Feral to domestication

Hello my little chickadees

My latest victim I kept in my cave far longer than any of the others. Why you ask? Simply because Rosemary Tantra Bensko tried to be funnier than me !!!!

Actually if I'm honest she was. However that's no excuse, so she spent an extra few days in there, without any facilities (if you know what I mean)

She smells a bit better than I expected so that's a double bonus. 

Here we go then....

                             

 BIO 

Tantra Bensko turned feral after six years teaching in-person in universities and obtaining her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lived with bears, eating from the same uva ursi bushes, and in a packing crate washed up on the shore so she could be part of a sea lion clan, and she avoided any shelter in red canyons, snowy mountains, wet caves. Even when renting places to live, she slept in the yard, or the porch. Though she has since become domesticated, she still howls and regularly creeps around in the dark playing with a long piece of bamboo. She finds humans quite strange and curious creatures.

Where do you live?

In an apartment in this little missing puzzle piece of Oakland, which is called the Lorin District of Berkeley. So if you walk in any of three directions, you see a sign that says, Welcome to Oakland. There is also a statue near me on the Berkeley side of the border that spells out HERE. And a statue on the Oakland side that spells out THERE. So, apparently, I’m here.

Hobbies

Dancing. I’m decades older than the other people on the floor, but, hell. I’ve

got more practice. I’ll show those rascals how it’s done.

 Pets – furry or human?

 I hang out with the cellar spiders in the corners. One, Octavia, likes to be as   

 close to me as she can, so when I was sleeping low to the floor, she lived

 under the nearby table. When I moved up to a higher mattress, she moved

 up too. 

I also love the house finch in the yard. I try to imitate him. One time he tried

to teach me his song, note by note, until he decided I was hopeless. We still

talk sometimes, but not like that one time. I still hold out hope. But I look

away, instead of staring, as don’t want to make him uncomfortable by

putting him under any pressure. Instead, I think guilt might work better if

he sees me languishing on the doorsill, my chirps growing softer and more fragile 

and longingly hopeless.

What you do to chill out?

 Lately, I’ve been getting into my pleasure fort. I haven’t found an

 apartment-mate lately, so I have the extra bedroom to myself. Might as

 well make use of it! So, I put a soft cloth on the floor and tall chairs in there

 and hung a tapestry over it, facing the closet, with the rosy light of a salt lamp

 in the dark. In there I enjoy skin-playing with things like a ceremonially wrapped owl 

 feather, ice cubes and a fan, a rose scented beeswax candle with lovely warm wax to drip, 

 a teeny broom....and oh so much more.

Day job?

I teach fiction writing online with UCLA, Writers.com, and my own academy. I adore it.

Tell me about your books. When you first started writing. How many completed. Work in progress?

I started writing as a child, and knew I wanted to be an author. I’ve had quite a few Literary books published, but the recent one, Glossolalia: Psychological Suspense, is the only one published so far which is intended to be accessible to a reasonably large audience. “What if your subconscious determined the fate of nations?” It’s been called a breakneck, high octane, kick-ass Political Thriller.

Nancy works at a pesticide company and there’s a chemical which is legally deemed too toxic to use or to dump. My father owned one, and there was such a chemical, which they stored in a big container indefinitely. In the novel, Nancy notices it being transported away, and when she chases the waste truck, she goes down the metaphorical rabbit hole.

It’s part of a seven book series called The Agents of the Nevermind, which is an intelligence agency using disinformation, propaganda, hypnosis, drugs, media theater, mind control, occult practices, blackmail and so forth to protect official lies. I’ve written the other ones, and will revise them all drastically before they each come out. I’m working on the second one now, called Remember to Recycle. The series theme is the heroism of recognizing, resisting, and exposing social engineering. AKA – State-sponsored perception management.

If you could have any animal from time immemorial as a pet for long freezing days and nights, what would you choose and why?

A Slow Loris would make the time go faster.

Do you prefer heat OR cold?

This is the Bay Area. There’s not usually an OR there. Think microclimates on speed.

Fantasy holiday… Where would you choose to go if someone else was picking up the tab?

Does that mean I could permanently bankrupt the person who left a 2-star Amazon review by going to Venus on his tab? If not, I’d pick Romania.

Are you with a traditional publisher or self-published?

I’ve had hundreds of stories as well as lot of poems and articles, chapbooks, collections, and a novella published by other presses. But now I’m indie all the way. I wouldn’t want to give up control of a book any more. I published other people’s obscure literary chapbooks with my press and now am focusing on putting out my Agents of the Nevermind series. Yeehaw!

