Interview: We Are The Ululating Tzatziki

I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Liz Ottosson from Better World Words: editor, writer, reader, translator, proofreader, and all-round lovely person.

LO: Editing this book was so much fun! Partly I think that’s because there was so much going on around the edges of the main story – like with Zymurgy the psychic dung beetle, Maurice the depressed alligator. All the space stuff, like the Vaffazzatan Hyperbeetroot stew. The final impression is that the novel is absolutely brimming with great ideas and comic devices. How did you come up with all of that? Were they always there in the narrative, or did you develop them separately? And then how did you tame them so that they fitted with the main narrative and didn’t take over?

ML: The short answer: I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

I’d written a short story of the same name (which Space Squid were kind enough to publish) and I had a handful of set-pieces when I had the idea to put them together into a novel. As I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, I went online and found some advice on how to organise a novel. I’d describe the next part of the process as “shoehorning”.

The ideas I had got crammed into a template that loosely resembled a plan, the ones that wouldn’t fit no matter how hard I pressed got shelved (they might appear in the next part), then rewrote the whole thing about twelve times. So, about 95% madness, 5% method. But in all that chaos, I persisted enough to see how the pieces could fit together.

LO: Can you sum up the plot in a couple of sentences? (For anyone who is interested, the full blurb is available here, and it’s a thing of beauty. Possibly the best blurb I’ve ever read.)

ML: Why, thank you! The blurb tells us that at some point Nigel is ordered to dress someone as a garden gnome and call them Denis Thatcher, at another he meets a man made of Mozzarella, and then he consults The Economist Style Guide to check whether “anteater” is technically a rhyme for “plant-eater”. Just join the dots and you have a story.

LO: Who’s your favourite character? (Mine is Elaine, who I feel is an underappreciated warrior!)

ML: That would have to be Mr. Mozzarella. I spent a lot of time rewriting his lines, because that was my fun thing to do. He's totally one-dimensional, of course. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Darth Maul was one-dimensional, and I think he was the best thing in The Phantom Menace. And possibly the whole trilogy.

LO: Who was the easiest character to write, and who was the hardest?

ML: Nigel was hard. He went through a lot of changes. I wrote scenes for him that only worked when he was cocky and confident, but that made him unlikeable. Then he was soppy and emotional, which worked much better most of the time, but I missed the scenes in which he was picking fights. So I opted for this split character who was one thing when sober, another when drunk. Bonus: it sounds a bit like Withnail and I in places.

Mrs. God was really easy to write, once I’d decided who she was based on. (And no, it wasn’t my geordie granny. Although the idea of her being a Mills & Boon fan was.)

LO: There are a lot of big action sequences in this book, and I get the impression (possibly erroneously!) that it was a lot of fun to write. I’m interested to know which scene or sequence of scenes you enjoyed writing the most?

ML: The zero-G fight scene was always going in. I watched a ton of videos taken on the ISS and I saw how easy it was even for trained astronauts to misjudge things and bump into walls. Then I came up with the idea of the two combatants in the scene trying but failing to make physical contact because they couldn’t handle the manouvering. I don’t know how it comes across on paper, but in my mind, it’s a classic.

LO: Where did the original idea come from? A lot of people will see Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy overtones; at times I was reminded of the Adrian Mole books by Sue Townsend, but I know you had other influences in mind as well. Tell us about them!

ML: There are a lot of different things in here, the Hitchhiker’s Guide being the main one, of course. I loved that book when I was a kid and I’ve always wished there was a bit more to the story, and that it held its own a bit longer into the sequels. That might be why the one I wrote is 400 pages plus. You'll find some Red Dwarf in there too, and maybe even some of George’s Marvellous Medicine.

LO: Tangential to this: you could have written anything. Writing a book is a huge endeavour, and requires a big personal commitment from the author. Why did you decide to write this book?

ML: Sheer bloody stubbornness, to be totally honest. I just wanted to write something novel-length, and this is what I had in my head when I made that choice.

LO: It does feel like you’re brimming over with ideas, so… will there be a sequel?

ML: Two planned. But I’m nervous about it. I think it’s so sad when sequels come out with progressively lower quality. That’s the last thing I would want. At this point, I think I’d rather scrap them than bring them out if they’re not up to scratch.

If this book works, it’s probably to do with the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. What I mean by that is—it worked because of the type of book I wanted it to be; I think the mayhem actually improves it. (Now, after finishing the book, I have very little idea, but more than before.) So, if I want a sequel to feel like the original, part of the work is going to be going back to my original way of doing things, which I’d describe as arse-about-face.

Doing things in an arse-about-face way is my thing, apparently. Who on earth would insist on including a chapter in a book, just because you thought of an amazing title for one? (That’s exactly what happened, by the way, with some chapters - the best example being “The Man With the Tan With the Flan With the Plan”. I had a man with a plan when I decided I was going with that title, which meant I needed to give the man a tan (plus a reason for it) and a flan with a plan (plus a reason for the flan's existence, plus the flan – and not the man – being in possession of said plan. That was a lot of fun. (Weirdly enough, it ended up being one of my favourite parts.)

LO: This is a sci-fi book; we’re all geeks here. So, what’s your writing set-up like – do you write in a particular place, do you use any particular software? I know you’re a Scrivener fan!

ML: I can write anywhere, even on the bus. And I adore Scrivener. I just need to figure out what all the buttons do.

LO: Like all of us, I’m sure you have a busy life. How did you fit the writing in around the rest of your responsibilities?

ML: Badly. I write in my spare time, so every time I sit down to write, there’s something else that I could be doing. If you do things this way, there’ll be a point where you really have to seriously weigh up the potential benefits of writing versus the other things that are being neglected. You’ll feel selfish and, who knows, you might be right.

LO: If someone’s reading this and thinking they have a book in them, or perhaps they’ve written a draft but are wondering what to do with it… any advice for them?

ML: I think the important thing here is to consider carefully what you’d define as a “success” if you ever get to the end of the slog. If you only sold a handful of copies, but you liked the story, would that be a success?

LO: It's been a pleasure. Thanks for the time and the laughs.

ML: The pleasure is mine. Thank you for a fun interview.