INTERVIEW 4- KIRTIDA GAUTAM INTEVIEWS ANNE GOODWIN

INTERVIEW 4

KIRTIDA GAUTAM INTERVIEWS 

ANNE GOODWIN

Anne Goodwin’s debut novel, Sugar and Snails, is about a woman who has kept her past identity a secret for thirty years. It was published in July 2015 by Inspired Quill. Her second novel, Underneath is about a man who keeps a woman captive in his cellar, is scheduled for May 2017. Anne is also a book blogger and author of over 60 published short stories. If you’re in the UK, come and meet her at one of her author events. Alternatively you can connect via her website: annethology or on Twitter @Annecdotist.

Thank you very much Anne for taking out time to answer the Questions for Authorprenuer Blog and sharing your journey as an author with the readers. 

What makes the process of writing worthwhile for you?

I find the process of revision the most intrinsically rewarding: cutting out redundant words; finding a way of expressing something with greater clarity, subtlety or eloquence; and, even though my fiction is not plot-heavy, I love spreading clues, like a trail of breadcrumbs, to lead to the climax.However, I must admit my writing is also an addiction that won’t let me go, with origins in my love of reading and the dream of my own words giving a similar pleasure to others. The addiction is driven by a need to express the unexpressible and to tame the thoughts bubbling in my head. It’s maintained by the satisfaction of publication and from readers’ appreciation but, as with any addiction, the highs can leave me wanting more.

What was the most frustrating moment of your writing career?

The writer’s path is strewn with disappointments; how does one choose among so many? But it was certainly frustrating when, after she’d fallen in love with my novel, an agent’s assistant was unable to persuade her senior colleagues in the agency to take it on. Luckily, I was able to find a happy home for my novel with a publisher who accepts direct submissions. A little further along the path, however, I remember the shock when a bookseller informed me that, due to the discount required for a shop to stock it, my novel was priced too low; fortunately something the publisher was able to rectify.

What was the most satisfying moment of your writing career?

A string of moments connected with getting my first novel published: the generous quotes from the early readers; the excitement of publication day; and seeing friends and family actually enjoy themselves at my launch parties and queue up to buy signed copies of my book.

If you have to make a movie trailer of your writing career, what the trailer will look like?

What a fascinating question, although a tricky one for those of us who work with words rather than images. But I’m picturing a girl with a gag across her mouth sitting reading a book. The girl morphs into a young woman scribbling in an exercise book as if her life depends on it (maybe illustrated by that cliché gallows in the background or a ticking time-bomb)! Finally – because don’t we all love a happy ending – she’s older and greyer, but nevertheless radiant as she signs copies of her first book. Alternatively, in the arthouse version, it won’t finish there but will move back to her frantic scribbling, although she’s now quite old and frail, in a dark and shabby room while, through the window, we see “normal” people out in the sunshine getting on with real-life. On reflection, I think I’ll have the Disney version, please.

How much do you rely on personal emotions and memories to write your novels?

I like to read, and try to write, fiction that has emotional depth, so I’m drawing very much on my own emotional experience. I often use my memories of real places, and of houses especially, for my settings, although will happily play around with the details to suit the plot. The occasional episode from my own life can seep into the story, but generally I’m happier making things up. Yet, at an emotional level, much of my fiction could be read as a metaphor for my own personal story.

Would you like to research some vocations as possible jobs for a character?

The narrator of my next novel, Underneath, has worked in a rural school in South Africa, a dive centre in Belize, a car hire firm in Hong Kong and a cycle repair shop in Guatemala. I don’t think I have enough lifetimes to try all these, and I’ve lost the travelling bug, so maybe I’ll pass.

Tell me about some research information which you would never have known if you would not have written your book.

Another fascinating question, Kirtida. I’m a lazy researcher, and tend to write about topics I already know something about, just checking facts and details. However, I was rather thrown in the process of writing Sugar and Snails by the discovery, or rediscovery, that a law passed by parliament one year doesn’t come into operation until the next. Although this sounds pretty humdrum, it caused me some problems with the timeline until I was able to build it into the plot as a point of tension.

Related Post:

Kirtida Gautam interviews Scott Hawkins
Kirtida Gautam interviews Michael J. Sullivan
Kirtida Gautam interviews Debra Holland 
Kirtida Gautam interviews Karen Fortunati
Kirtida Gautam interviews Tanya Anne Crosby

Kirtida Gautam is a clinical psychologist and an author. Follow her on Twitter @KirtidaGautam  

If your book is like your child, then what is the role of other people associated with your book?

