I have no idea. Like a lot of writers, I think I’m afraid to go looking for the source of my inspiration. It feels like a candle flame that might very easily be extinguished. Characters pop up seemingly out of nowhere, and I’m just grateful when they appear. I do realize, though, that there is a lot of me in each and every one of them, even the bad ones. So that’s where they come from: me, with all of my flaws. Q. Why the Large Hadron Collider? In other words, “The Gates” takes a very factual, explanatory approach to telling a fantasy story. Why the use of quantum physics and (fantastically informative) footnotes to back a story about the opening of Hell? A. I’m just curious about the world, and I have a magpie attitude to bits of knowledge: I’m always on the lookout for shiny things that I can appropriate. I was curious about the Collider, and I’d had the idea for The Gates for a long time. The two just seemed to connect naturally, and the book came together easily as a result. There is a tension, too, between science and the supernatural that I thought I could explore in the book. The footnotes simply became another aspect of the narrative voice, which is very different from the one in the Parker books, or even The Book of Lost Things. It’s probably closest to my own voice. Q. You’re well known for your extensive music collection, and you included two ‘mix-tapes’; soundtracks of a sort with two Parker novels. If you had done the same with “The Gates”, how different would the music be? Do you have any loose soundtrack in your mind for it? A. Not so much for that book, but I really would like to do one more for the next Parker book. In fact, there was one ready to go with The Lovers in 2009, but it fell apart at the last minute. In a way, it’s very frustrating to do those CDs. They’re expensive, arduous to put together, and the bookstores haven’t been very supportive of them, but they’re real labors of love on my part. Q. Both “The Gates” and your previous fantasy novel, “The Book Of Lost Things” contain extra information; the regular footnotes in “The Gates” and an entire section about fairytales in “Lost Things”. Do you do extensive research to support what you want to write? Or is it the other way round – that fairytales and quantum physics interested you independantly – and these novels provided an outlet? A. Oh, it’s definitely the latter. I tend to have subjects in which I’m interested at the time, and then they become the source material for the books. For The Whisperers, the next Parker book, I used a lot of material about post-traumatic stress disorder, and the aftermath of conflict, as that was something about which I’d been reading over the previous year or so. I try not to shoehorn knowledge into the books for its own sake, but it’s an inexact science. Q. You’ve said of “Lost Things” that it wasn’t as massive a departure from your Parker novels as people might think at first, because you’re still dealing with similar themes, just in a new way (forgive the poor paraphrasing). So just how different, or similar, is it writing fantasy books like “The Gates” and “Lost Things” compared to your Parker novels, and what appeals to you most about each style? A. Well, The Gates is obviously much lighter, and I could let my imagination run riot in that book in a way that I can’t in the Parker books. Lost Things was a little more literary, I think, and is probably the book to which I’m closest, and of which I’m most fond. If there’s a common theme in my work, it’s a fascination with childhood. That runs through all of the books, even the Parkers. There are other minor themes running through them as well, but that’s the significant one. Q. Will we see more from either world, or any more non-Parker books in the same vein as “The Gates” (and “Lost Things”)? A. I think I’d like to write a sequel to The Gates, which will probably be the book for next year. I love writing the Parker books, but not every story that I want to tell is suited to them. In addition, by moving away from them for every second book, in some form or another, I return to the series refreshed, and that enables me to make each book different, I hope, which is the challenge when you’re writing a series. The downside, I suppose, is that my sales suffer every time I move away from Parker, but it’s worth it. I have very tolerant publishers, and I get to write whatever I want to write at any time, and so far they’ve been willing to publish everything that I’ve given them. Q. Can you tell us a bit about upcoming projects or plans, in the short or long term, for novels or novel adaptions? A. Well, The Whisperers is out in May, and sometime this year I hope to deliver the sequel to The Gates. The movie of The New Daughter, one of my short stories, came out in the US before Christmas on a limited release, although I have yet to see it. After that, well, I’m not sure, but it seems like enough to be getting along with . . . Interview by Nollaig Jan 2010

Since this interview, Adam has published Apartment 16 (reviewed) and The Ritual. Last Days is due to be published next month.

In the search for a horror book that doesn’t rely in gore and sex, I discovered Adam Nevill’s Banquet For The Damned. Adam tells us a little more.. Q. Can you start by telling us a little about your current book, Banquet For The Damned? A. It’s a horror novel, but of a particular caste. One steeped in the occult and the supernatural, in European witchcraft. It’s about something coming back into a modern university town from a grim time in Scottish history – at first through dreams or night terrors and then as a real and growing physical manifestation of ancient evil, felt incrementally throughout the entire town. Something that could not exist, something too preposterous to even suggest in the modern world, and yet … It is a novel written from my desire to contribute to the great tradition of the supernatural in literature that I have always enjoyed with a passion as a reader. It draws upon the craft of using suggestion and implication to introduce the supernatural to the natural order of things, by offering glimpses and hints as opposed to full and bloody revelations, and by trying to achieve a sense of awe and wonder through the supernatural. But I didn’t want the novel to be a pastiche, but a thoroughly modern novel in idiom. So while I observed the craft of the masters in terms of how I described the unworldly aspects, and created suspense and mystery, I also used the structure of the modern popular horror novel defined by Stephen King and Peter Straub etc in the seventies and early eighties. I hoped to achieve the best of both worlds, to reemploy the subtlety and craft of the past when dealing with supernatural horror, while writing in a thoroughly contemporary and accessible language and narrative. Q. Where did the idea / inspiration come from? A. The British Isles has a wonderful, rich and diverse history of the weird tale. And my main influences are drawn from what I would call the great age of the supernatural in fiction, from the late Victorian to the Edwardian period. It is the fiction that made me want to write in the first place, that began the compulsion to write a horror novel. And it’s a very British field – Sheridan La Fanu and Bram Stoker from Ireland, Arthur Machen from Wales, R L Stevenson in Scotland and M R James, Algernon Blackwood and Walter de la Mare from England to name but a few of the precursors of the field. So these influences informed me on how I wanted to approach a novel of the supernatural, but the concept of a young alienated man seeking a mentor - and a once notorious writer and master of ritual magic and the black arts – in an old town by the sea, I had carried around with me for a while. And, literally, as