Lee Weatherly is an award-winning children’s author. Her acclaimed novels for young teenagers include Child X, Missing Abby and Kat Got Your Tongue. For younger readers, Lee is the author of the popular Glitterwings Academy fairy series (writing as Titania Woods), as well as the upcoming series Pocket Cats; she is also the author of two picture books. For adults, Lee is the co-author of Teach Yourself How to Write a Blockbuster, and is a gifted writing coach, teaching workshop courses across the southeast.



Which writer would you be for a day?
I’d have to say myself, just because I’m used to my own quirks and foibles, and wouldn’t want to try to work out someone else’s in only a day! (We’re all mad as snakes, you know.) But if I could be myself in the Bahamas, that would be nice.

Independent bookshop or Amazon?
Amazon, to my shame. I love the convenience of shopping from my computer – though this can be a Bad Thing late at night, after a few glasses of wine.

Left on a cliffhanger or told all?
Left on a cliffhanger at the proper moment in the story, and then told all when it’s time to reveal all. I really loathe being left on a cliffhanger at the end of a book – it just makes me want to throw it across the room.


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ÒMaggieÕs EndÓ was performed at the Shaw Theatre of which IÕve not been to before and luckily itÕs a stones throw from KingÕs Cross which makes my life a lot easier.
I was really looking forward to this production and I wanted to see an audience with fire in the pit of their belly. And I did. It just seemed that it surfed on that idea and plot was a glimpse of an unachievable idea.

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Besides, what with all those Cornish pasties, it's as well I returned to London before my surfboard sank under me.



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It's always a nice thing to start writing in a new notebook. Like this one:

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Tomorrow is the day. My début novel will be released and I will finally be able to prove to the world that I am not an unemployable waster.

Well, actually, I am, but at least I managed to write a book at the same time...


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The ad was so enticing, so compelling with its swirling black screens, fluorescent colours and liberal application of exclamation marks that it free-wired directly from the screen to your frontal cortex and sent you scurrying to the crumb-filled cracks in the back of the sofa lest you’d accidentally dropped that handbag sized solar powered toothbrush-cum-car-wash device you’d been working on.

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To be pregnant will mean that, nine months from now, I will give birth to a child with a defective brain and severe personality and behaviour disorders, due to going on a massive bender shortly after conception.


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I've been thinking about thinking, in between eating too many Easter eggs: specifically, about thinking - the conciousness of characters - in fiction. The editorial report on a friend's novel says it's 'too introspective', and it's something which is said by a lot of agents and editors about a lot of aspiring novels. It's true that there's all the difference in the world, to the reader, between the novel reporting what someone has thought, and giving us thought as it gives us dialogue, and the two work differently. But the depiction of consciousness is the only unique thing about prose fiction, however you tell/show it, when you compare it to other forms and arts. So how do you put that to best use, while not making your novels too thinky in the way a play may be too talky or a film too... what's a better word for 'see-y'? And it's a pretty feeble novel (or possibly it's a highly successful, all-action SAS thriller) whose characters never reflect, never change, have no awareness of their own affective selves and those changes, and so don't end up, emotionally speaking, in a different place from where they started. So there I was, munching away on the FairTrade organic choc and my friend's problem, which is compounded by the fact that although plenty happens in her novel, the core of her main character's change is a mental and emotional one: that's what the book's about (and I know it's good, because I've read some of it.)

I started thinking about narrative drive, because when editors at the commercial end of things don't like something which writers do like, it's usually because it's slowing up the story. Storytelling is king, and there's no denying that 'introspection' doesn't sound terribly forward-moving. Nor, really, does 'thinking', 'reflecting' or 'brooding'. And then I had a bit of a brainwave - or I hope it's a brainwave.

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I wonder if any of you can assist? I am looking for examples of contemporary epic poems of any genre. Some examples already are: Alice Oswald, Dart and, Craig Raine, History:The Home Movie. Any pointers would be gratefully recieved!

Happy Easter!

My topical story from the last post is up on the Pygmy Giant, a site for British flash fiction, today.

http://thepygmygiant.wordpress.com/


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