…. I was challenged to seven, but I already admitted to one!
1) I don't write sequentially. I have a habit of writing a
vignette in my head, and then another, and then another, and then putting them
together like a rather badly-strung length of pearls.
This does rather mean that I have to keep rewriting the end
of my novels but calling the Uncivil Wars books character-led is a bit like
saying that water can be a little bit wet at times.
2) I have no idea what Hollie Babbitt looks like. Actually
that's not true, I know what he looks like, I just don't know who he
looks like, other than himself. I have read a number of books where characters
are evidently based on actors. Mine are not amongst them. In an ideal world, I
would cast Christopher Eccleston c. "Jude" as Babbitt, and it'd be
close, but it wouldn't be quite right. Orlando Bloom in his Legolas moments for
Luce, again not absolutely right, but as near as I can get it, and Julian Sands
(when he was young and pretty) as Russell. It's not spot-on, but it's close.
Stephen Fry has been suggested for Drew Venning…. Right
accent, wrong colouring.
On the other hand, I have no problem at all casting Tyburn!
3) I know what happens at the end of the series and I'm not
telling. The actual ending has never changed. It's already been written, and
everything else is just working up to that point. Which is not to say that
Hapless Russell will not get his own series, and that there isn't a Thirty
Years' War series on the blocks. (Is that a spoiler? Only if your chronology is
off-cock. Our Hollie is thirty-four at the beginning of the English Civil War
and went out to the Low Countries as a big fifteen year-old with an attitude
problem. That's twenty years of learning his business, by my reckoning.)
I didn't start the Uncivil Wars books with the intention of
involving Hollie in Leveller politics. It just sort of happened that way. He
started off being absolutely partisan and then it just got personal, the more
he put down roots in England again. He is not, absolutely not, any kind of
political statement. Someone did suggest that he was and I would like to set it
down - really, absolutely, categorically - that Hollie Babbitt is not any kind
of political metaphor. He is his own dear bad-tempered self and his involvement
in the Leveller movement is purely an emotional response to the treatment of
his own soldiers by Parliament.
4) I don't think I write like anyone else. Possibly Simon
Scarrow, whom I quite like. The thought of Rosie and Luce as the Civil War Maco
and Cato - hmmm. Certainly sufficiently sweary. Possibly slightly more
political, especially as the series progresses. With more poetry. I have to
admit to a near-heretical loathing of "Three Musketeers" soundalikes.
I struggle horribly with Alatriste, although cannot guarantee that someone very
like him does not stray across the radar of a young Hollie Babbitt. Hollie
(drunk on his sixteenth birthday at Breda, natch) offered to punch him
repeatedly in the head. I believe he took exception to the Spanish gentleman's
facial hair. Being a redhead, he never has succeeded with the fashionable
moustache thing. Rather a tragedy for him, in the elegantly goatee'd part of
the seventeenth century…
Anyway. I hate all that mannered thee's and thou's and have
at thee, varlet, stuff. The seventeenth century was the golden age of the
English language, undoubtedly. Let's not forget it was also funny, filthy, and
accessible. People spoke in it. To each other. They didn’t order their ale in
rhyming quatrains. (Apart from Lucey Pettitt, probably, and I imagine even he
only does it when egged on by his mates, or drunk.)
5) I have always written. The first thing I ever wrote was a
Sherlock Holmes story, aged about four, and all I can remember about it was
that it involved a graveyard at the full moon. Unfortunately it was written in
the back of the car on my way to a family holiday and I get car sick. I don't
remember the end…
Hollie and Luce, on the other hand, first appeared in a
time-travel comedy romance co-written with a friend of mine, sadly lost to
posterity, in which the gallant Captain Babbitt began as a stern and
easily-shocked Puritan officer in the Army of Parliament who was repeatedly
seduced in some very unlikely environments by a most unwomanly miss.
Luce was a very camp transvestite who desperately wanted to
get into the twenty-first century because he could wear make-up to work and no
one would pass remarks.
There was a full-length novel written about this foolery
(and a horse called Bastard who had a habit of widdling contemptuously on
people he didn’t like) but it sadly did not survive a computer crash. It was
hellish funny, though.
6) I have a habit of writing longhand on public transport,
which is where I do most of my background thinking. There is a pink notebook
which contains some very, very intimate information on the matter of the
private lives of my lads.
Not all of it will ever make it into the books…
You're right: you remain as enigmatic as ever - as do your lads. Or maybe not.
ReplyDeleteHeh, well, since there is a vicious rumour that I'm a man, I try to retain a little mystery....
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