I drove into St Andrews the first time, a story started to write itself from that simple idea. The novel just took shape in my imagination immediately. I suddenly had this wonderful setting for so many set-pieces. So many things about the town just suggested the story to me. M R James’s short stories, without a doubt, and Algernon Blackwood and Walter de la Mare were my primary stylistic influences, though their influence is usually confined to short fiction. I wanted to pull it off on an epic scale, and I’d always wanted to have a go at a long, multi-plot novel with an entire history of its own, a rich background and fully developed community and sense of place and atmosphere, like Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, and King’s Salem’s Lot – the kind of novels I read a lot of in the eighties. Q. Is the history in the book based on actual documents, or from your imagination? A. Bit of both. The library at St Andrews university was a wonderful source of information for the occult in Scottish history. At one time I had over thirty books on loan on my library card about witchcraft alone. But I also studied sleep disturbances and anthropology, and the town’s history. I wanted the history behind the witchcraft, and the anthropological information, to seem feasible, and to add authenticity to the story. I think if an author can show a command of place and history and setting the reader is more likely to become immersed in the story and mystery. More likely to suspend disbelief. I keep coming across modern novels with no interest in language at all, with no sense of place, no real description, no atmosphere for a story to rise from, just dialogue and action like film scripts. A few people have said to me that Banquet reminded them of how books used to be written. They’d almost forgotten. That pleased me. Q. Is St Andrews an actual place, and if so, does it have any occult history? A. Yes, it is Scotland’s oldest university town. It’s like an Oxford or Cambridge of Scotland. A great seat of learning and once a major European ecclesiastic centre like Rome that attracted huge numbers of pilgrims. In fact the town is planned on three long processions up to the now ruined cathedral. Most of Scotland is steeped in the occult and witchcraft, and the Kingdom of Fife has a very rich history too. Q. Are you personally a fan of horror books, and do you prefer modern horror writers, or the more classical? A. I am a fan of the field, and have read much of the canon from its Gothic beginnings onward. I’ve studied it twice at university too, writing thesis, seminars and essays etc, so I have an all round interest as a reader, student and writer of the weird tale. And I think it essential for a writer to read the canon of the field they write in, of what has gone before them, before they make a contribution. And I have discovered some excellent writing right from the classic period of the ghost story until the modern day. So I like elements of the classic and modern. I love M R James, but then I think Dan Simmon’s The Terror is probably one of the best horror novels of all time, and that was published last year. I often reread Lovecraft and Machen, but then tend to look for what I like in those writers in new authors too. I really rate John Marks Fangland and Max Brookes World War Z – which are both very new and innovative approaches to the field. So I’m not stuck in the past, drawing a line at 1926 or anything like that. Nor am I a writer of pastiches, but those who neglect to school themselves in the masters, well, it shows quite frankly, and there a lot of really awful horror novels out there. Q. You have previously written under a pseudonym.. which genre has been your favourite to write? A. I wrote a great deal of erotica, cut my teeth in that genre. I read Anais Nin when quite young and she had a huge impact on my imagination. So I’d had a few erotic novels published long before Banquet. I’m concentrating more on the horror now, due to time limitations more than a preference. But writing in each genre has been enormously pleasurable, though also fraught and difficult. Each are hard to get right and are loaded with so many reader expectations. But had I not written so much erotica and learned my craft there, I may not have written Banquet. Q. What are you working on right now, and what plans do you have for your writing future? A. I’m just completing a new horror novel – the thirteenth draft right now in fact. It’s taken three years to complete, the same time-frame as Banquet. It’s been a very ambitious novel and I binned 80K words a year ago and started the subplot completely from scratch. It’s nearly broken me at times, and I have seriously thought of abandoning the book twice. But I had the same misgivings, doubts, anxieties and concerns about Banquet (and axed a big portion of that too). But I worry that if I ever abandon a novel, it will become easy to give up on future novels once they become problematic too. I know writers with graveyards of unfinished and abandoned books on their computers. The first ghost story I had published I had been rewriting for five years – I had seventeen versions of it in a folder. So I am relieved I continued with the new book, despite the time – it’s very very creepy. Following that, I have begun a third book, which began as a ghastly image of something I found when hiking in Wales. From that, the story is writing itself. Often, the main problem with writing a novel, is not the story etc but the way it is being written. I remember Nicholas Shakespeare saying that there are a hundred ways to write a novel and only one of them is right. It’s good advice and a sound warning to the curious. I’ve started plenty of books with the wrong voice or in the wrong point-of-view, or with too great an authorial omniscience etc, or where the writing is flat, but I just go back and rewrite the same book in a different way until it works for me. Crap novels are often successful, but I’ve no ambition to write one of them. I’m not interested in money as a writer. A readership, yes, even if it is a modest one. What’s important is getting as close to the original vision for a book as possible. And that’s as good a purpose as any. Q. You work in publishing.. do you think that has helped or hindered your road to publication? A. Banquet had already been published in a limited edition hardback by P S Publishing in 2004, and was lucky enough to have been acclaimed, and I’d had another nine novels published before I came to work in publishing, so the work of getting published initially had already been done nearly a decade before I set foot in publishing. But it has certainly opened my eyes to the reality of publishing – I was pretty clueless before. I think writers increasingly need to adjust their expectations, not so much about getting published but about what it will lead to, and what publishers are able to do for most books. Q. Would you like to see your book as a film, or do you feel that too much can be lost during the translation to screen? A. I would love to see it as a film – I’m a huge fan of horror films – and Banquet has been optioned (though that often means nothing so I ain’t kidding myself). But the novel is written in the present tense and was visualised cinematically by me as I composed it, so it is suitable for a film or episodic television drama. And though I would welcome a good interpretation of Banquet, the chances of it being ruined, as most horror films are actually terrible, would be very high. What I worry about is not what is lost during translation, because a film can only be an interpretation of a novel, but I would worry about how many people could interfere on the long critical path from page to screen and