My virtual book tour: snails, kids, acting and porridge

Today my Cyclone virtual book tour for Balancing on the Edge of the World comes nearer home, just up the motorway to Keeper of the Snails, the amazing blog of novelist Clare Dudman (whose great books I wrote about yesterday). (Currently she's blogging about the silk worms she's keeping!)

Clare asks me in depth about my use of a child's perspective in my fiction and in fiction in general, about how much I use people and settings from life and how acting relates to writing. Other things, too, including getting me to reveal my recipe for porridge!

This book tour is turning out to be fascinating. As Barbara Smith comments on today's leg, it's really interesting to be presented with the different responses and angles on the book from the different hosts, and I must say it's also a wonderful opportunity to be able to talk about the book and what I'm trying to do in it in such depth.

For instance, it's a great surprise to me that Clare finds similarities in my stories to those of Chekhov: the last writer I'd have thought I was like was Chekhov, simply because I think of Chekhov as a tradition, and I see many of my own stories as innovative. Stupid, of course, because Chekhov was enough of an innovator in his own time, and Clare is right, I do, like Chekhov, often use the minutiae of life as a telescopic window onto our wider place in the universe. Interesting how we need others sometimes to remind us of our influences...

An even bigger surprise to me today was that Clare took all of the stories in Balancing as being set in the north, whereas in fact some of the settings I had in mind were Welsh! Part of the reason for this is that I tend not to specify geography as I'm looking for universality (there's just one story in the book in which I do): I want readers to sink into the situations in my stories (and not be alientated, as I think readers can be, by the names of places they don't know or don't know well). But Clare also says she feels the voice and tone of the stories are northern, which I must say makes me feel quite weird. I know my fictive (and real-life) voice is pretty ironic, but I always thought I got that from my dad, and not from having lived in the north for admittedly many years now...

And Clare sees an edge of anger in the stories. You see, you just can't fox some people...

You can read the interview here: