1: Before being published you had a long & successful career behind camera on some famous films. Can you tell us about that?

2: The Eyre Affair was not your first book, and not the first to be rejected by a publisher either! What made you keep writing, and how did you feel when your book was finally published?

3: What has been the response around the world to a fairly unusual set of books?

4: Is there one author who has been a great influence on your work? (Sorry, I know you've been asked this a million times, but it's one people always want to know....)

5: You maintain an extensive website which introduces readers to BookWorld and entertains fans. How important is reader feedback to you?

6: What are the burdens, responsibilities and advantages of creating a series with popular characters and the odd famous literary figure? And are there any literary figures who are just too 'untouchable'?

7: There is a great deal of satire in your books about modern life in the UK (or perhaps just in Wales). Why do you think your books have been so popular around the world despite this? And will you be buying shares in Goliath Corporation?

8: What's next for Thursday Next?






1: Before being published you had a long & successful career behind camera on some famous films. Can you tell us about that?

Sure. I began as a teaboy and office 'runner' in Shepperton studios in 1981 on a film called 'Pirates of Penzance'. The copyright to all the Gilbert & Sullivan operas had just come into the public domain, so quite a few people were making them. Oddly enough, the BBC did six of them in the same time that we did one! Ah, those oft-remembered carefree days! The Xerox photocopier only did one copy at a time. You fed it in, waited about twenty seconds and the faded copy veeeeeery slowly came out of a slot at the bottom. Multiple copies of callsheets and stuff were done on an ink-transfer printing machine called a Gestetner. Proper photocopying had to be sent 'to London'. We made coffee the same way, though. The star of the show was an actor named Rex Smith who everyone thought was going to be a huge hit but we never heard from him again. An unknown named Kevin Kline as the pirate king stole the show, along with Angela Lansbury and Linda Ronstadt. My first film a musical - I would meet crew members years later still humming the tunes, and I have a couple of props in my house even now.

After that, I gradually worked my way up through the ranks, ending up in the camera department, a focus puller on films such as 'Goldeneye', 'Entrapment', 'The Mask of Zorro' and 'The Saint.' Look carefully and you can even see me in the 'making of' documentary! By 2000 I was beginning to make the move to being a cameraman which means taking a very long slide down the ladder; I did about 10 low budget/no budget shorts and one commercial - for Mr Kipling's French Fancies, as it happens (it's a sort of cake) when all of a sudden a hobby which I had begun ten years previously suddenly bore fruit. The hobby? Writing!

2: The Eyre Affair was not your first book, and not the first to be rejected by a publisher either! What made you keep writing, and how did you feel when your book was finally published?

I think I had 76 rejections, which, when you consider they were over ten years, shows I wasn't really trying that hard! I kept on writing because I enjoyed it. Once the first two books were roundly rejected I really thought it was possible - even probable - that I would never be published. But it didn't really matter as I was enjoying the process. In fact, it was a tremendous release - since I was not going to be published it didn't matter what I wrote. Crimean war? No problem! Reengineered dodos? Bring them on! Catching meteorites with pitchers gloves? Go for it! So in a strange sort of way the rejection actually helped. I didn't have to play it safe or have an audience or publisher in mind - I just wrote it for myself. Then, when I was finally picked up they did so because my novels were -how shall we put it? Unusual. The weakness - the oddity of my books - had become the strength. The lesson here for would be writers is clear - write your own material and ignore publishers who tell you what people will read!

3: What has been the response around the world to a fairly unusual set of books?

Strangely enough, fairly uniform. I had thought readers in the US might not 'get it' but I was delightfully surprised that they did very much 'get it' - sometimes in ways that the English audiences didn't. It has been well received in Australia and New Zealand where its subversive treatment of the classics seems to hit the right post-colonial nerve. The thing is, what I am doing in very simple terms is to tap into a large collective memory and consciousness - the way we were taught English, the way we were all meant to regard the classics as some sort of hallowed ground. I always thought the classics were meant for reading, not study. As soon as one became a 'study text' a stormcloud of pompous academia used to gather and spoiled their true lustre - I now find other people thought the same. To have fun with material that was treated so seriously when you were growing up has a sort of mildly subversive air, I feel - and with a bit of luck I can help readers look at the classics and Shakespeare from a new and unusual angle.