Favourite meal (hot and cold)?

Hot – Sweat - Cold – mushy persimmons.

Favourite drink (hot and cold)?

Hot – Ginger tea - Cold- Mead.

How hard do you find book promotion?

Depends on whether I lick it and flick it.

Any tips or hints you’ve found that were successful for you in promotion?

Be rich. That seems to work for people.

Favourite genres to read and write?

My series is Psychological Suspense/Thillers. Wait, fiction manuscript editors/fiction writing instructors read fiction for fun?

You’ve set up your own publishing house using FB writer friends to help run it. What would you name it? Who would you choose to run the different departments? As the owner, how would you ensure the FB staff achieved success?

My actual publishing company is called LucidPlay (Insubordinate Books is the imprint for my own books.). Emily Kiernan would be fun to hire for editing, and brilliant literary cocktails. Mia Avramut for art and adventuresome international relations. Teri Lee Kline for author interviews and setting up deliciously unavoidable readings. Thaisa Frank for book descriptions and clever media quotes.

I believe blackmail is generally considered effective. So, I’d have to do something shamefully wonderful with them and secretly record it. They’d know that if it were to be released to the world, everyone would implode with envy. They’ve have compassion for their fellow man, and buckle down and get to work, and do whatever it took to make the press go wild.

http://flameflower.wix.com/glossolalia-suspense

http://flameflower.wix.com/glossolalia-suspense 

Website for Glossolalia

http://flameflower.wix.com/agentsofthenevermind

http://flameflower.wix.com/agentsofthenevermind 

Website for Agents of the Nevermind series

http://www.insubordinatebooks.com/

http://www.insubordinatebooks.com/ 

Website for Insubordinate Books

Well my little chickadees, what can I say except I'm going for a lay down to recover.

Laters Potaters

The Seasoned Traveller

 Hello my little chickadees 

I discovered recently through Wikipedia that chickadees are a group of North American birds in the tit family. Species found in North America are referred to as chickadees, while other species in the genus are called tits. Their name reputedly comes from the fact that their calls make a distinctive "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" sound. So there you go, that's something else you've learnt. Ok so many of you smart pants out there are going to tell me that you knew that.... tips hat.

Anyhows, today on my blog I have a very seasoned traveller, Sheila Mary Taylor Belshaw aka Sheila Mary Belshaw aka Sheila Mary Taylor the author, who hails from Cape Town, Menorca, and the UK, depending on the time of the year.

So tell us all about yourself Sheila.

Hi Tee, I’m thrilled to be interviewed by you, one of my longest standing writing friends. And being one of many admirers of your lovely books, it is indeed an honour.

Tee Why thank you my friend. You can leave any loose change in the plate at the bottom of the page :-) 

Bio

Do you want the book, or the shorter version? Well, I’m sure it will be the shorter version, and I presume you want the unedited version, because reading your very vibrant blog, I gather you don’t like your victims to stand on ceremony, but to tell it how it is, warts and all. So here it is in a nutshell …

Eldest daughter of two of the most wonderfully academic Scottish academics I have ever known - a lecturer in psychology and behaviorial science, and a teacher of English – both published writers, so I’m not surprised, looking back, that I was a rebel. Doing no school work because there were so many more exciting things to do in Cape Town (what an amazing place to grow up in!) – riding, trick-skating in nightclubs, hunting, dancing, swimming, climbing Table Mountain, camping, lady jockey at the races – and then scraping through my exams by only revising the night before so that the academic parents decided I was not academic material and did not send me to university !!! Nor did they let me pursue my dream to be a famous ballet dancer!

My rebellion was to escape to the UK to further my dance career, but instead I met my future life partner –the irresistible Colin Belshaw, a brilliant mining engineer who would give me a privileged life and three wonderful sons.

Writing? Oh yes, it was always in the back of my mind, striving to get out, but because I thought you had to have a degree to be a writer … sadly I was a very late starter.

Editing. Another late start. I developed this skill when I worked closely with Penguin, who published my mother’s three works of fiction thirty years after her death. This led to her winning the South African Posthumous Literary Award, and I consider this four-year labour of love – editing her long-lost unpublished manuscripts – my most important literary achievement. I then went on to edit books for friends, and was later employed by Taylor Street Publishers of San Francisco as their chief editor – a job I absolutely adored. 

