A conversation with S.P. Moss
Flying and travel are in S.P. Moss’s blood – she visited four of the world’s continents before starting school. She read avidly and wrote determinedly in between plotting to become a spy and building brother-proof camps.
She studied Psychology at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking part in some interesting experiments in parapsychology as well as playing trumpet in a Big Band.
A chance meeting in an Austrian ski hut resulted in more travel – this time to Germany, where she now lives in a small town outside Frankfurt with her husband and son. She still makes use of her trumpet-playing, spying and camp-building skills in her busy life as an author, mother and freelance marketing consultant.
The Bother in Burmeon was her first published novel. The danger, dirty deeds and derring-do continue in the sequel – or is it a prequel? – Trouble in Teutonia.
Sara Crowe – Your books The Bother in Burmeon and Trouble in Teutonia are a carnival of genres. There are strong echoes of Boy’s Own Annual adventure fiction, war stories, spy stories, historical fiction, and a nod to fantasy in the devices of the magic kaleidoscope and time travel. Are relevant storytelling traditions important to you and, if so, what do you think they offer young readers today?
S.P. Moss – A carnival of genres – I like that! I’m lucky, in a way, that in writing for children you don’t need to worry too much about which genre you’re in. I loved all the influences you mention as a child – not just in book form but also through films and TV series, and they all found their way into Burmeon and Teutonia – from Biggles to Bond, from Tintin to Thunderbirds. I suppose I could have left it at that, but I felt it important that children today should feel some sense of connection to that world, hence my main character being very much a 21st century boy. My son was born in 2000 and is partly fascinated and partly bewildered by 20th century technology – you can’t just delete everything and Play Again. And in your book Bone Jack, although Ash may Google this or that, the internet can’t give him the answers to the dark mystery he’s involved in, nor can it fight his battles or run his race.
Sara Crowe – I was very aware of having to negotiate internet and mobile phone use in Bone Jack. It was important to me that Ash and Callie went to a library rather than spending 5 minutes on Google to get all the answers they needed. There’s a magic and thrill of discovery about libraries that you don’t get from search engines, as well as archives and collections that don’t exist anywhere on the internet.
Mobile phones can present a different sort of problem if your story is set in the 21st century. You can’t put your protagonist in jeopardy and then have your reader thinking ‘Why doesn’t he just phone his dad or the cops?’ so you have to find reasons why that’s not possible – no signal, a flat battery, a lost or forgotten phone, or perhaps make your character someone who refuses to ask for help or doesn’t have anyone he or she can call upon.
This won’t have been such an issue for you because Billy time-travels back to 1962 in The Bother in Burmeon and to 1957 in Trouble in Teutonia, long before mobile phones and the internet existed. Did you find it liberating in any other ways to set the main part of your stories in the past?
S.P. Moss – Liberating is a good word. One idea I had when I started the stories was to make a bit of social commentary about our health & safety obsessed, risk-averse society. It was just after the time that The Dangerous Book for Boys and its clones came out, and all those “Born in the 50s/60s/70s” articles were floating around the ether (emails with huge distribution lists in those days, rather than Facebook!). Children didn’t seem to be having adventures in the real world any more – it had become “out of bounds” or only accessible if dressed from head to toe in protective clothing. Adventure had become virtual. It was refreshing to write about a lost world of “goodies and baddies and brave Uncle Johnnies” as my master-villain Featherstonehaugh puts it, without worrying too much about being strictly PC, or giving Billy’s heroic Grandpop “issues” instead of letting him get on and fly planes, wield swords, right wrongs and generally be an action man.
Refreshing and liberating for me, yes, but in my search for an agent and a publisher, I still wasn’t convinced that the “Boy’s Own Adventure”, reimagined for the 21st century was exactly what they were looking for.
Sara Crowe – Many contemporary adventure stories seem to be set in fantasy, science fiction, or dystopian worlds. The hunger for adventures hasn’t gone away but often it’s transplanted to a world or a time that’s at a remove from ours. It probably also has something to do with changed perceptions of our own world in an age of TV, affordable air travel, and ladders on Everest. Even so, adventures set in our own world do seem to be making a come back – you mentioned The Dangerous Book for Boys, and Anthony McGowan’s Willard Price Adventure books also spring to mind.
I note that we both have boy protagonists. A boy protagonist wasn’t a conscious choice on my part – my major characters seem to manifest fully formed in my imagination and once that’s happened, I find it impossible to change them much. I also wanted a particular dynamic in Bone Jack – a boy who hero-worships his soldier father in a rather childish way and whose priorities and assumptions about what courage is are challenged and changed by the reality of the damaged man who returns from war.
How did Billy arrive in your imagination?
S.P. Moss – Billy arrived via my son – who has always been a bit of a dreamer. At some absurdly young age, someone suggested I should get him “tested” for Attention Deficit Disorder, which of course I didn’t, but I did read a little into the subject with the result that Billy is a boy with a vivid imagination – and difficulties concentrating at school. His name, Billy Blake, is no coincidence as I feel what is labelled as a disorder these days may actually be a special ability. I go along with Billy’s famous namesake in believing “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” It seems quite possible to me that normal human perception only lets in a small percentage of what is going on out there. Some of us are better primed to access beyond that small percentage than others. This ability may well attract a negative label as it deviates from the norm, from expectations. Edith Sitwell said of Blake: “Of course he was cracked, but that is where the light shone through.”