4:Is there one author who has been a great influence on your work? (Sorry, I know you've been asked this a million times, but it's one people always want to know...)

Probably 'Alice in Wonderland' as it was the first book I remember picking up to read of my own volition, aged perhaps eight or nine. The Cheshire Cat's nonsequitous behavior, the Duchess, the 'off with his head!' Queen of Hearts, and croquet with flamingos and hedgehogs are as familiar to me as my own backyard. I think the mix of highbrow and nonsense greatly appealed to me; Lewis Carroll was an extremely intelligent man yet could make humorous connections in his writings that are as fresh, full of genuine charm and as delightful now as they were in the late nineteenth century. I still have that very same copy of 'Alice' in my library today. In many ways Thursday is Alice, guiding us through her own wonderland and like Alice, never seems to be that surprised by what happens!

5: You maintain an extensive website which introduces readers to BookWorld and entertains fans. How important is reader feedback to you?

Feedback is a double-edged sword, really. I want to make sure that readers get the most out of my books but I also want to keep them guessing. I note what gets posted on the forum and read letters that people very kindly send me, but I try to stay independent, hoping that what I find amusing, readers might too. I suppose the thing to try and do is give people what they want - but not in the manner they expect it

6: What are the burdens, responsibilities and advantages of creating a series with popular characters and the odd famous literary figure? And are there any literary figures who are just too 'untouchable'?

Well, using literary characters I have to be careful to get them 'right'. Although my books can and do have appeal to people who are not literary scholars I wanted them to appeal to the English majors too, so when I am going to subvert a character like Jane Eyre or Miss Havisham, I need to know what they would do and how they might react and then add a few plausible embellishments of my own - Miss Havisham's love of fast cars, for instance. In 'The Well of Lost Plots' I wanted a rage counseling session inside 'Wuthering Heights' so had to read the book again in order to know the characters well enough so I can gather them in a room and have them all talking to one another - and not be rumbled by a 'Wuthering Heights' fan. It's attention to detail, really.

Untouchable literary figures? Some, perhaps. Scout Finch from 'To Kill a Mocking Bird' always struck me as such a great character that subverting her in any manner would be disrespectful and do no service to the original novel. But that's more of a modern classic, isn't it? I prefer to stay with the cobwebs of the classics where they have grown hardened with age - and no novelists around to accuse me of copyright infringements, either!

7: There is a great deal of satire in your books about modern life in the UK (or perhaps just in Wales). Why do you think your books have been so popular around the world despite this? And will you be buying shares in Goliath Corporation?

'Despite this'? Do you think people don't like satire? On the contrary, I think they love it, although to be honest I use satire for two reasons: firstly because it makes Thursday's world instantly recognizable as something very like our own. Meddling governments, scheming multinationals, bureaucracy gone mad - all of these we can see around us and it makes Thursday's struggle more like our own. Secondly, it's just great fun and highly desirable to show up the utter pointlessness of some rules and regulations in our world and the sometimes excruciatingly banality of television - and a whole host of other modern ills.

8: What's next for Thursday Next?

The fourth installment in the Thursday Next series, 'Something Rotten' will be coming out in the UK/US this August. I don't want to give too much of the book away but suffice to say that Thursday arrives back in Swindon two years later to discover that a lot has changed while she has been away. Yorrick Kaine has seized power, Goliath are threatening to change to a faith-based corporate management system, and the winning of the 1988 World Croquet League SuperHoop (as foretold in the Seventh Revealment of St Zvlkx) is inextricably linked to the fall of Kaine and Goliath.

Characters that were absent from 'The Well of Lost Plots' have guest appearances in the new book, most notably Spike, Mycroft and Polly, Joffy, Thursday's Mum, Emma Hamilton - and of course, Landen.





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