Where do you live

This is always a difficult question, especially when you have to fill in forms and state your address and phone number. Colin and I are nomads. We live in the UK, Menorca, and Cape Town. All three homes are home. When I open the front door, I am home, never on holiday, although they say that a change is as good as a holiday! I have not experienced a winter since 1998.

Hobbies

Past hobbies? Calligraphy, believe it or not. And illuminated manuscripts! And taking photos and sticking them into albums! Remember that? But making up stories about the photos so that the album read like a book … I suppose this was the unborn writer in me, bursting to be released …

Photography has now become my main hobby and I would like to go on a course to become a better photographer.

Please note that I do not consider writing to be a hobby, but as my raison d’etre...

I have always loved listening to classical music, especially Beethoven and Mozart, and I do still dance – twice a week at the Fitness League. I have other hobbies, but for instance you would probably consider that sticking off-cuts of my favourite plants into washed-out wine bottles and when you see the roots growing, sticking them into flower pots, to be child’s play …

Pets – furry or human

Cats we can’t have because Col is allergic to them, but when we lived in Zambia (for 33 years) we always had dogs. Poodles took the place of my children when they went to boarding school, and I ended up breeding them and teaching myself to clip them because where we lived, no-one else could do it. As a teenager, my horses were also my pets, and one of them used to follow me into the house, walking through it as though it was perfectly normal for horses to walk around in houses, pushing me along, nuzzling me with his lovely soft nose … Oh, don’t get me started …

What do you do to chill out

I drink two glasses of pink wine every evening. Never more. Never less. Not because that’s the limit, but because my body tells me it is, and gone are the days when I didn’t care if I had a hangover or not. Although sometimes – not very often – I might be tempted! But I’m not. Oh, and because I love it, and because I am always the driver!

But my real chill-out moments are walking on the beach. There’s nothing like it to make the soul soar into the realms of fantasy and freedom – of a feeling that raw nature is what life is all about. The wind in your hair, the clouds, the mountains, the smell of the sea, the roar of the waves, the birds, the dolphins, the grasses swaying gracefully on the dunes … Fish Hoek Beach in Cape Town is the best beach in the whole world. Every day I get up at dawn and drive to the beach, my camera charged and ready to record the most beautiful sunrises ever seen. And not just sunrises, but life and nature and like-minded people who find joy in the wonder of nature. I have travelled a lot and have never found anywhere else on earth that is quite like this.

Day job

My day job was first to love my parents, who looking back were quite extraordinary, and then to love my husband and my children, and all the wonderful people I have known who have contributed to this amazing life that I am lucky enough to still be living as though I am a mere twenty-year-old. 

But that’s not really what you wanted to know, is it, Tee? Day job? Well I’ve had lots, but my day job now is to keep my husband well and happy, under the dire circumstances that we both try very hard to keep our heads above.

Tell me about your books Sheila. When you first started writing. How many completed. Work in progress

When did I first start writing? I wrote a poem when I was about ten. My mother sent it to the Cape Times and it was published. I wrote twenty-page letters to my aunts and cousins in far-away Scotland. When I left home I wrote on those flimsy blue airmail letters to my mother every week until she died.  But as I said earlier, I didn’t always want to be a writer because I was convinced you had to have a degree in English; I wanted to be a dancer …     

It took a near tragedy to start writing in earnest when my beautiful youngest son Andrew was diagnosed with OsteoSarcoma at the age of eighteen and given a 15% chance of survival. “Fly With A Miracle” (now “Count to Ten”) was the result of my feverish scribblings on scraps of paper while sitting at his bedside hour after hour, day after day, month after month, wondering whether he was going to live or die.  

How many manuscripts are completed

Ten, all published. A few more unpublished but still on the back burner. The first five, published by traditional publishers, are long out of print: four romances, The Nightingale Will Sing , Diamonds of the Sun, Savage Paradise, The Shadow of the Flame, published by Thorpe Publishing (only after Mills & Boon rejected them because the plots were too “complicated”!); and Fly With a Miracle by Denor Press, London.

Then when the digital age exploded I took a plunge into the e-book revolution with my first legal crime thriller – Pinpoint, published by Taylor Street, and was a best seller in the top 1,000 on Amazon.com for four months. Taylor Street (no relation to me!) also published Count to Ten (the rewrite of Fly With a Miracle), Dance to a Tangled Web, Golden Sapphire, and Eldorado. And these were all later published by Precious Oil. My latest book – Lari’s Castle was published by Bardel, who have also re-published Pinpoint, Eldorado, and Dance to a Tangled Web, and are planning to re-publish all my other books in the very near future.

