Ask the Author – April 2021

 

Ask the Author – April 2021

My second round of Ask the Authors questions is this month’s offering to blogdom – please find the questions and answers below, I hope they pass muster!

From Jeannie Ingraham

If you didn't write fantasy, what other genre do you think you'd try? 

I suspect I would be writing either science fiction or historical fiction. I know some people bunch scifi and fantasy in together but to me they are both opposite ends of the imaginative spectrum – science at the base of one and magic at the base of the other – while sharing the same creative new world-building-and-exploring traits. And in many ways, historical fiction, setting characters in a different cultural society and seeing how things pan out, is of a similar ilk – they all involve playing about in a world not quite our own. As a lover of geography, history and imagination, I need to have that kind of playground. I couldn’t write stories set in our own, ordinary, modern world – I prefer to spend my imaginative time somewhere far away from reality!

And is there a book cover to tease us with?

Not yet, still waiting on that one but hopefully soon. :)

From Sarah Awa

Do you know anyone in real life who's had problems similar to those your characters have? 

That’s a tricky one to answer – I can’t say I know a great deal of people who’ve had to find ways to cope with having their head cut off! ;) I think I said in a blog long ago, all my main characters have character traits that have been borrowed from me in some ways, so when it comes to wishing the world was a fairer place, being frustrated by the impracticality of others, being worried about everything, wishing I had more time to learn and study, being nervous of the reactions of others and angry at the same time, the closest person to having those problems would be me! And in more general terms, anyone out there who is struggling to free themselves of the stereotypes that culture and society have thrust upon them would, I hope, be able to find something in my characters to relate to.

Is it hard writing a whole, long book that's a comedy? I've only ever done non-comedic novel-length stories, only have written short humorous pieces; it seems to me like it would be harder to keep up the humour for so long. Or does it come easily to you?

The most honest answer to this is simply that I didn’t consider myself to be writing a comedic novel. As far as I was always concerned, I felt I was writing a serious story with humour inserted into as appropriate and it felt quite odd when the time of publication came and it was being marketed as a comedic book because my mindset of not considering it that way was so strong! There is nothing more fatal to funniness that deliberately trying to be funny so I didn’t – I wrote the story and let any humour that came into it come in its own way. I then let the reader judge the quality or not for themselves!

What Hogwarts Houses would you put your characters in?

Well, I think it’s fair to say that Dullard has Ravenclaw written down to his very core. Fodder, I would have to sort into Gryffindor for his courage in pushing forward his idealism, though I suspect some of the other heroic types in there would really get on his nerves! Flirt, loyal and practical as she is, could only really be a Hufflepuff and probably Shoulders too – for all his griping, he’s stuck with his friends. Pleasance is where things get rather tricky – she’s bright (believe it or not!) but not really Ravenclaw standard, she’s loyal in her own way but not exactly Hufflepuff, she can be brave (again, believe it or not!) but not necessarily heroically and she’s ambitious but not calculating in the way Slytherins are portrayed. I suspect she’d be home schooled. ;)

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