Ask the Author: Tony Littlejohns
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Tony Littlejohns
Hi, Rob, thanks for the interest. I've been writing it over the last two years and am coming to the end of what should be the final edit. I hope to have it published for Kindle within two weeks, with the paperback to follow sometime after. It's not a direct sequel, but a legacy story, set seventeen years after the pandemic, and deals mainly with the next generation, though all the characters from the first book are in it.
Thanks and best regards, Tony
Thanks and best regards, Tony
Tony Littlejohns
I have had a liking for apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic films and TV shows for many years, but had become very jaded with the usual offerings, with most of them being about zombies, mutations, ridiculous “Mad Max”- type scenarios, or pure sci-fi. I longed for productions that were more based on reality, or at least speculative reality: with human-interest stories about what might possibly happen and how people dealt with it.
Here in the UK there was a BBC TV series in the 1970s called Survivors, which has achieved cult status and was a big influence on The Hoffmann Plague. It’s about a devastating pandemic and follows a small group of survivors as they try to rebuild their lives. I watched it again a couple of years ago, for the first time in about forty years.
I developed an interest in survival and bushcraft through my voluntary work with Raleigh International in Belize in 2001, where I spent three months living in the jungle in remote locations. It’s not a very active or obsessive interest- I don’t go and sit in the woods whittling things from bits of wood, or anything like that. And I haven’t converted my home into a fallout shelter! But, having always been a handy type of guy, I wondered how I might cope and survive in that type of scenario, and the things one would need to do.
In November 2016 I watched the film Contagion and really enjoyed it. The next day, while walking on the beach in my home town of Bexhill-on-Sea, on the south coast of England, the first lines of the novel came to me out of nowhere. I hadn’t been thinking about writing a novel, but I went home and just started writing. Eighteen weeks later the initial draft was finished. I was sending each chapter to my sister and her husband, one of my nieces and my brother, and they loved it and couldn’t wait for each new chapter! It was their enthusiasm for what I was writing that spurred me on to write more. Without them pestering me constantly for more chapters I don’t know if I would have continued writing, but it obviously had some merit… The ratings and reviews it’s getting on Goodreads seem to confirm that so far!
Here in the UK there was a BBC TV series in the 1970s called Survivors, which has achieved cult status and was a big influence on The Hoffmann Plague. It’s about a devastating pandemic and follows a small group of survivors as they try to rebuild their lives. I watched it again a couple of years ago, for the first time in about forty years.
I developed an interest in survival and bushcraft through my voluntary work with Raleigh International in Belize in 2001, where I spent three months living in the jungle in remote locations. It’s not a very active or obsessive interest- I don’t go and sit in the woods whittling things from bits of wood, or anything like that. And I haven’t converted my home into a fallout shelter! But, having always been a handy type of guy, I wondered how I might cope and survive in that type of scenario, and the things one would need to do.
In November 2016 I watched the film Contagion and really enjoyed it. The next day, while walking on the beach in my home town of Bexhill-on-Sea, on the south coast of England, the first lines of the novel came to me out of nowhere. I hadn’t been thinking about writing a novel, but I went home and just started writing. Eighteen weeks later the initial draft was finished. I was sending each chapter to my sister and her husband, one of my nieces and my brother, and they loved it and couldn’t wait for each new chapter! It was their enthusiasm for what I was writing that spurred me on to write more. Without them pestering me constantly for more chapters I don’t know if I would have continued writing, but it obviously had some merit… The ratings and reviews it’s getting on Goodreads seem to confirm that so far!
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Apr 16, 2021 11:06AM · flag