I often hear authors saying that, "my book is like my child." I don’t 

disagree. Of course it is. It’s their brain child and it’s as dear to them 

as their own child. Let us stick with this connotation and try to 

understand roles of some of the key people associated with books in 

relation to a mother and her child. 

Father of the child

So the first important role in a child's life after his/her mother is a role of 

a father. Father's typical role is to protect and provide. A Father helps his 

child to grow by providing financial support for his/her education, medical 

expenses, food, and means for a safe environment and a happy life. This 

is what a publisher does for a book. Indisputably it’s a writer who delivers 

it, but a publisher bears all the expenses of publishing, marketing, and 

everything that a book needs to grow. But there are millions of self-

published authors, who don’t have anyone supporting their work. They 

are like single parent raising their child all alone by bearing financial load 

and giving the required nurturing. They mostly have to become involved 

in all the steps required for a book to reach its potential height by making 

sure that their book gets established in the market and reaches to 

the hands of the readers. It’s no surprise that being a single parent is 

one hell of a difficult a job.

Your Gynecologist

Now what is the role of an editor? An editor is a gynecologist, who makes 

sure you deliver a healthy baby with minimum complications. I truly believe 

that writers should give their editors same respect that they would give to 

their gynecologist during pregnancy. The way only a mother feels a baby's 

movements when it is in her womb, but a doctor who performs a sonography 

has a clearer view of the child, an editor has a more objective and clear vision 

of a book. Just the way a doctor provides time to time medicine to keep your 

baby healthy, an editor gives you timely feedback to explain what is working 

in the favor of your book and what’s not. There is a professional term “Book 

Doctors” used widely these days for the developmental editors, who support 

the authors in the whole process of turning their draft manuscripts into a full 

grown professional book. If a doctor doesn’t perform his or her job with 

precision, you are bound to have complications in delivery. In reference to 

writers if an editor does a shabby job, you’ll face troubles in delivering a 

potentially successful book. 

Importance of a good Nanny

There is another important role these days for a mother’s and a child’s life. 

Think for a moment that you are a mother, who just gave birth to a tender 

newborn baby and you already have another baby conceived in your belly 

and also have planned the third baby that you want to conceive as soon as 

you deliver your second child...ohhh, that’s scary!  At least if you are a single 

mother having no support of your partner. Now think about a similar scenario 

in a life of a self published author. He/she has just published her first book, 

has started writing the second book and his/her mind is already wrangling 

with the idea of the third book. Just the way you cannot plan for another 

baby till your first child is grown up a little, especially if you don’t have a 

family support, you cannot focus on writing your second book if your first 

book is out there in the market and you know that you have to do all the 

marketing on your own to make sure your book is a success. Here comes 

the role of a nanny. She is not the mother and hence probably won’t feel 

the same emotions for the child, but as she spends more time with the child 

making sure the baby eats & sleeps in time, is cleaned properly, is engaged 

well in playing, she also gets attached with the child. In the world of books 

and publications that’s the job of a marketing and PR person. A marketing 

person supports the author in making his/her book a success by looking after 

all the tasks associated with marketing, creating readership, and engaging in 

social media campaigns of the book. If you have a strong support of your 

marketing person, you can give your brain child in his/her able hands and 

focus on writing your next book. If your marketing person is not efficient, 

you wouldn’t have time to write your next book as all your time will go into 

marketing your first book.

The more I am getting engaged with self published writers, trying to 

understand their issues and roadblocks, the more I understand and 

respect the role of an editor and marketing person for the book.I have 

made a humble effort for providing these two crucial services of editing 

and marketing to authors through my freelance service called 

"For Your Fiction". I am determined to take my duties as an editor and 

a marketing person seriously, because as a mother I know, if you have 

an amateur doctor and an inefficient nanny, how difficult your life would 

become.

INTERVIEW-3 KIRTIDA GAUTAM INTERVIEWS SCOTT HAWKINS

INTERVIEW-3

KIRTIDA GAUTAM INTERVIEWS 
SCOTT HOWKINS

Scott Hawkins is born in Idaho in 1969, grew up in South Carolina. He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a B.S.C.S. in computer science in 1991 and an M.S. in 1993 and works as a computer programmer.  He’s been a member of Absolute Write since 2006. Scott has also been deeply involved in keeping Absolute Write’s server running for close to ten years now. He lives in the Atlanta suburbs with his wife and seven dogs. The Library at Mount Char is his first novel. The Novel was nominated as the Best Debut Novel for Goodreads.com Reader's Choice Award. 

At first we would like to know, what inspired you to write your first fantasy Novel “The Library at Mount Char”? Were there any books or movies that inspired you to write this brilliant Novel or do you remember any moment when the idea first struck your mind?