I do detect something of this theme in Bone Jack, too – the sense of the vastness of nature and eternity, with us, at the present time, being only a minute speck on an infinite canvas.
Sara Crowe – For me, the appeal of writing and reading about landscape, nature, history, or huge events such as war or revolution, is the shift in perspective that comes from that. Painting characters and their lives into a vaster canvas opens up all sorts of possibilities, new connections and ways of seeing and understanding, as well as any amount of dramatic potential. The writers whose books I loved as a child all did this, in their different ways – Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Rosemary Sutcliff, Jack London, Ursula Le Guin.
To change tack – you’ve now got two books featuring Billy and his trips back in time to Grandpop’s heyday. What’s next? Will there be a new Billy and Grandpop adventure?
S.P. Moss – In the same way that your characters appear fully-formed, Billy and Grandpop’s adventures arrived in my head as a series, so yes. I have had ideas for the third and fourth books floating around in my head, accompanied by odd notes in various places for some time now.
When I think about it, it is rather odd that I am writing a series. At primary school, I went through an Enid Blyton phase as anyone who reads my books can tell (!) but from the age of 9 or 10, apart from an odd foray into Biggles, all the books I read were of the non-serial variety.
I assume that Bone Jack is standalone – what part do you think series play for children and YA readers (and writers/publishers) vs. one-off novels? I’m wondering about supply and demand here.
Sara Crowe - Yes, Bone Jack is a standalone. I think series need to have either a significant world-building dimension or else a premise that propels the same core characters into a series of self-contained adventures, which is what the time-travel kaleidoscope does in your books.
My next book will be another standalone but I also have two very rough outlines for series – one a dark fantasy YA series and the other for an adult crime series. I’m not sure if I’ll ever write them though – I’m always sketching outlines for books that will probably never be written. Having an idea is one thing; having a good idea is another. Which brings us to that question that so many writers seem to dread: where do you get your ideas from? Or, to be a little more subtle about it, what fires your imagination?
S.P. Moss – Maybe writers dread that question because it’s a very difficult one to answer when phrased in the general. It’s certainly easier to answer about a specific book. My view is that ideas come from a fusion of the external world, with all its colours, sounds, sights and smells (and here I do find the internet a rather pale reflection) with the personal, internal world of the author, where memories, dreams and imagination live. This fusion creates an energy that’s hard to stop once it is unleashed.
The inspiration for Bother and Trouble came while I was writing a biography of my dad for friends and family. I’d spent ages poring over log books, black and white snapshots in exotic locations and reminiscences from old chums when my young son asked what his granddad was like. One of those delightful “what if” questions flitted into my mind, and with it a lost world full of danger, dirty deeds and derring-do. This was no fantasy world, but rather the past re-imagined, as seen through a mysterious kaleidoscope by a 21st century boy. It’s a world built from early Bond films, mid 20th century book covers, Betjeman poems, old BOAC posters, Ladybird Books, 1960s TV series … and all before Pinterest came along! My publisher described it as “a long-forgotten beauty – not fantasy, not ancient history, but something you and I had forgotten was magic: a Britain where country roads were bright and welcoming, where cars, motorbikes and aeroplanes – not to mention their pilots – still had an aura of adventure about them.” I recently saw the film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I loved as it builds a world that is the past, but not exactly.
But it’s important that the fusion I mentioned can’t be forced. It has to be a case of spontaneous combustion. While I was trying to find a publisher for my first book, I had another idea that came from thinking about “what could be more commercial – what would agents/publishers jump at?” – it was a YA story based on real historical events. Funnily enough, I never had the energy to write it – and I have noticed recently that a book on exactly this theme has just come out.
Sara Crowe – That’s a great point about the ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ question being too general. It may be easy to say where a particular idea came from but novels are a mesh of many ideas, some of which seem to appear out of thin air, like magic. Most of my ideas start with a setting. It might be a whole landscape, like the mountains in Bone Jack, or an old house, or a gnarly oak tree, or a little crossroads along a quiet country lane, or anywhere. Then it does get a bit like magic – I’ll get a vision of a character in that setting, perhaps a whole scene. If it’s interesting enough to me, I start to build on it. Who is this character? Where did they come from? Why are they here? What will happen next? Almost before you know it, a story is unfolding.
S.P.Moss – Well, having been entranced and enchanted by Bone Jack, I’m intrigued to see which settings have worked their magic for your next book. I’m busy at the moment marketing Trouble in Teutonia – setting up a few school visits, which I love doing (and it gives me an excuse to come home to the UK). Being with a small publisher, a lot of the onus is on the author to promote their work, so it’s great to find guest blog spots or fellow authors with whom you can chat in public! This conversation has been both fun and stimulating so thanks ever so much for having me. And soon, I’ll start piecing all those notes and ideas for my next adventure together. It’s set even further forward in time than The Bother in Burmeon, in 1966, so there will be a few tricky time-travel dilemmas to play with. I just need to get cracking now, as Grandpop would say.
Sara Crowe – Back to it, then! Thank you so much for talking to me!
You can read more about S.P. Moss, her books and their world here and here.