                 

Work in progress 

Silent Justice. The first book I have ever struggled to finish. It’s a legal thriller set in Cape Town, and its progress has been severely curtailed by the circumstances of my husband’s serious illness. But I’m pressing on, and I will finish it soon! After that I am going to rewrite those very early published romances, putting back all the spicy bits that at the time had to be removed!

If you could have any animal from time immemorial as a pet for long freezing days and nights, what would you choose and why

Definitely not a rabbit or a rhino or a rat or a reindeer. Nothing from time immemorial. A Poodle, of course, like the lovely apricot Poodles I use to breed long ago. They are almost human and you can talk to them and they talk back to you, and they love you unreservedly.

Do you prefer heat OR cold

I think that has to be heat. We lived in Zambia for many years, as well as Tanzania and Ghana, so I am more used to heat than cold. I remember choosing the European winter for our long leave from these tropical countries, and skiing in Switzerland and Yugoslavia were our favourites. How exhilarating it was to feel the tingle of cold air on our faces!

Fantasy holiday… 

Where would you choose to go if someone else was picking up the tab

Wow! Tee, if you’d asked me this twenty or thirty or forty years ago, I’d have said Las Vegas or the Maldives or Hong Kong. But actually my secret dream is Katmandu. Long ago I read a wonderful book by Han Suyin called The Mountain is Young, set in Katmandu. (She also wrote the best seller “A Many Splendored Thing”, made into a film). I still read it regularly. I fell in love with Katmandu and wanted more than anything else to go there, but it never happened. It’s too late now, but I can still dream, can’t I …

Are you with a traditional publisher or self published

Because I’ve been published by both I suppose the modern word for this is Hybrid … )

Favourite meal (hot and cold)

I’m extremely lucky that my darling husband Col is the main cook these days, even though I once did a Cordon Bleu Cookery course in London because of all the entertaining I had to do in Zambia. He cooks the main meal every night (I do the breakfasts and lunches) and I have to say that I love all his meals, but my favourite has to be roast lamb and all the trimmings! Followed by a Mini Magnum chocolate ice cream!

Favourite drink (hot and cold)

Pink wine, of course! There’s nothing to beat it. Rosé. Rosado. And Pink Champagne. Why? Because it’s delicious, and because white wine gives me gout. And red wine puts me under the table! My favourite hot drink is Rooibos Tea, which is grown in the Western Cape of South Africa, has no caffeine and no tannin and is full of things that are very good for you.

How hard do you find book promotion

Far too hard to do. And I’m useless at it anyway. Which is why none of my books are selling at the moment. I didn’t realise, but I do now, how lucky I was when my first five books were published by traditional publishers who also did the promotion. And also when Tim Roux first published my books, starting with Pinpoint, and somehow he managed to promote them as well, so that I had all the time to write, plus a very nice little income, thank you very much, which sadly came to an end when Taylor Street Publishing was closed, and I also lost my job as their chief editor.

Any tips or hints you’ve found that were successful for you in promotion 

I wish I could answer this one, Tee, but I can’t. My own fault, I know, but I just wasn’t born with the ability to sell things. Some people are, and I envy them. It’s a gift. I probably couldn’t sell a bucket of water in a drought …

Favourite genres to read and write

I’ve never really put the books I love into a “genre”. I love books that explore psychological problems. I love books that feature a character who is flawed, or damaged, or has been wrongly accused of something. And I love books that admit that there are very few problems in life that do not have romance at the core. I did write a few “romances” when I first started writing, but this was only because one of the writer circles I joined said you had to write “romance” because this was the way to fame and fortune! But Mills & Boon turned down all my romances because the plots were too “complicated” … and … well they had things in them that their readers would be shocked at! They were eventually published by Thorpe, but only when I cut out the “complications”! So to answer your question, I always seem to read books by authors who have a deep understanding of human nature, with some mystery and some romance in them too.

And I suppose this is also what I love to write. But I cannot categorize it into a genre. Something triggers a spark. I see a difficult situation. One sentence drums into my subconscious and suddenly it grows tentacles and it’s a paragraph, and then it’s a page, and it keeps growing from this one magical germ, and I don’t know where it’s going to lead, but the more I write, the more it grows and the people in it become real people and they have problems, and then they start writing the book themselves, so every day I wonder what is going to happen next …

Oh, the joy of writing!

You’ve set up your own publishing house using FB writer friends to help run it. What would you name it? Who would you choose to run the different departments? As the owner, how would you ensure the FB staff achieved success

I have to smile at this question, Tee. There is absolutely no way I could set up my own publishing house! And what would I name it? “Last Chance Publishers”?