It wasn’t really any one thing.  When I’m working on a new project, I tend to just jot things down—scenes, character sketches, whatever—until I have half a dozen snippets that feel like they’re working. I don’t worry too much about narrative flow or even making sense until much later.  In the initial stages I just want stuff that’s interesting in itself.

I’ll be a little vague here to avoid spoilers.  In the case of Library at Mount Char, the core scenes were one where a guy goes out for a jog, a neighborhood picnic that went bad, and a guy meeting a strange woman at a bar.  I truly didn’t have much of an idea of how to string them together, or even what order they’d be in, but each scene felt lively in itself, and I figured I could come up with some way to string them together.  What ultimately became the story sprang from trying to figure out a way to string those three scenes together.

So, like—what is this guy doing in the neighborhood?  Why him and no one else?  What happened after they left the bar?  Stuff like that.  I try to keep the reader interested first, then go back later and make up plausible reasons why stuff happened.  Well, semi-plausible. 

Do you follow the same process of writing a Novel and technical books? If not, what is different about writing a Novel? Please tell our reader more about your writing process.

They don’t have much in common, at least for me.  A computer book is very similar to an academic research project.  First I read everything I can on the subject, then I set up a lab and start experimenting for myself.  It’s a lot like writing twenty or thirty term papers in a row.  That can be rewarding in its own way, but it’s not the sort of thing I would do for fun.

Novels, when they’re going well, are much more fun to write.  I talked a little bit above about how I get started.  Those initial stages can be a lot of work, and sometimes frustrating.  It’s also very time-consuming.  I usually throw out more than half of what I write.  But once I’ve gotten past that and have the story and characters sorted out in my mind, I get very immersed in actually putting it on paper.  That’s really fun.  At that point there’s really nothing I enjoy more. 

As we all know, your wife has been instrumental in shaping up your writing work and giving you objective feedbacks. Can you please tell us more about her contribution in your Novel writing?

It’s simple but hugely valuable.  She’s not a writer herself, but she’s an avid reader.  She doesn’t give detailed feedback, she just looks at my stuff and gives me a “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down.” She’s ruthless, and she doesn’t mince words.  She’s literally thwapped me on the head with manuscript pages a couple of times.  “This sucks!  Fix it!”

If I can get a scene past her, I’m pretty confident that it’s working.  It’s not necessarily going to be for everybody, but I’m confident that at least I won’t embarrass myself too badly by sending it out into the world.

I have heard that you have a playlist for The Library at Mount Char. Can you tell our readers, how music helps you in writing?

I be happy to tell you, but I bet it’s not in the ways you expect.  I’m really not a very musical guy.  I’ve got almost no aptitude for it, and I don’t even listen to it much.  When I’m in the car driving by myself I keep the radio off.  Most of the stuff on my iPod is audio books.  All my musical friends say that what I do listen to is garbage. 

The thing is, though, I’ve got a lot of dogs in the house.  They bark every time the neighbors slam a car door.  They bark at squirrels, deer, and the cat that hangs out on the front porch.  They can be very persistent.  So a lot of times when I’m working I put headphones on to drown out the noise. 

I’ve also found that having one song play over and over when I’m working on a particular scene helps get me in the mood—kind of a conditioned response. I will never be able to hear Dead Man’s Party without thinking of the big showdown about 2/3 of the way through the book.  I’ve probably heard that song more times than Danny Elfman at this point.   I’ve got at least one for each chapter.  If I ever want to get into that frame of mind again, all I have to do is put on the headphones.

What kind of research or ground work you did before you started writing The Library at Mount Char?

There wasn’t a whole lot.  That’s the beauty of writing fantasy—if you need a fact, you can just make it up.

I did spend a bit of time reading up on uncontacted tribes, or at least trying to.  The problem is with isolated tribes is that there’s really not much to say about them.  There are some guys called the Sentinelese that have an island in the south Pacific.  Whenever anybody tries to land there, they attack, so people tend to leave them alone.  If anybody discovers oil on the island I’m sure we’ll learn more about them, but as it stands we don’t know much.  They’re not really hurting anybody.

Years ago I read an article about some Brazilian tribes from the amazon that got displaced by deforestation.  These guys have basically been living in the Stone Age their entire lives, but then all of a sudden they’re in downtown Sao Paolo.  Everybody was talking on cell phones, ordering pizza, that kind of stuff.  That had to do a number on your head.  That article wasn’t research, exactly, but that may have been one of the things that sparked the idea for the book.

