Pat Black: What real-life events inspired Lily Poole?
Jack O’Donnell: The start of Lily Poole is pretty much how it
happened. I went down the shortcut to sign on the buroo one morning. It had
been slippy and had been snowing. I got to this bit of the road where a primary
school boy stood frozen, not sure whether to go forwards or backwards. I guess
if I was writing a novel I’d say he was greeting. He might well have been, I
can’t remember. I took his hand and took him down to St Stephen’s school. He
gave me a great line, ‘big people don’t understand’. There’s a book in there
somewhere.
PB: You’re a prolific short story writer. Apart from “it took
longer”, how different was the experience in writing a novel?
JOD: I guess we all do the same things.
We write short stories and then novels. I don’t do anything different. I write
short stories and some of them turn into longer stories. Lily Poole like most of my other stories is a collection of short
stories packaged as a novel. It’s a novel by deceit.
PB: This story plays with the ideas of second sight, tying in with
Scottish mythology. Is Lily Poole a ghost
story?
JOD: Lily
Poole is a ghost story. But only if you believe in ghosts.
PB: Tell us how Unbound works.
JOD: Unbound works by crowdfunding. Unbound is a publisher and they were looking
for material. ABCtales were looking to make some money, so they offered them
some potential clients. Luke Neima, who is now with Granta, was reading my
first-draft stuff, and he put my name forward. I wrote about it here.
What that means is until they get the
money up front they won’t publish your book. It’s like when you used to get a
Provie loan and went to pick up your new jacket and Doc Martens from Dees. But you need to have paid for them
in advance. It’s an old/new idea. I fucking hated it. What you end up doing is
shaking down everybody you’ve ever known for money. I must admit to cheating
and giving the book to customers that pledged and in return I’d cut their
grass. Sssshhh, don’t tell those that pledged and I never cut their grass, but
got a signed copy instead.
PB: What’s next for you?
JOD: I’ve not really got any writing
projects lined up. I just write stuff. I’ve been trying to sell the last novel
I wrote to publishers. Trying to get an agent. But that’s not really writing.
That’s the business of writing, which is something completely different. I’m
currently writing the follow-up novel to the unpublished novel I can’t get
published, which is pretty stupid in anyone’s language. And I was thinking
about looking again at one of my first drafts of Bill and the UFO, which is more a kid’s book, about angels that
disguise themselves as aliens to fit in. Well, it’s not really about that. I
can’t really remember what it’s about, but I got kinda fond of not remembering
it as it was. Sometimes I surprise
myself and realise some of the stories I’m reading I wrote. That’s worrying,
too. Some of the first drafts are terrible. Well, most if not all. I can’t
remember all of Lily Poole, but there
were multiple drafts.
Most of my first-draft stories or
poems go up on ABCtales. I also blog on ABCtales and Wordpress: https://wordpress.com/post/odonnellgrunting.wordpress.com/3622
But I’m word blind in the sense that I can’t spot the difference between what I’ve written and what I think I’ve written. It’s a bit like laughing at your own jokes. Only other people can tell you, ‘honestly, they’re not funny’. Fellow writers at ABCtales are too polite to say it’s crap. I’ve got to tell myself it’s crap, but just get on with it. That’s what writers do. Well, I think they do. The next time I meet a writer I’ll ask him or her.
Read our review here.
No comments:
Post a Comment