Okay, you win. So in my dreams I’ve set it up. Who do I choose to run it? Well, nobody would be better than you. And clearly I’m the chief editor, for the same reason! You are also the blog expert. Poppet has to be the cover designer and John Holt on the techie side. Nobody to beat them. And then there’s the very important editorial committee who’ll decide which books we will publish – all of them writers I admire:  Gerry McCullough, Babs Morton, Nigel Lampard, Mel Comley, and lots of others who know who they are, so we can have a party when we’ve finished choosing the books …

Amazon.com Author Page:

https://www.amazon.com/Sheila-Mary-Taylor/e/B001KMO6S4/ref

 https://www.amazon.com/Sheila-Mary-Taylor/e/B001KMO6S4/ref

Amazon.co.uk Author Page:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sheila-Mary-Taylor/e/B001KMO6S4/ref

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sheila-Mary-Taylor/e/B001KMO6S4/ref

Link to Pinpoint YouTube Book Trailer:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Ou3N7hx8Qwww.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Ou3N7hx8Q

Thank you Sheila for agreeing to 'hang around' in my chilly wet cave and I'm happy to see you survived !

 Laters Potaters

Off the wall and insane

Hello my little chickadees

On my blog today I have an off the wall, insane nutter (her words). Consequently we really get along as Bev is almost as crazy as me. No one is crazier that me, take my word for it.

So then here she is. Take it away Bev Allen

                                                      

BIO

“Bev is married and mother of two adult children….” 

Or, Bev is a crazy old woman who writes weird short stories about things like a bloke having sex with his garden pond and, when she has remembered her medication, sci-fic/fantasy adventures liberally laced with soldiers. She has a fondness for soldiers which should not be taken to mean she stands on street corners in garrison towns.

Where do you live?

Slap bang in the middle of the English Sires, in a town with a bleeding castle for god’s sake!. Me, a died in the wool South London working class girl with the sort of accent that makes the middle classes check their wallet and count the cutlery. How the hell did that happen? I think I wasn’t paying attention one day and someone kidnapped me.

Hobbies

I make patchwork quilts and before you get any ideas about sewing bees, Laura Ashley hexagons and dear old ladies sitting around peering over their glasses and silver thimbles twinkling in the candle light, you need to understand todays quilters have moved on are, by and large half way around the bend with a fabric addition which makes crack cocaine look like mild sedative.

Pets – furry or human

Furry. Very, very furry. An old git of a Birman called Fitzwilliam Darcy Big Chief Paddy Paws Our Cat Allen. He hates my husband just as much as my husband hates him and I think he plans to live forever just to annoy the old man.

What you do to chill out

I like a sauna. I think I might have been a lizard in a former life, an iguana perhaps, or maybe a kormdo dragon. (BTW, the spell checker wanted that to be a condom dragon)

TEE   Dontcha just love spellcheck

Day job

It’s been a while since anyone paid me, but should anyone ever do so, it will probably be for some research work, usually military. The last lot was for work on Delhi Durbars…I only mention it because it isn’t often you get the chance to slip “Delhi Durbar” into the conversation without people giving you a funny look.

 Tell me about your books. When you first started writing. How many completed. Work in progress?

As I said, I write two sorts of things, the long stuff is the sci-fic/fantasy adventure stuff and the shorter fiction is the weird, thrill or chill, take your pick.

I can’t remember when I started writing, but I do know it was a defence mechanism. I have all these people in my head and they all have stories and if I leave them in there they cause problems, mainly by making me what I like to call absent minded, but my family refer to as “crazy as a box of biscuits”. If I write them down, they aren’t in my head and I can go to the shops for bread and milk and not come back with a tin of smoked oysters and an avocado.

What really got me started was being one of the winners of SFX magazine’s short story competition. On the strength of this I got a commission from Big Finish.

I got to write a DR. WHO story! And I got paid for it and it is in a HARDBACK book! AND…Tom Baker himself signed my copy.

(Pause for dealing with family who are groaning and saying “is she doing the Dr. Who happy dance again?”).

TEE   Blimey!! Go Bev!!

My first book “Jabin” is the story of an unwanted, unloved kid searching for security and a place to call home. His struggles are set against a world dealing with terrorism, religious fundamentalism and political unrest. Yeah, yeah, I was making a point, but I mixed in loads of action and some sex and some violence and a positive ending (sort of), so what is not to like? And lots of soldiers, as I said before, I like soldiers.

