Ask the Author: F.J. Campbell
Answered Questions (7)
F.J. Campbell
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F.J. Campbell
The idea for 'No Number Nine' came to me on a boring car journey.
F.J. Campbell
'The Islanders' was inspired by Thomas Hardy's 'Far from the Madding Crowd', which I read with my lovely Munich book club. I thought, Bathsheba Everdene is a kick-arse feminist hero and I want to write a story about who she'd be now (or almost now - The Islanders is set in the 1980s/90s).
F.J. Campbell
I'm thinking about a sequel to 'No Number Nine'. It's going to be from Nadine's point of view, set twelve years afterwards. Nadine and Pip are in their early thirties and Nadine's done something really bad involving a one-night-stand. It's provisionally called 'Just for Kicks'.
F.J. Campbell
Before I started writing, I never thought I could do it. I was always reading these amazing literary books, prize winners, classics etc and thinking, These authors are so intellectually superior to me, I could never write a book like this. But my lightbulb moment was that I didn't have to write a book like that - I could just write a fun book, something light to read on a beach or on the commute to work, or on the sofa in the evenings when you're too tired to get into something heavy and challenging. So that's the kind of book I wrote. And it was so much fun.
F.J. Campbell
You get to live in this entirely different world for a few hours every day. And it's your world and you say what happens. You can have conversations there that you're not brave enough to have in real life. You can be someone else for a while.
F.J. Campbell
I haven't had this badly yet - just small problems with developing parts of plots that I can't seem to work out. I just stop, and do something else - go for a walk, drink a glass of wine, read a book or two or five. Until now that's worked (but the plots of my novels are not fiendishly difficult!).
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