Interviews: the best of

A selection of my favourite interviews and guest posts. Waffling ahoy!

June 2011: The Victorianist
'I love the characterisation in Jude the Obscure. Little Time is a lot like me as a child (which is a bit worrying, really!).'

March 2011: Dear Author
'So [Henry Shadwell from Trades of the Flesh is] a contradiction, really, which makes him feel real and alive for me, and it's hard to pigeonhole him as either fitting the classic image of the Victorian man or being more modern – like most people in most times, he's a mixture of good and bad qualities.'

November 2010: MNWers blog
'I think my Muse wears a waistcoat and top hat and carries a cane. At least, I like to think so.'

April 2010: Normblog writer's choice
'On her way home, [Fanny Stanton of Penelope Lively's Fanny and the Monsters] watches her Aunt Caroline struggling to fit the voluminous skirts of her widow's weeds through the door of the train, noting that she seems 'equally ill-adapted to the world' as the dinosaurs, and Fanny ponders whether Aunt Caroline and women like her are also heading for extinction. But the world is not yet sufficiently in sympathy with Fanny's progressive views as to allow her clemency when she raises the subject of evolution at the dinner table...'

October 2009: Preston Writing Network
'I was a toddler when I saw a cartoon adaptation of The Hobbit, and I zeroed in on the character you'd probably expect to be frightening for a small child - Gollum. I promptly named skeletons "Smeagols", and I was fascinated with them too. (The skeletons in Funnybones were Smeagols to me thereafter.) I read a lot of children's books with witches in them, and despite being a child myself, I was just as enthralled with Roald Dahl's monstrous, child-hating Grand High Witch as I was with friendly witchy protagonists like Meg (of Meg and Mog) and Heggerty Haggerty. As I grew into adolescence, I made my mark in my English coursework by "sympathising with the devil"; looking at the story from the point of view of the characters that were presented to us as villains or antagonists.'

September 2009: Madame Guillotine
'"Oh, I'm a seduced milliner – anything you like." That was the rather cynical and dismissive response Victorian prostitute 'Lushing Loo' gave the sociologist Henry Mayhew when he asked her how she had ended up in her profession, and who can blame her? Whether out of genuine social concern, voyeurism or a penchant for poverty tourism, a number of Learned Men of the period, from Mayhew to Charles Booth (no relation to me, at least as far as I'm aware), did seem to enjoy cornering prostitutes in pubs and quizzing them about their lifestyles, which I imagine caused no end of irritation to those who were busy trying to catch a little trade and/or drink themselves silly. Lushing Loo, Mayhew tells us, went on to treat him to a soused rendition of one of her favourite songs – oh, to have been a fly on the wall!'

September 2009: MNWers blog
'I can't understand why we have such a double standard where stereotyping is concerned: if an author were to write a contemporary novel populated with cookie-cutter characters taken from lazy stereotypes of groups of people (based on age, sex, race, sexual orientation, nationality or whatever), any decent editor or agent would quite rightly pull them up on it during the edit or reject the book outright, but when the group of people in question are those who lived at a certain time, it's widely accepted and even expected.'

September 2009: Nik Perring's blog
'I think I avoided one of the common struggles of writers working on their second novels, a lot of whom reportedly find, if they begin writing Book Two after Book One has been published or accepted for publication, that they are consumed with performance anxiety – that "dance as if there's nobody looking" situation no longer applies, and the author is left wondering: will Those In Power like their second novel as much as they liked their first, or will they hear those words that are dreaded by artists of all stripes: "I prefer your older work to your newer work"?'