sarah pinborough

to all! I'm so so sorry I haven't been checking in as frequently as I should. As usual when you make a commitment to something, the world goes do lally around you. I was away at fantasycon for a few days (and anyone who's ever been near the Britannia Hotel in Nottingham will know there's no chance of an internet connection..a proper toilet flush would be nice but that's a different story..) And then i got home (after not winning Best Novel, but frankly wearing the best dress of all the nominees... but then I was the only woman..)to find that Peter, my little cat, was very unwell - took him to the vets to find that he'd been hit by a car. Having no husband or kids my cats are stupidly important to me so it's been a ridiculous week of rushing backward and forward to vets and feeling very blue..However, he's fine. Well, as fine as you can be with 3 fractures in one leg and lots of bruising but he's got no lasting damage which is a huge relief. I'm signing him up with The Tufty Club immediately. On top of all that I've changed agents this week so there's been long phone calls to and from New York and London which seem to have taken up all my home time.. All of which has no bearing on the questions - so I'll crack on! IDEAS: Ideas are funny things as any of you that write will know. Your original idea normally morphs into something else as you go along. Most horror writers I know don't think -Oh I'll write a vampire novel, or a zombie novel..they tend to think about a character first and then the horror tends to fall in around that character's arc, although sometimes a single image can hit you and the book gets built around that. For example, when I wrote Breeding Ground (which I wanted to call FAT) the spark came from my friend Jo's and my obsession with calories. I was just mulling over how women are obsessive over their weight (in the main) and we all fluctuate but none of us are happy and yet men can be bald, flabby, or whatever and just tumble out of bed naked and happy. From there I started thinking about other difference between the sexes - nothing too deep, everyday stuff like how women really 'talk' and men don't. And then I got an image of women all over the world slowly getting fatter and fatter and stranger and stranger and wondered how their men would deal with it. They probably wouldn't even talk about it until it was too late. In my head i had a picture of a hugely fat woman sitting in a lounge with the curtains drawn, chewing absently on raw meat, and claiming to be silently 'talking' to her friend hundreds of miles away. Her boyfriend, watching in the doorway, suddenly realises that something has gone very very wrong indeed. And that was kind of the launch pad of the book which was very influenced by Wyndham's 'Day of the Triffids' - although nastier..;-) CRIME The crime book is currently doing the round of publishers and we'll see whether it makes the book shelves or not! It's called SCREAM BLUE MURDER and was quite weird for me to write becuase you can't just change the world whenever you want to! It was good fun though and I'll defo do another one at some point I think. I'm not sure about other genres but lots of horror writers seems to move into other areas and back again. I have a lot of friends who write thrillers and fantasy and sci-fi. I guess maybe it's because horror, in essence, is an emotion and therefore you can instill elements of it in so many other genres. A lot of people who say they don't read horror really mean they don't like vampire/werewolf/zombie books... (i've never written any of those!) but will read Hannibal - now that's horrific! I like to try different things because not all stories fit the horror genre. I've got a novella coming out next year from PS publishing in the UK, THE LANGUAGE OF DYING, which has no horror in it at all and is about 5 siblings coping with the last week of their father's life. And when I'm not trying to finish the next horror book, I'm also working on a children's fantasy book and an adult contemporary fantasy novel in collaboration with three other female writers, Sarah Langan, Alex Sokoloff and Deb LeBlanc. I think you just have to try and write the stories that you feel need telling. Agents and editors obviously prefer it if you don't jumo genres massively because it makes it harder to sell - or they make you change your name. Michael Marshall Smith the sci-fi and horror writer became Michael Marshall on his bestselling thrillers, and I think is becoming M M Smith for a new book...;-)

definitely the former! ;-) I also tend to set my books in places I've lived - that gets rid of another half per cent! I've written a crime book that's out with various editors and then i had to research - it was very tiring!!!!

Hi Janet, Agents and publishers are a kind of chicken and egg situation...But i was quite lucky. I'd gone to America (got married in Vegas - whole other story...) and on the way back I picked up a couple of horror books at the airport and. I'd started writing The Hidden at that point and by the time I got back to England, i knew that Leisure were probably the kind of publisher I wanted for my writing. When i finished the book, I checked their submission guidelines and then sent out my first 3 chapters and 1 page synopsis. About a week later I got an email asking for the rest! It was only when I had the deal that I got my first agent! I was just very very lucky....;-)

The Stand is in my top five favourite books - probably top three - maybe even my fave.. If you'd read it, you'd remember - Captain Trips? need i say more? if you haven't read it - don't read the new unabridged version, it's far too long. the original print was long enough and fantastic! SP

I think you've hit the nail on the head there. after King and Herbert became very successful (especially King) then publishers starting buying huge amounts of horror without really thinking about Quality. I know a lot of people like Laymon but he wasn't really for me - and he's actually better than a lot that was published. I think we're in danger of crime going the same way. Thanks for the kind words - I think you'll like The Reckoning. It's my least overtly horror ;-)

Hi! I tried to answer these yesterday but my computer kept kicking me off the internet - very rude of it! Let's hope i have better luck this time! Okay - the US /UK thing...to sum it up - the horror publishing market has been relatively dead for about ten years. It's only in the past couple of years that we've even had our own shelves in the major book shops and then we're talking about a small shelf amongst the huge amount of space given to fantasy and crime... So when I wrote my first novel I immediately looked to the States for a publisher - although things weren't much better there! My publisher is the only mass-market publisher that puts out more than one or two horror titles a year, so I'm very lucky to be with them. Hopefully the market is picking up slightly now - we'll see....;-) As for influences - all the usual King, Barker, Herbert. And also John Wyndham. He's one of my all time favourites. I don't read a huge amount of full length horror but I do read a lot of shorts. I also read crime - and some historical fiction like Edward Rutherford and Philippa Gregory.