gradually, incrementally, ruin it, until even the spirit of the original story is lost in some terrible, vapid rubbish. The best films are made by auteurs and I’d rather it went to a director/producer team with a single creative vision, rather than some dreadful committee made up of Soho media 'ooh, that's rude', corporate types wanting it to be a facsimile of another successful film aimed at 13 year old girls or something, and the usual raft of hustling wannabes looking to augment a CV by having a say in the film. I worked in TV for eight years, though not in production, but was near enough to sense that those with the best hustling skills tended to get their way and go far, though they were not necessarily the most talented or creative people. Just look at British TV – I think, these days, it is largely a creation of the mediocre. You see, I’m bitter already and it hasn’t even been scripted. Q. Finally, what else to you enjoy reading, when you have a spare five minutes to yourself? A. I read a lot, probably more than I write, which is one reason why it takes me so long to finish a book. But that is part of living a literary life, and continually learning as a writer, which a writer should be doing. And I read an enormous range of things from American literary fiction to quality horror to military history. I’m currently reading the last few Cormac McCarthy novels I haven’t yet read. Feb 2008

Tess Gerritsen is a very sucessful crime writer, with 9 best-selling thrillers to her name so far. She has written 4 stand alone medical thrillers, starting with ‘Harvest’ in 1996, plus 5 books in the Jane Rizzoli / Maura Isles series, which starts with ‘The Surgeon’. The latest book in that series, ‘The Mephisto Club’ takes a fascinating turn. Q. Where do you get your ideas from.. are they sparked by real life events, or do they come purely from your imagination? A. I’m a voracious and omnivorous reader, and I’m always encountering items that spark my curiosity. Sometimes, it’s a news article that intrigues me. VANISH, for instance, was inspired by an article in /NY Times Magazine/ about the frightening experience of girls from eastern Europe who are smuggled into the U.S. as sex slaves. I was so horrified, I started reading more and more about the subject – not because I thought “there’s a novel in this” but because I just needed to learn more. Then I came across information that there’s a link between the sex slave trade and U.S. defense contractors overseas. And all at once, the plot of VANISH snapped into place for me. For THE MEPHISTO CLUB, it was my fascination with Biblical archaeology (I was an anthropology major) that led me to start reading pre-Christian religious texts. What I learned there became the premise for MEPHISTO CLUB (which goes on sale Sept. 12) Occasionally, it’s a conversation that will inspire a book. THE SURGEON, for instance, came about because one of my readers said she really wanted me to write a book about “serial killers and twisted sex.” I hadn’t planned on writing a serial killer novel at all, but after thinking about it, I realized that I could give it a medical spin that would make it unique. Q. How about your characters, are they modelled on people that you know? A. Maura is very much like me – a believer in science and logic. Many of her biographical details re actually taken from my own life, e.g. where she trained as a doctor, what hobbies she has, what she believes in. Jane, on the other hand, is so completely unlike me that I think of her as the anti-Tess: she’s brash, she’s courageous, and she’s not afraid to be blunt. That’s what makes her so fun to write. She says the things I’d never dare say! Q. How does writing about the medical profession compare to actually being a part of it.. and which do you prefer? A. I’d much prefer to be writing about it! I found practicing medicine very stressful, especially back when I was a mother of two young sons. Every time I lost a patient, it was hard on me, and autopsies almost always upset me. But when I can step back and write about the experience as an author, when I’m looking over the shoulder of a fictional character, I find that I can be much more of an objective observer and describe what I’m seeing, without all the emotional turmoil! Q. Although you are a doctor and you write medical thrillers, is there anything that you’re squeamish about, either in life or in fiction? A. I’m as squeamish as the next person. I avoid movies where there’s graphic violence on the screen, and I don’t really enjoy books in which graphic violence occurs on the page. You’ll notice in my own books that although I show autopsies and crime scenes, you very seldom see the violence on the page. Rather, you see the investigators who come in after something horrifying has happened. It puts just enough distance between me and the crime to make it more comfortable to write – and read. Q. Are your family supportive of your writing career? Do they enjoy your books, or do they prefer something different? A. My family is very supportive. However, crime thrillers aren’t really what they like to read. I have two sons who much prefer reading technical manuals for their various electronic gadgets! Q. Do you get time to read for pleasure? If so, which books do you like.. do you read thrillers, or go for something completely different? A. I’m always reading, but I find I seldom pick up thrillers these days, and if I do, they tend to be historical. My tastes run to nonfiction: history, archaeology, and politics. Q. Which book do you wish you’d written? A. ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ by Barbara Kingsolver. That was an unforgettable book. Q. Finally, your latest book, The Mephisto Club, asks whether there are subjects of Satan walking amongst us, in the form of Nephilim. Where did you first come across this idea / theory? A. I’d been browsing in a bookshop in Oxford, England, when I came across a translation of an ancient religious text called The Book of Enoch. It’s one of the documents found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it was written around 200 years before the birth of Christ. It describes evil creatures called “Nephilim”, who are the offspring of human women and fallen angels. Descendants of the Nephilim are said to still walk among us, and they are the source of much of the evil and violence in our world. I got so fascinated by this pre-Biblical theory of evil (and they do appear in the Bible as well) that I kept searching for more information on Nephilim, and found that they appeared in other ancient religious texts. And I began to wonder: what if this wasn’t a fable? What if there really is a subset of people – predators – who have always lived and interbred with us? What if that evil bloodline is the explanation for serial killers? That’s how THE MEPHISTO CLUB was born. Feb 2008

I really enjoyed Divergent - the second book is out any day, and I'm looking forward to that one. I've been doing these on audio - I listened to the first two books back to back, then got a bit fed up in the middle of the last.. so I'm taking a break. A great series though.

There's an old thread here with some info - http://www.bookclubforum.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/127-jonathan-stroud/page__p__5271__hl__bartimaeus__fromsearch__1#entry5271 And this one is about the prequel - http://www.bookclubforum.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/7248-the-ring-of-solomon-bartimaeus-by-jonathan-stroud/page__hl__bartimaeus__fromsearch__1

I'm sure I'd class wearwolves and witches as paranormal.

Andie, I love the Bartimaeus Trilogy - and there's now a prequel which I think was even better! Heroes of the Valley is also a good read - very different, but I really enjoyed it.

