For those of you who have been following us on Facebook, you've seen bits & pieces of this Q&A with Stefan Bachmann as part of our month-long The Whatnot celebration! Here is the Q&A in its entirety-enjoy!
-Can you share some of the inspiration behind creating such a diverse cast of characters for The Peculiar? Can you give us a glimpse of the new characters we get to meet in The Whatnot?
The characters in The Peculiar are all pretty strange and weird, either because they're literally blue-skinend trolls with branches growing out of their heads, or because they're just odd and mysterious people. So I don't actually know where the inspiration came from! I wanted to write a murder mystery about faeries and Victorians, and all these colorful characters walked onto the page when they were needed. I don't think I'll ever write a book with that little planning again, but that's the way it was with the first one.
In The Whatnot, I tried to build the characters much more consciously. There are some new faces, and some characters from the first book that we get to know better. Hettie, who was really important in The Peculiar but didn't get a lot of page-time, becomes a main character in Book 2, and I think she's my favorite character from both books. She's much braver and more forthright than Bartholomew was (the hero in The Peculiar), and her adventures in the nightmarish faery world were really fun to write. There's also a new character named Pikey Thomas, a gutterboy in London with a mysterious gift: he can see into the faery world through his one blind eye, and he joins forces with Bartholomew in an attempt to bring Hettie back to England. He's a bit of a prickly character, but he's in search of a family and a home, and I liked writing him, too.
-Did you have a favorite scene to write (or perhaps, a challenging one)?
My favorite scene in The Whatnot is probably this lavish ballroom scene in the house of a faery lady. It's a really big, vaguely creepy scene, and something drastic happens during it that is pivotal to the book. It was probably also the hardest scene to get right, too. My editor had SO MANY notes on those pages. Thank goodness. It's better now, I think.
-You had quite a few signing events forThe Peculiar; how does it feel getting to meet so many of your fans?
It's amazing. There are millions of ways to entertain oneself nowadays, so the fact that people take the time to read my book and then go to a bookstore or an event in real life to talk to me. . . It's awesome, and I'm so grateful for every person who comes.
-Where are some of your favorite places to travel? How many different countries have you been to?
Traveling is my favorite thing to do EVER. I have lots of favorite places: I love Prague for its atmosphere, Zürich because it's clean and pretty and I live here, London for all its layers of history, New York City because there's just so much to do, all the time, Moscow because it's different and weirdly wild compared to most European cities. . . Recently I went to Scotland and Yorkshire and have become enamored with both. The countryside in northern UK is incredible.
I've been to about thirty countries so far, but most of them are in Europe. Turkey is the only Asian country I've been to, alas. I have been to most of the US states, though, including Hawaii, and I've been to Canada a few times, too.
-If you could give one piece of advice to young people, what would it be? How old were you when you knew you wanted to write books?
I don't like giving advice because I feel like I'm still figuring everything out, too, but when people ask I usually say something like "Try to find what you love and then work, work, work at it." It's not super fun-sounding advice, but I think it's mostly sound. :)
I was around eleven when I started thinking it would be cool to write a book and have people read it. So I tried, every year, and would write book after book, and short story after short story, and with each one I was like, "This one is going to get published, definitely." Luckily most of them weren't, and now that I'm about to have two books out in stores and several more under contract, I'm really glad for all those rejection slips and terrible stories from before.
-Can you share some of the inspiration behind creating such a diverse cast of characters for The Peculiar? Can you give us a glimpse of the new characters we get to meet in The Whatnot?
The characters in The Peculiar are all pretty strange and weird, either because they're literally blue-skinend trolls with branches growing out of their heads, or because they're just odd and mysterious people. So I don't actually know where the inspiration came from! I wanted to write a murder mystery about faeries and Victorians, and all these colorful characters walked onto the page when they were needed. I don't think I'll ever write a book with that little planning again, but that's the way it was with the first one.
In The Whatnot, I tried to build the characters much more consciously. There are some new faces, and some characters from the first book that we get to know better. Hettie, who was really important in The Peculiar but didn't get a lot of page-time, becomes a main character in Book 2, and I think she's my favorite character from both books. She's much braver and more forthright than Bartholomew was (the hero in The Peculiar), and her adventures in the nightmarish faery world were really fun to write. There's also a new character named Pikey Thomas, a gutterboy in London with a mysterious gift: he can see into the faery world through his one blind eye, and he joins forces with Bartholomew in an attempt to bring Hettie back to England. He's a bit of a prickly character, but he's in search of a family and a home, and I liked writing him, too.
-Did you have a favorite scene to write (or perhaps, a challenging one)?
My favorite scene in The Whatnot is probably this lavish ballroom scene in the house of a faery lady. It's a really big, vaguely creepy scene, and something drastic happens during it that is pivotal to the book. It was probably also the hardest scene to get right, too. My editor had SO MANY notes on those pages. Thank goodness. It's better now, I think.
-You had quite a few signing events forThe Peculiar; how does it feel getting to meet so many of your fans?
It's amazing. There are millions of ways to entertain oneself nowadays, so the fact that people take the time to read my book and then go to a bookstore or an event in real life to talk to me. . . It's awesome, and I'm so grateful for every person who comes.
-Where are some of your favorite places to travel? How many different countries have you been to?
Traveling is my favorite thing to do EVER. I have lots of favorite places: I love Prague for its atmosphere, Zürich because it's clean and pretty and I live here, London for all its layers of history, New York City because there's just so much to do, all the time, Moscow because it's different and weirdly wild compared to most European cities. . . Recently I went to Scotland and Yorkshire and have become enamored with both. The countryside in northern UK is incredible.
I've been to about thirty countries so far, but most of them are in Europe. Turkey is the only Asian country I've been to, alas. I have been to most of the US states, though, including Hawaii, and I've been to Canada a few times, too.
-If you could give one piece of advice to young people, what would it be? How old were you when you knew you wanted to write books?
I don't like giving advice because I feel like I'm still figuring everything out, too, but when people ask I usually say something like "Try to find what you love and then work, work, work at it." It's not super fun-sounding advice, but I think it's mostly sound. :)
I was around eleven when I started thinking it would be cool to write a book and have people read it. So I tried, every year, and would write book after book, and short story after short story, and with each one I was like, "This one is going to get published, definitely." Luckily most of them weren't, and now that I'm about to have two books out in stores and several more under contract, I'm really glad for all those rejection slips and terrible stories from before.