There was a religious aspect to the book, obviously.  I didn’t do a whole lot of reading specifically on that topic when I was writing, but I’ve read quite a bit about religion over the years—I got Greek and Roman in school, Christian stuff from my mom, I picked up a bit of Hindu lore somewhere, and Polynesian stuff from somewhere else.  I tried to think about the things that they all had in common.  They all do seem to be scratching the same itch. 

For instance, a few years ago I was reading about angelology while researching a previous book.  There are only a half-dozen or so angels named in the Bible, but in Catholic tradition there are probably a couple of thousand.  Somebody must have felt a need for them to invent that many.

I noticed that the angels had a lot of similarities to modern superheroes—there’s Uriel the fire angel, and Barnabas the ice angel.  Maybe there’s another one that has adamantium claws, like Wolverine.  I remember a set of liner notes in some medieval manuscript speculating about whether the Metatron could beat up the Archangel Michael that would sound familiar to any comic book fan.  If memory serves, there was even something analogous to trading cards the young monks would pass around the monastery. 

So with Mount Char I was trying to come up with a new mythology that scratched the same itch as the others without borrowing explicitly from any one of them. 

What kind of books you like to read in general and what kind of movies you like?

I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy.  I still do, but I’ve also branched out in my old age.  I’ll buy anything by Joe Haldeman, Ursula Le Guin or Stephen King.  I don’t write a lot of short fiction—it’s a different skill set, and I want to stay focused on novels—but I love to read it. I’ve got most of the Gardner Dozois annual Year’s Best anthologies, and I love Ellen Datlow’s fantasy anthologies. 

That said, these days about half of what I read is non-fiction.  I like non-fiction books about complex systems falling apart—disasters, basically.  At one point I read a lot about airplane crashes, but it turned me into a white-knuckle flier, so I stopped. Financial disasters are interesting, so I got a lot of reading pleasure from the 2008 debacle.

There’s a book about the collapse of Enron called Conspiracy of Fools that I absolutely love.  I’ve been through it at least half a dozen times.  I read all of the Richard Rhodes histories of the Cold War.  Dark Sun is a favorite.  I’ll buy anything by Michael Lewis.  I was kind of hoping for a bumper crop of nuclear doom books after the Fukushima thing, but evidently the Japanese don’t revel in postmortems the way we do.  Or maybe the books just haven’t been translated yet.

As far as movies—I love them.  I go to the movies almost every weekend.  If you can’t get me and the wife to buy a ticket to your flick, you aren’t really trying.  I’ll go see pretty much anything with an effects budget, all the fanboy stuff.  You probably could have guessed that from reading Mount Char.

Less stereotypically, Remains of the Day is one of my all-time favorite movies.  I was amazed at how much I liked the Reese Witherspoon movie Wild—no disrespect to anyone involved in making it, mind you, but the ads for it didn’t make me feel like part of the target demographic.  One day I checked it out on pay-per-view and I loved it. 

Please tell us also about your future work.

Right now I’m working on one that’s got elements of noir mystery and fairy tale wrapped up in a science-fiction premise.  Imagine Humprey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon was instead a slightly crazy middle-aged woman who is prone to killing sprees.  The premise is that she gets hired by Dr. No to investigate a school shooting that may have been perpetrated by Peter Pan.  Then it gets weird. 

Do you have any message or piece of advice for our readers and new authors, which you wish you would have got before you got into writing your novel?

I do!  This is something I don’t remember hearing said much, and I really wish I’d had more people clobber me over the head with it.

If you’re one of those people for whom language comes easily, you may actually be at a disadvantage in trying to make it as a novelist.  All those years of easy A’s in English class and good standardized test scores may have given you a false sense of security.  It certainly did me.

I had kind of gotten in the habit of thinking in terms of “good enough.”  As in, “this scene isn’t really working, but the next scene kicks so much ass it’s probably good enough.” 

No.

There is no “good enough” when you’re trying to get a novel published.  Maybe if you’re Shakespeare or somebody like that, but for mere mortals such as myself, it is never going to be okay to let anything slide.  I’m bad at evaluating my own work—it all seems good to me, you know?   I finally got it through my head that if I spot a problem, even a small one, it probably means that whatever I’m looking at is actually a trainwreck.  

These days I’m trying to train myself to be completely unforgiving.  The flesh is weak and all that, but that’s the goal.

Related Post:

Kirtida Gautam interviews Tanya Anne Crosby
Kirtida Gautam interviews Michael J. Sullivan
Kirtida Gautam interviews Debra Holland 
Kirtida Gautam interviews Anne Goodwin
Kirtida Gautam interviews Karen Fortunati 
Kirtida Gautam interviews Beth Yarnall

Kirtida Gautam is a clinical psychologist and an author. Follow her on Twitter @KirtidaGautam