Jonathan Stroud’s latest book, Heroes of the Valley, was published at the beginning of this year, and I was lucky enough to be able to review it just prior to it’s launch. Following on, Jonathan has been kind enough to answer a few questions… Q. You’re probably best know for your Bartimaeus Trilogy, but you’ve had other books published prior to that – could you tell us a little about them? A. My first book, published way back in 1994, was a book of word puzzles (see below); this was followed by several gamebooks – books that combined stories with puzzles of various kinds. Two of them: The Lost Treasure of Captain Blood and The Viking Saga of Harri Bristlebeard are still in print. They’re for 7-10 year olds. Meanwhile I was working on a novel about a nasty dragon – this became Buried Fire, which was followed by two other novels, The Leap and The Last Siege. These pre-Bart novels are all fairly different – BF is a straight fantasy, The Leap is a psychological fantasy and The Last Siege isn’t a fantasy at all, but a modern-day thriller. Q. Did you enjoy writing when you were younger, and how old were you when your first book was published? A. I always loved writing, and I’ve got various tattered stories and booklets I put together when I was 8 or so. For a long while, though, I didn’t write conventional stories – I made comics instead, or devised boardgames. But it’s all part of the same creative itch! My first book – Justin Credible’s Word Play World came out when I was 23, I think, though it’s hard to remember all that time ago! Q. Returning to the Bartimaeus Trilogy, can you tell how some of the initial ideas came about? A. The idea came very suddenly: walking along one day I was pondering the challenge of writing about magic and magicians in the post-Harry Potter age. And it struck me that most of these wizards in children’s books fall into the Dumbledore/Gandalf pattern – I.e. genial old coves with big beards fighting evil. I wondered if I could turn it around and make the human wizards the bad guys. For my hero I’d have a demon (again reversing the tradition). During the same walk I also decided it would be set in modern London and that the magicians would all be politicians. A few days later I sat down with this idea and wrote the first 2 chapters of Amulet: Bart just appeared fully formed and I knew that it would be good, though I hadn’t a clue what the actual story was yet! Q. Was it always meant to be a trilogy, or did that idea develop as you started writing? A. To begin with it was going to be a single novel, but pretty quickly I developed three strands of narrative – following Bart in the present, together with Nat and Kitty’s back stories. Kitty was going to be a major figure in the first book then. Before long these three intertwining threads were getting too tangled and the book too complicated, so I stopped writing and worked out an overall 3-book structure, bringing Kitty in properly in Book 2 and working towards the eventual ending. Then I went back to Amulet, restructured what I’d done and kept on typing! Q. I understand that there is to be a film based on The Amulet of Samarkand. Can you tell us how that is progressing? A. Several years ago we had a screenplay and a director and producer and all was looking very good. Then it all went a bit quiet, but I’ve heard recently that the script Vis out to several new prospective directors, so it looks as if things are moving again – fingers crossed! Q. How do you feel about seeing your ideas on the big screen, and who would you like to see play the role of Nathaniel? A. I’m delighted at the prospect of a movie version of Amulet. Inevitably it would be different from the book: it’s impossible to include all the subtleties of a 500 page book in a 2 hour film – but that’s no different from the way that traditional folk and fairy tales have been told and retold by countless different narrators over the years. It’ll be a distinct version, that’s all. As long as the key relationships between my characters are true to the book, I’ll be content. As for Nat, I don’t have an opinion – it would have to be a young actor that no one’s ever heard of, preferably fairly slender, dark and nervously charismatic. Q. Your latest book is still fantasy, but it has a very different feel to it. Can you tell us a little more about Heroes of the Valley? A. Heroes is inspired by Icelandic Sagas, which are remarkable medieval accounts of life on the island. They’re mainly about farmers bickering and inter-marrying, but every now and then there’ll be a sudden appearance of a ghost or giant: the supernatural lurks on the edges of ordinary life. I wanted to do a story that had the same sort of tone: the fantasy is on the margins, in stories told by the characters, constantly threatening to become real. The central character, Halli Sveinsson, wants to be like the great heroes of old, but is unfortunately rather short, stocky and a bit rubbish at fighting. He gets a chance to go on a quest, but things don’t go according to plan and he needs to team up with a clever, independent-minded girl called Aud, in order to survive. It’s got lots of jokes, action and other good things! Q. Your books are marketed as children’s books, but they also appeal to adults. Do you set out to write for a specific age group, or do you hope that it will appeal to all? A. Ever since Bartimaeus I’ve had the hope (and expectation) that my books would have a wide audience. Essentially I try to write something that I would like if I found it myself on a bookstore shelf. I know that I’d have liked Bart (and Halli) when I was a boy – and I’d like them now. So that makes me think that other people, old and young, would enjoy them. Q. I’m sure your fans would like to know if you’re working on something new. Can you give us any sort of peek into what we can expect from you next? A. Well, it’s too early to say, really! I’ve recently written a short story which is a sort of sci-fi fantasy about a detective hunting dragons in a big city: it’ll be published (I hope) in an anthology before long. Maybe that will turn into something longer one day… I don’t know! Q. Finally, do you get much chance to read for your own pleasure.. and if so, who are some of your favourite authors and books? A. I don’t read nearly enough when I’m writing, because I find it hard to vault into some one else’s created world when I’m struggling to build my own. But recently I’d enjoyed books by the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, Neil Gaiman’s new fantasy The Graveyard Book, and some very peculiar but great 1950s books about a schoolboy called Nigel Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. This last series is well worth checking out: it’s very very funny, very anarchic, satirical and verbally deft. It’s also very English. Jan 2009

