UK novelist Cecilia Busby joins My Book Corner as part of the inaugural #UKMG Extravaganza tour, answering our infamous set of questions.
Keep reading for a truly wonderful sneak peek exclusive, (HUGE thank you Cecilia, the cake is in the post!), and it just goes to show inspiration for your writing can be lurking anywhere ….
Tell us about you in 25 words or less.
I grew up on barges and spent my childhood trying to find Narnia. Now I write fantasy adventure stories, mostly in my pyjamas.
What makes you happy?
Umm…. I’m lucky enough to live in north Devon, near the border with Cornwall. So it’s hard to beat a long walk on the beach with the kids and coming home to a roaring log fire and afternoon tea. But then again, a sunny day and great surf followed by fish and chips is also pretty good. I guess the theme is beach, family and food.
Where have you always wanted to visit, but haven’t made it to … yet?
I’d love to drive through some of the amazing landscapes of the US – those incredible rock formations in Arizona, or the Nevada desert. Ever since I heard you could get paid to drive someone’s car from the East to West coast I’ve fancied doing that – but boring things like money and children at school have so far held me back. Maybe one day I can be an adventurous granny, driving an open-top sports car down Highway 51 with the radio on full blast!
Where is your favourite place to write?
I have two favourite places: one is the kitchen, sitting at a big old pine table opposite a window that looks out on the garden (usually it’s a mess of weeds but if you don’t look too hard, it’s just nice and green!) The other place, when I’m really stuck, is in bed with a mug of tea and a notebook on my knees. In the winter, both places require a hot-water bottle on my lap to stop me freezing (the house is old and very draughty…)
How did the world for the Amber Trilogy first emerge?
The starting point for that story was when a pair of swimming goggles in a flowery bag appeared on my staircase. They didn’t belong to us, none of the kids recognized them, and no one had visited that day. So where did they come from? I still have no idea! It got me thinking about parallel worlds, and the idea that objects might fall through a hole from one to another. It explains all those things that just disappear – you know, you left them on the table but they’ve just gone. Sometimes they reappear right where you left them – which would be when they fall back again through the same hole. So I thought I’d start from that – and then I had to work out why these things were slipping form one world to another and what the different worlds were. I knew one would be ours – the ‘normal’ everyday world – but the story really took off when I started imagining a pair of swimming goggles appearing in a magic, castles-and-knights kind of world – and that became the opening scene of Deep Amber. The other books in the trilogy have two new worlds in them: in one there’s a swashbuckling pirate (based on the old black-and-white Errol Flynn films I loved when I was a child), and the other’s based on Ancient Assyria, because I liked the idea of creating a hot, desert world with dragons and bazaars and ancient cities.
What’s the best thing about being a published author?
It’s lovely seeing the stories you’ve written actually there in front of you, in a real book – and especially when they have some fabulous illustrations (David Wyatt did the covers for the Amber trilogy but he also drew some amazing black-and-white illustrations for my earlier books, Frogspell and its sequels). But the bit that is best of all is when you meet a child who’s read your books and is a fan – or you see they’ve reviewed your book online and loved it. There’s nothing quite like that buzz of knowing someone lived in your world for the time they were reading the book, and it’s now part of their memory and history, in the way the books I read as a child became such an important part of me.
What’s the strangest question you’ve ever been asked?
I do quite a few school visits and festivals and I do get asked some odd things! What car do you drive (answer: ancient Volvo estate), “How many cats have you got?” (answer: three) and not-so-subtle attempts to find out how old I am (answer: twenty-one, of course). But probably the ones that throw me most are the ones that aren’t actually a question. I quite often get younger children putting their hand up, and when I pick them, they say: “I’ve got a new rabbit”, or ‘My cousin is called Amber”, or “I fell over in the playground and hurt my foot”. Generally I have a little bit of a conversation with them about their rabbit, or cousin, or foot, and we move on!
What’s your worst habit?
Umm. My worst habit is drinking champagne and eating caviar at two in the morning. Oh – and making things up. That’s probably my worst habit.
Your favourite word(s)?
My favourite word is a very simple one – it’s ‘said’. I almost always use it whenever someone says anything in my books, and I like it because it’s an ‘invisible’ word. It does the job without drawing attention to itself, like ‘chortled’ or ‘exclaimed’ or ‘gasped’ would. When I was about eleven, I discovered Biggles, and was amazed at the number of alternatives Captain W.E. Johns, who wrote the books, found for the word ‘said’. At the time, I thought he was pretty clever, and made a whole list of them to use in my stories – things like ‘opined lazily’ or ‘interjected waspishly’. My stories must have been a nightmare!
Can you give us a glimpse / peek / hint at your current WIP (I could bribe you with a cake!)?
Oooh – there’s nothing I’d like better! No need for cake – I’ll happily press my latest WIP on a stranger on the bus if they ask nicely! It’s called The Shoe-box Gods, and it’s a story about a boy, Ben, who gets an old shoe-box full of broken action figures at a car-boot sale: a bare-chested barbarian with a horned helmet, a wizard with one eye missing, a soldier with one hand broken off, a small green goblin, a mermaid and an Indian girl with a bow and arrows. He finds out that they are actually a bunch of the Norse gods, blasted into our world as helpless plastic figures by one of the Frost giants. (Can you guess which gods?) He and his cousin, Jess, have a whole set of adventures helping the gods get their powers back. Take a sneak peek here. I don’t have a publisher yet, but it’s out there seeking a home as we speak!
Did we forget anything?
Well, I can’t think of anything – but if anyone does have another question, they are welcome to contact me via my website to ask it – or come along to the MG Extravaganza and ask it in person!
Just for fun
Tea or coffee? Tea, but it has to be proper tea-leaves in a tea-pot. (I have been known to take my tea-pot with me on overnight stays!)
Paper books or e-books? Paper – I will read e-books if I have to, but there’s no substitute for the feel of a book in your hand, or being able to flick back and forth through the pages.
Cake or chocolate? Oooh, difficult – I love both. I think it has to be cake, for the variety (chocolate brownies come pretty close to chocolate, after all, and then there’s lemon drizzle cake, and fruit cake, and Victoria sponge, and… *goes into a happy dream state featuring quantities of cake*)
Write or type? Handwrite – badly. No point leaving my notebooks to posterity, no one will be able to decipher a word!
Poetry or prose? Prose.
Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff or Slytherin? Ha ha – good question! Of course we’d all love to be Gryffindor, wouldn’t we? I’m afraid I was always a top swot at school so I guess that makes me Ravenclaw.
Hot or cold? Hot – when things get too bad in my house and the fire’s not on, I light the oven and open the door and stand in front of it roasting my legs and basking in the hot air rising past my face. Bliss!
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