Book two is also me on one of hobby horses, the environment. This time my young hero is not a victim, in fact being one for five minutes would probably do him a lot of good. “The Tattooed Tribes” is an adventure story set on a forest world; a tribal maiden has been kidnapped on her wedding day and if there is not going to be a blood bath something is going to have to be done about it. Enter my heroes. Less violence, less sex, no soldiers, but lots and lots of trees and bushcraft.

“Solemn Curfew” is a novella I wrote for a big anthology which disappeared when the company publishing it did the same. It’s about cooking and greed and thwarted ambition. If you like your mushrooms blue and your cooking done by naked men, this is for you.

WIP is a sort of fantasy adventure book (but no magic, I can’t do magic, it feels like cheating) about a bastard prince who rebels against his king and is defeated in battle. Rather than being chopped as the little bugger deserves he is given a second chance by the mercenary commander ( woo hoo…soldiers) who helped beat him. What follows is a rite of passage story with muskets.

I like muskets, they go bang and black powder smells SO pretty.

I’m also working a couple of short stories for the horror/dark fantasy market, one is about slugs and a stick blender, the other is about a werewolves and the perfumery trade.

If you could have any animal from time immemorial as a pet for long freezing days and nights, what would you choose and why?

I like orangutans. They’re orange. And if you’re lucky they turn out to be librarians.

TEE  Note to self.... double check medication given to the victims in cave. I wonder if there is a gas leak in there somewhere? 

Do you prefer heat OR cold?

Either, so long as its dry heat or cold. Sogginess in all forms is repellant.

Fantasy holiday… Where would you choose to go if someone else was picking up the tab?

Obviously I want to go to Vulcan, but in the absence of warp drive I suppose I’d settle for Tahiti or Tonga or even Fiji. Hell…why be picky if someone else is picking up the bill, I’ll have an extended tour of Polynesia taking in Hawaii.

Are you with a traditional publisher or self published?

The books are currently published by Wild Wolf, but the novella “A Solemn Curfew” is self-published. The short stories are either with various publishers or on my web site.

http://www.bevallenauthor.com

Favourite meal (hot and cold)?

Hot …Shellfish linguine with loads of shellfish. I love shellfish, in fact I have never met a marine mollusc I didn’t like.

Cold… Caviar. You can muck it about with chopped egg and sour cream and blinis if you really feel the need, but all I need is a spoon.

Favourite drink (hot and cold)?

I like gin. I like it with tonic, ice and a slice of cucumber (not lemon or lime, the acid upsets the gin).

And I like coffee, using like as in “I like to breathe”.

How hard do you find book promotion?

Like shoving a red hot boulder up a steep slope well-greased with melting lard

Any tips or hints you’ve found that were successful for you in promotion?

None, but if you know some I’m prepared to offer you my first born. He’s tall enough to be very useful when it comes to high cupboards and he can fry chicken a treat. I will deliver him free if you can come up with something.

TEE  Can I have him anyway Bev? He sounds perfect.

Favourite genres to read and write?

I read fantasy and cosy crime mainly, but I have some odd tastes in non-fiction stuff which I won’t list because it tends to confirm everyone’s suspicions about me. If I tell you the last book I bought was on ritual sacrifices, you’ll get the picture.

To write, I think I like the weird best, I can’t seem to sustain it over a whole novel, but I can turn your stomach in about 5,000 words on a good day, but I like writing the longer stuff as well because it gives me time and space to explore people and their darker side.

Try being the fat, bespectacled kid of an abusive bully of a father and you really understand the dark side.

You’ve set up your own publishing house using FB writer friends to help run it. What would you name it? Who would you choose to run the different departments? As the owner, how would you ensure the FB staff achieved success

LOL, now we really are pumping the depths of fantasy.

Name….”Prospero Publishing”. ( Because …”we are such things as dreams are made of….)

I’ve no idea who to get to do the work, I don’t think I’d be mean enough to ask any of them. Cruel and unusual punishment. (Mmm…there’s an idea for a shortie, I must work on it)

As owner I would have no idea how to make it work, I can’t get my own stuff to sell, so how the hell I would sell other people’s I do not know.

If you push me for a sensible answer (you’re mean and I may stamp my foot at you) I think it would have to be a co-operative with everyone fronting up money for publicity which would be shared equally with all authors and I think every penny earned in royalties would have to be ploughed back into more publicity for at least five years. Tough on anyone who suddenly becomes the next JKR, but probably the only way.

Phew...there you have it folks.

Laters Potaters