Ask the Author: Gregg Dunnett
Answered Questions (6)
Gregg Dunnett
Hola Elvira! First of all apologies for the delay, I didn't realise I had this question here unanswered.
Entre Sombras is the spanish title for my book Little Ghosts.
Gracias :-)
Entre Sombras is the spanish title for my book Little Ghosts.
Gracias :-)
Gregg Dunnett
Hi Lydia, thank you for the question, and sorry if the ending was confusing. It's been a little while since I wrote this book, but I do get asked regularly, so I wrote a page explaining how I meant the ending to come across, which you can read here. If you still have questions after that, please do email them across and I'll do my best to answer.
http://greggdunnett.co.uk/ending_thew...
http://greggdunnett.co.uk/ending_thew...
Gregg Dunnett
I realise after publishing one book that I'm definitely still in the aspiring writer category myself. But the advice I try to tell myself is to enjoy it. There are small successes all the way along the path, even if the path ultimately leads to failure. You wrote 1000 words today - enjoy it. You dreamt up a good character? Enjoy it.
Gregg Dunnett
I'm actually much more excited about my next novel than my first (which is probably always the case). It is again set by the water (I doubt I'll ever write a book which isn't) but it's much more global in scope and less claustrophobic in nature than 'The Wave at Hanging Rock'. It starts with a twin who is talking with her sister on the phone as she is killed in a terrorist attack in an airport. She later discovers how the bomber also happened to have a twin, and she decides to track him down. And along the way she bumps into the best character I've ever come up with. But I can't say too much about him yet.
Gregg Dunnett
I write in breaks while looking after my two young kids, so the answer is either: I get up at five and do two hours before they wake up, or my two precious sessions a week when they're both in nursery. In each case I make a strong coffee and stick Coldplay on Spotify. For some reason any other music distracts me, but the two things together act as a trigger and I'm usually engaged in the writing after a matter of moments.
Gregg Dunnett
My most recent book, which is the first to be published, but not the first I've written, was partly inspired by my own childhood experiences. It's about three kids who are kind of isolated from their peers by their shared love of surfing, and how they drift away into their own world where they exaggerate the importance of keeping everyone else away from 'their' waves. I grew up surfing and windsurfing in a slightly similar way.
But the novel nearly died when I got quite stuck on whether three kids would really do something as terrible as these three do in the novel in real life (I wanted it to feel real all the way through). So I took a long walk on the beach under a high cliff. And I was kind of talking to myself, trying to work out the plot and what needed to happen, and all of a sudden a rock landed close by me. I looked up and saw three boys on the top of the cliff. They were scrabbling for their bikes to get away, and as they did one of them threw another rock at me. For no reason, other than - presumably - kids, especially boys in their own world, really do do stupid, dangerous things. And although I was quite shocked and angry at first, that event kept me going, and got me through my crisis of confidence that the novel wasn't realistic.
But the novel nearly died when I got quite stuck on whether three kids would really do something as terrible as these three do in the novel in real life (I wanted it to feel real all the way through). So I took a long walk on the beach under a high cliff. And I was kind of talking to myself, trying to work out the plot and what needed to happen, and all of a sudden a rock landed close by me. I looked up and saw three boys on the top of the cliff. They were scrabbling for their bikes to get away, and as they did one of them threw another rock at me. For no reason, other than - presumably - kids, especially boys in their own world, really do do stupid, dangerous things. And although I was quite shocked and angry at first, that event kept me going, and got me through my crisis of confidence that the novel wasn't realistic.
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