Interview Paddy Bostock

by

David Toft

1) When did you start writing, and why?

The first things I wrote were sketches and songs for a school show. Later there were poems and more songs, as chronicles of experience, I suppose. Novels didn’t start happening until the mid-1990s, as a daily holiday from work.

2) Do you have a theme in mind when you embark on a story?

Not so much a theme as a general context, some characters and a catalyst event. After that, who knows?

3) Planner or pantser, which are you?

Pants all the way for me!

4) Do you pluck your characters from real life, or out of your head?

Inevitably they come from life but they’re always grotesquely distorted.

5) Has any single book or author influenced you above all others?

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.

6) Is there a particular time of day when you feel yourself to be at your most creative?

Between five and seven p.m. with a glass of wine.

7) If you had just one piece of advice to give to aspiring novelists, what would it be?

Avoid vanity publishers like the plague.

8) If you had just one piece of advice to give to aspiring novelists, what would it be? What effect/influence would you like your books to have on your readers?

To leave them laughing.

9) Do you have any projects in the pipeline after the release of “Mole Smith and the Diamond Studded Pistol?”

There are a number of completed manuscripts on the hard drive, some parts of a series and others free-standing, but all the product of breathing spaces between rejections. At the moment, I am working on the latest addition to the series.