Maggie O’Farrell was born in Northern Ireland in 1972, and grew up in Wales and Scotland. She now lives in Edinburgh with her family. Her debut novel, After You’d Gone, was published to international acclaim, and won a Betty Trask Award, while her third, The Distance Between Us, won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award. Q. How long have you been writing for, is something you’ve always loved? A. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve no idea where the impulse sprang from but I can’t remember life without it. I have a very clear memory of struggling with a story when I was about four or five. I asked my mother if she would write it for me and her reply made a huge impression on me. She said, ‘But if I wrote it it would be my story, not yours.’ It was a very astute answer, I think, as it spurred me to try harder. I’ve kept a diary since I was about nine and wrote stories during my teens. At university and in my early twenties I attended poetry classes, where I was taught by Jo Shapcott and then Michael Donaghy. These had a huge effect on my writing, forcing me to economise, to make each word pull its weight. I was 24 when I started writing what would eventually become my first novel, After You’d Gone. Q. How would you describe your books to someone who hasn’t read them? A. Long, with no respect for chronology. Q. Where do you get the inspiration for your story lines, are they based on real life events, or taken from your imagination? A. I don’t use my life in my novels, or not directly. I would never write autobiographically as I tend to write as an alternative to my life, not a repetition or imitation of it. Often, at the end of a book, it’s hard to remember the source of your ideas. Even the things you’ve taken from real life are, by the time you finish, unrecognisable after you’ve written and rewritten and redrafted and recast them in fictional form. Q. After You’d Gone, and The Distance Between Us jumps between the present and the past, with various story strands coming together at the end. How do you make sure this works so well, do you have to have a time line or a plan to refer to? A. I write them as they appear on the page – I don’t rearrange much in the redrafting process. To me, a story is rarely about one person; many voices and many times collude in any narrative. I do end up with timelines and scribbed diagrams and things on the wall otherwise, near the end, I get terrified of dropping a thread. Q. Tell us a little about your latest novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, in what ways is it different from your previous books? A. It is a novel I’ve wanted to write for a long time. I first had the idea – of a woman who is incarcerated in an asylum for a lifetime – fifteen years ago. I tried to write it then, as my first novel, but it didn’t work and I ended up abandoning it. This was in the mid nineties, after Thatcher’s Care in the Community Act, when psychiatric hospitals were being closed down and patients turfed out. There were a lot of stories flying around at that time of people, particularly women, like Esme who had been put away for reasons of immorality and left to rot. A friend told me about his grandmother’s cousin, who had just died in an asylum, having been put there in her early twenties for “eloping with a legal clerk”. The idea never went away and I gradually amassed more and more stories and examples of girls who had been committed in the early Twentieth century for little more that being disobedient or incalcitrant. When you start to dig a little deeper, into case notes and medical reports, the findings are terrifying. I’ve always been interested in the idea of what happens to the same type of woman – uncompromising, unconventional, refusing to fit into the domestic role society has set out for her – at different times in history. Centuries ago, she might have been condemned as a witch but as recently as sixty years ago she might have been deemed insane and committed to an asylum. It feels very different to me, in lots of way. It’s partly historical as most of the book takes place in 1930s Edinburgh and colonial India. I think it’s tighter than the others: there are only three main characters, whereas the others have tended to be more wide-ranging. I did a great deal more research for it, on psychiatric practices and institutions, on life and society in the 1930s. Q. Are you working on a new novel at the moment? Can you give us any sneak previews? A. I am but I hate talking about things I haven’t finished! It’s set in 1960s London, that’s about all I can say. Q. Do you have a favourite out of your novels? A. It’s always the one I haven’t started yet. Q. Are your books set in places that you know? If not, how do much do you research them? A. Usually, yes. I don’t think I would ever write about a place of which I had no experience. I do find it easier to write about places where I’m not. When I was living in London, I wrote about Edinburgh; and now I live in Edinburgh I find myself writing about London. Somehow it’s easier to inhabit a place in your imagination if you are not there. Q. Have you ever taken a character from someone you know, or are they a mixture of attributes? A. I would never transpose somone directly. I think all fiction is a patchwork of things you’ve made up, things you’ve borrowed or heard or read somewhere, and things you’ve translated from life. So there are certain bits of certain people who appear in my books, but never a whole person. Q. Do you get time to read for relaxation? If so, who are your favourite authors? A. Dead ones: Charlotte Bronte, RL Stevenson, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Burgess, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Molly Keane, James Hogg, Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf. Alive ones: Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, JM Coetzee, Michele Roberts, Ali Smith, Kate Atkinson, David Mitchell, Colum McCann, Peter Carey, Jeanette Winterson, William Boyd. Feb 2008

Benita Brown was born and brought up in Newcastle, in the North East of England, and her books have been compared with those of Catherine Cookson; with engaging characters in an historical setting, overcoming obstacles either set by society or by personal circumstance. Her latest novel, Fortune’s Daughter, follows talented young singer, Daisy, as she works in northern music halls and theatres, but there is one man who would love to see her career in tatters and Daisy herself destroyed… Q. Your novels are set in and around Newcastle – where you live – what is it about the area that inspires you? A. Newcastle is a fabulous city with a fascinating history. I walk around the city centre and rejoice that this is all mine – my own wonderful stage set where my characters can act out their stories. Sometimes I say daft things like, ‘Look, there’s the milliner’s where Ella bought her hat.’ The hat shop is real and has been there since my mother was a girl but Ella is a fictional character in one of my books. Most of my novels are set in Victorian and Edwardian days when Newcastle was one of the richest cities in Europe – and yet there was also dire poverty with people dying on the streets. The characters in my novels inhabit both these worlds and the contrast between them draws me in. But I don’t just write about the ‘toon’. Northumberland’s wide skies, heather clad hills and endless beaches also inspire me. Q. What is it about the genre that drew you to writing novels of an historical nature? A. The romance of past times, I suppose. Imagining how people lived. What they wore, what they ate, how they interacted with one another. They had much harder lives than we do and yet their hopes and desires were not too different from our own. Fashions and, importantly, attitudes change but human nature remains pretty much the same. Q. Are there any other eras or areas you plan to write about? A. I’d like to write a generational novel beginning in the early twentieth century and following one family through two world wars and a rapidly changing world until about the 1970s. There would be a wider canvass – the British Empire for example. Q. The women in your novels are strong-willed – are any of them, or any other characters, modelled on people you know? A. Not entirely. Some of the minor characters are suggested by specific people in my past but the leading characters are the archetypes that you find in stories since storytelling began. Except it’s my job to make them recognizable human beings with the traits and quirks that make us individual. Q. Some people are disdainful of the entire romance genre – how would you pitch your books to someone who hasn’t yet read them? A. Strictly speaking I don’t write romance. Mills & Boon, chic lit, aga sagas, romantic suspense are all more romantic than the regional saga. But, to use a cliché, Romance is a broad church. Novelists such as Jojo Moyes and Philippa Gregory have been happy to pocket the £10,000 Romantic Novel of the Year Award. I’m told that Diana Gabaldon was surprised to find her first novel being pitched as romance. She protested that she wrote fantasy. OK, they said, we’ll classify it as fantasy but you won’t sell even half as many books. She didn’t protest further. The point of this is that when you write a book of course you like to be paid for it, but also you want people to read it. As many people as possible. A book is a two-way thing. The writer and the reader are both important. My novels are about birth, living, loving, working, hoping, scheming, dying. I often have a dark thread running through. Sometimes there’s a murder. My agent joked that I’m a frustrated crime writer. But, as for romance, although it may not be the main thrust of the book, my heroine will fall in love and marry if she wants to. That’s part of life isn’t it? Then there’s love of your children, your parents, your siblings, your friends, your pets. Love of one sort or another can be found in my books. Isn’t love the emotion that makes life bearable – and sometimes glorious? There you are – although I can’t claim to write straightforward love stories I’m not ashamed to acknowledge their importance. And I’m perfectly happy for WHSmith to put my books in the ‘Romance and Family Saga’ section. As for the disdainful ones, I’ve discussed this with other writers and we have our theories. Q. Which of your own novels is your favourite and why? A. My favourite is always the one I’ve just finished! (My least favourite is always the one I’m working on. Blood, sweat and tears.) However, A Safe Harbour, set in a Northumbrian fishing village at the time when the livelihood of the inshore fishermen was being destroyed by the new steam trawlers, is particularly dear to my heart. My husband is from one of those fishing families and stories my mother-in-law told me sparked the idea for the book. The cottage which is one of the main locations in the book is based on our first married home, a two-roomed, three hundred-year-old fisherman’s cottage on the cliff top. The Kate who is the heroine in the book is a tribute to my husband’s grandmother and many another red-headed fisher-lass. Q. Do you get time to read for pleasure? If so, which books do you like? A. I read all the time. I read all sorts of books. I like biography, history, travel and many kinds of fiction. I never read sagas. I’d be worried that I could ‘steal’ an idea without realizing that I’d done so. Favourite crime novelists are Reginald Hill and Margaret Yorke. I’ve just finished ‘Straight Into Darkness’ by Faye Kellerman. I’ve never read her before and I think this is one of her ‘one off’ books rather than part of a series. It’s a thriller set in 1920s Munich. I found myself picking holes in the plot but the background of the politics of the time was absolutely fascinating. I like some historical novels and find Elizabeth Chadwick better than Philippa Gregory. Chadwick’s research is sounder. Even I found instances when Gregory got things wrong. Commercial Women’s fiction: I’ve just treated myself to ‘Daughters of Fire’ by Barbara Erskine and ‘A Step in the Dark’ by Judith Lennox. Non-fiction: I’m reading ‘The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed’ by Judith Flanders. Marvellous stuff.. Q. Which book do you wish you’d written? A. Too many to list! Q. You say on your website that you particularly loved writing your latest novel, Fortune’s Daughter – what was it in particular that made this one so enjoyable? A. So many classic storylines here. A stolen child, a cold-hearted stepmother (I had two of those myself!) And some of my favourite backgrounds – the back streets of Newcastle, the Music Hall, Opera, a country house, characters from different levels of society. I can’t be more specific except to say what a ball I had telling this story. And, after all, it’s all down to story; even E. M. Forster admitted this. Catherine Cookson once told me that if she had lived in ancient times, she would have been the storyteller enthralling her listeners as they sat round the fire. If any would be writer doubts the importance of story, let me recommend two books: ‘Story’ by Robert McKee and ‘The Writer’s Journey’ by Christopher Vogler. Interview by Kell Feb 2008

Tom Bale is the author of a new crime novel, Skin and Bones, which I recently reviewed. Tom kindly answered some questions, about the book, and his writing. Q. Could you start by telling us a little about Skin and Bones? A. It’s a fast-paced thriller, set in the Sussex countryside. A young woman gets caught up in a shooting spree, and after being chased and nearly killed, she discovers something that no one else knows: there was a second gunman involved. She joins forces with the son of one of the victims, and together they go in search of the truth about what really happened. But as they uncover the conspiracy behind the massacre, they realise the killing didn’t begin on that cold winter morning, and worst of all, it won’t end there… Q. Where did the ideas and inspiration come from? A. It sounds corny, but this one came from a dream – I literally dreamed every detail of the entire opening sequence, where Julia goes into the village, discovers a massacre taking place and then gets chased by the killer. (Admittedly, it was the night after a boozy Christmas party!) I woke up in the early hours, ran it all through in my head to see if it made sense, and thought: “Oh my God, I’ve got to write this!” For one thing, I wanted to know who was trying to wipe out an entire village, and why… Q. It’s always interesting to read crime books set in England, do you write about areas you know, or are they fictional? A. A bit of both. The setting is very much the Sussex that I know and love, as I was born in Brighton and have lived down here most of my life. But with SKIN AND BONES, I had to create a fictional village, bearing in mind the grisly fate suffered by so many of the residents. Q. Have you always enjoyed writing, or is it something you’ve started recently? Have you written any other novels before this one? A. I’ve been writing stories since I was seven, or thereabouts. Over the years I’ve written probably millions of words: novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, a sitcom – you name it, I’ve tried it. For years I collected rejection slips, then had a few agonising near misses before finally crossing the invisible, magical line to publication. Q. Do you have a ‘day job’, and does it help or hinder your writing? A. All the good advice on this subject suggests keeping your job until your writing career is well established, but I ignored that advice! Actually, I left my last job in what was probably a bit of a mid life crisis. The company I worked for was taken over by a new management team with very different ideas about running things, so I jumped ship and had a couple of years where I did some consultancy work and tried to make it as a writer. We were scraping by on my wife’s salary and our rapidly dwindling savings when the deal with Preface came through. Writing full time should make it easier, but I never seem to be as productive as I expect to be. For one thing, I often get more done at night than I do during the day – probably because of all the years when I’d come home from work (or school) and write in the evenings. And I suspect the Internet has had a devastating effect on most writers’ productivity – to combat the isolation of working from home, it’s all too easy to spend hours online when you’re supposed to be writing. Q. How about the characters in the book, good and bad.. are they based on anyone you know?! A. I never consciously base my characters on people I know, though I’m sure that various traits slip in that could be traced back to friends and family – and of course I think there are always elements of the writer in all of his or her characters. Q. Do you enjoy reading crime fiction.. any favourite authors? A. I love reading crime and thrillers, and it’s almost unfair to list my favourites, as I’m bound to leave some out. But here are a few, in no particular order: Michael Connelly, John Sandford, Lee Child, Carol O’Connell, Martin Cruz Smith, Carl Hiassen, Ian Rankin, Mark Billingham, Mo Hayder, Michael Robotham. Q. Do you enjoy reading other genres? Again, if so, which are your favourite books and authors? A. I love the comic novels of David Nobbs and Sue Townsend. And I used to read quite a bit of literary fiction, but I must admit I find a lot of it nowadays is just too pretentious and long-winded. I want something that really grabs my attention and spirits me away to another world. But my favourite literary writers include Hemingway, John Updike, Ian McEwan, Lisa St Aubin de Teran, Pete Dexter, Peter Benson – and the mighty Graham Greene. Q. Is there a book that you wish you’d written? A. There are lots! Anything that Graham Greene wrote, for a start. And a really remarkable novel that should have won the 1981 Booker prize: The White Hotel by DM Thomas. Q. Finally, can you tell us a little about what we can expect from you next? A. I’ve just finished the first draft of another Sussex-based thriller, provisionally called TERROR’S REACH. It’s set on a fictional island in the Emsworth/Bosham area of West Sussex, amongst a very wealthy community not unlike the famous Sandbanks resort in Dorset. A criminal gang take control of the island, with much more than just robbery on their mind, and the only person who can stop them is a disgraced former undercover cop, now working as a bodyguard to one of the island’s families. Dec 2008

If our forum is anything to go by, Kelley Armstrong is an author whose popularity is growing at a rapid rate. Her first book, Bitten, is about the only female werewolf, and her Women of the Otherworld series has grown from that. Q. What inspired you to start writing paranormal? And why do you think this genre appeals to so many readers? A. I’ve been fascinated by the paranormal since I was a child, so by now, I have no idea why I’m so attracted to it. As a genre, though, the attraction for me is the chance to write something fantastical that’s still within the realm of “normal”-at least in the sense that most people know what a werewolf or vampire is, and accept that more easily than they would a creature of my own creating. But because most people agree vampires don’t exist, I’m free to play with the conventions as I want, something I can’t do in, for example, crime novels. As for why it appeals to readers, there are those, like me, who’ve always been attracted to it, but the market these days is huge, and I’ve heard many explanations for why – none of which completely works for me! Q. Why did you choose to write strong female characters with supernatural abilities? A. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Back in the mid-nineties, I decided to write a first person narrative about a werewolf, and when I write first person, my natural inclination is to stick to a female voice. Then, after Bitten, when the publishers wanted me to consider a series, I decided to do one with different narrators, with different supernatural powers. It was presumed they’d all be women, and I realized too late that by letting them use the “Women of the Otherworld” series name, I’d be restricted to women! As for “strong,” I write them as they come to me. No one has ever told me to make them all strong, which is good, because the moment someone asks me to write a type of character or type of story, I freeze up. If they turn out strong and readers like that, then great-but I’d never want to feel that was a requirement for the series. Q. How would you pitch your books to someone who hasn’t yet read them? A. Ack! I am SO bad at this. People come up to me at signing and challenge me to “convince” them to try one, and I just can’t do it. I usually say something like “they’re supernatural thrillers in a contemporary setting” More of a bland description than a pitch, isn’t it? Q. Do you think you’ll ever write anything that doesn’t involve the supernatural? A. One hundred percent sure . Which is easy to say, because it’s done and awaiting publication Aug 07. It’s a crime series about a hit woman, not to replace this one, but to shake things up for me as a writer. Q. How do you manage to juggle writing with 3 kids? A. It’s my full-time job, so it’s no different than it’d be for anyone working outside the home with three kids. The plus, though, is that I have all the advantages of being a stay-at-home mom because I work from home. No worries about before/after school care, sick days etc. I’ll admit that these days I put in more than 40 hour week, but I still get more time with my family I ever did working from a corporate cubicle an hour’s commute away! Q. Do you get time to read for pleasure? If so, which books do you enjoy? A. Not nearly as much as I used to. The problem is that, between research, editing my work and reading other people’s work (as a favour or to potentially provide a quote) I do a lot of reading. So it’s tough to do it for pleasure. Audiobooks are a good solution for me. As a reader, my tastes tend toward crime and thrillers. I’m in the middle of Barth Anderson’s “The Patron Saint of Plagues” right now. Q. Which book do you wish you’d written? A. Any that hit the New York Times #1 spot Seriously, though, I don’t often read a book and say “I wish I’d written that” because the books I admire are beautifully written, and I just don’t have that artistic talent when it comes to words. My style is very plain and straightforward. So I admire those books, but know I could never write like that. What I will do is read a book and say “I wish I’d had that idea first,” which happens a lot. Q. Your latest book, Broken, involves a letter that may have written by Jack the Ripper. Is that a piece of crime history that interests you? A. Jack the Ripper is one of the more fascinating unsolved cases out there. The idea for the book came from skimming an article on the case, and seeing a mention of the missing letter. The mystery behind that and the “From Hell” designation were enough to have me writing it down as a future plot spark. Q. In your forth-coming book you hint at more interaction between Jaime and Jeremy. Is something your fans have been asking for? A. At this point, the number of readers wanting to see more of these two outweighs those who don’t. When a relationship was first hinted at in Industrial Magic, reaction was split 50/50. Gradually the “pro Jaime and Jeremy” side has picked up. But that doesn’t mean a relationship is forthcoming-just a resolution to the question. I’m influenced by reader response, but I’m more influenced by negative than positive-had 90% of readers said “no Jaime and Jeremy” you’d never see it even if that was my intention, but if 90% say “yes Jaime and Jeremy,” I wouldn’t put them together if I hadn’t planned to. Q. You’re very involved with your readers, and many of us have enjoyed your online e-fiction. Do you think it’s important for a writer to include their fans in this way, or is it just something you enjoy doing? A. I think every writer makes his/her choices regarding reader interaction and book promotion. I know authors who’ll do none of it, and their sales suffer for it, but they’re okay with that. It’s a trade-off. I know authors who are at conferences two out of four weekends a month, meeting readers and getting their name out there. Again, that’s what works for them. Getting out and promoting my books isn’t easy for me with young kids. And it’s not really what I’m good at anyway. So I do what I am good at, which is my online stuff. Running my own site, answering email, participating in my message board…all a substitute for getting out, traveling and meeting readers. And the eFiction is just another aspect…though, admittedly, it’s probably the one I enjoy most! Feb 2008

Having loved The Stepmother, it was a pleasure to ask Carrie Adams the following questions.. Q. If we start at the beginning, have you always enjoyed writing, or is it something that you’ve started recently? A. I wrote four crime novels under another name but it wasn’t until I wrote THE GODMOTHER that I feel I found my voice. Q. Your first book, THE GODMOTHER, has been labelled ‘Chick Noir’. Can you tell us a little about what that means, and what makes this book different to ‘chick lit’? A. A chick is a baby bird, I write for women, perhaps the publisher should have labelled it Hen Pen… Then again maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t work in marketing. Q.Where did the character of Tessa come from.., is she based on you, or someone that you know? A. She is a little part of almost every woman I know, we all have strengths and weaknesses, areas we excel and others where we fail. She is me and she is the complete opposite of me… jeez women are complex! Q. How about the other characters… do you tend to draw on people you know, or do they come from your imagination? A. One character is taken completely from real life, the rest are made up, but I’m not telling you which one. Q. Tessa’s story continues in THE STEPMOTHER… did you plan this from the beginning, or did it become obvious at the end of THE GODMOTHER that she had more to tell? A. Actually, Tessa only made it into THE STEPMOTHER by the skin of her teeth. Maybe she shouldn’t have. What was really important to me was that the reader sympathises with both women, the ex-wife (Bea) and the ‘new’ woman (Tessa), this is a story about what happens when your enemy could make the best alibi if only you’d let them. Q. You tackle a lot of varying issues in your books, how do you ‘research’ these…do you draw on the experiences of friends, or find other people to talk to you. A. For this book I needed the wisdom of hindsight, but hindsight can only be earned, so I talked to a lot of women who’d earned it. The idea came a long time ago from a vicar I know who told me women burying elderly parents often ‘confessed’ that their inconsolable grief was really reserved for a secret loss many years previously – that may sound weird but I don’t want to give too much away. Q. I could imagine your books as films… who would you like to see playing Tessa and Bea? A. Helen McCory would be a good Bea, but she’d have to eat some buns. I’d like an unknown for Tessa, I went to some lengths to keep her physical details to a minimum so that the reader could transpose themselves on to her if they like. Q. How long, on average, does each book take to write, starting from the initial idea? A. Interesting question. The publisher is always clambering for a book a year, but I think characters take more than that to solidify. I throw out many ideas before the one that comes along so that I can see from end to end in an instant. Q. Can you tell us a little about what you’re working on next? Are you carrying on the stories of any of these characters, or moving on to something different? A. I’ll let you know when I know. Q. Do you enjoy reading for relaxation? If so, which books and authors do you enjoy? A. Reading combines my two other favourite things – bath oil and good wine, I get irritable if I don’t have a book on the go. As for favourites, that is always such a hard question. If I had to take a collection to a desert island Pat Conroy springs to mind, or John Irving, then again can’t go wrong with Jilly Cooper, then again I love THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, and TO KILL A MOCKINGBORD is a must… oh I don’t know, ask me one on sport. Having loved The Stepmother, it was a pleasure to ask Carrie Adams the following questions.. Q. If we start at the beginning, have you always enjoyed writing, or is it something that you’ve started recently? A. I wrote four crime novels under another name but it wasn’t until I wrote THE GODMOTHER that I feel I found my voice. Q. Your first book, THE GODMOTHER, has been labelled ‘Chick Noir’. Can you tell us a little about what that means, and what makes this book different to ‘chick lit’? A. A chick is a baby bird, I write for women, perhaps the publisher should have labelled it Hen Pen… Then again maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t work in marketing. Q.Where did the character of Tessa come from.., is she based on you, or someone that you know? A. She is a little part of almost every woman I know, we all have strengths and weaknesses, areas we excel and others where we fail. She is me and she is the complete opposite of me… jeez women are complex! Q. How about the other characters… do you tend to draw on people you know, or do they come from your imagination? A. One character is taken completely from real life, the rest are made up, but I’m not telling you which one. Q. Tessa’s story continues in THE STEPMOTHER… did you plan this from the beginning, or did it become obvious at the end of THE GODMOTHER that she had more to tell? A. Actually, Tessa only made it into THE STEPMOTHER by the skin of her teeth. Maybe she shouldn’t have. What was really important to me was that the reader sympathises with both women, the ex-wife (Bea) and the ‘new’ woman (Tessa), this is a story about what happens when your enemy could make the best alibi if only you’d let them. Q. You tackle a lot of varying issues in your books, how do you ‘research’ these…do you draw on the experiences of friends, or find other people to talk to you. A. For this book I needed the wisdom of hindsight, but hindsight can only be earned, so I talked to a lot of women who’d earned it. The idea came a long time ago from a vicar I know who told me women burying elderly parents often ‘confessed’ that their inconsolable grief was really reserved for a secret loss many years previously – that may sound weird but I don’t want to give too much away. Q. I could imagine your books as films… who would you like to see playing Tessa and Bea? A. Helen McCory would be a good Bea, but she’d have to eat some buns. I’d like an unknown for Tessa, I went to some lengths to keep her physical details to a minimum so that the reader could transpose themselves on to her if they like. Q. How long, on average, does each book take to write, starting from the initial idea? A. Interesting question. The publisher is always clambering for a book a year, but I think characters take more than that to solidify. I throw out many ideas before the one that comes along so that I can see from end to end in an instant. Q. Can you tell us a little about what you’re working on next? Are you carrying on the stories of any of these characters, or moving on to something different? A. I’ll let you know when I know. Q. Do you enjoy reading for relaxation? If so, which books and authors do you enjoy? A. Reading combines my two other favourite things – bath oil and good wine, I get irritable if I don’t have a book on the go. As for favourites, that is always such a hard question. If I had to take a collection to a desert island Pat Conroy springs to mind, or John Irving, then again can’t go wrong with Jilly Cooper, then again I love THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, and TO KILL A MOCKINGBORD is a must… oh I don’t know, ask me one on sport. July 2008