Recently I was interviewed by my publisher, Dragon Soul Press, in conjunction with the release of their new romantic fantasy anthology First Love, for which I have contributed a short story entitled Papercut.
Papercut concerns a lonely teenage boy living with his overbearing Jehovah’s Witness mother, who has his world turned upside down when a mysterious girl made entirely of paper keeps appearing in his dreams.
Bits of this interview may crop up elsewhere, but here it is in full.
Did any of your books get rejected by publishers?
Yes. In some cases I came maddeningly close to mainstream publication. My most notable near misses were for Love vs Honour, a teenage romantic drama with a religious twist; and for Children of the Folded Valley, a dystopian memoir about a man looking back on his life growing up in the midst of a seemingly utopian cult. In the latter case, the publisher wanted me to rewrite the entire novel as a third person narrative, which was absurd. I felt thoroughly vindicated by the fact that when I self-published it, Children of the Folded Valley became my most successful novel to date by far. Everyone else I have spoken to says they can’t imagine it being a tenth as powerful as a third person narrative.
What inspires you to write?
The voices in my head. They won’t shut up.
What is your writing Kryptonite?
Social media (so distracting). Or exhaustion.
How hard was it to sit down and actually start writing something?
For First Love? Honestly not that hard. Although romance isn’t a genre I often tackle (despite the afore-mentioned novel Love vs Honour), romance with fantasy elements is a little different. I had the idea for my short story Paper Cut download into my mind almost straight away once I read the brief for the anthology.
What does literary success look like to you?
Someone making a film of your book. Even if the film ends up being terrible, it shows the book reached enough people that someone thought making the film was a good idea in the first place.
A more boring answer is making enough money on book sales so you can quit the day job. That’s a pipe dream for most writers though. Actually, a pipe dream is aspiring to be a plumber. Just as punching a clairvoyant who has won the lottery is striking a happy medium. Enough terrible jokes…
Do you read much and if so, who are your favourite authors?
Yes, I read constantly across many genres. I answered this question in fairly exhaustive fashion elsewhere on the Dragon Soul Press website, but this time I shall mostly restrict my answers to romantic fiction. I tend to prefer my romance doomed. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte), The English Patient (Michael Odaatje), Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), The Remains of the Day (Kazou Ishiguro) and One Day (David Nicholls) are all good examples. There are a few exceptions to this, such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, or Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (which is sort-of happy at the end despite the melancholia and tragedy throughout). Many of my favourite novels that wouldn’t be classed as romance feature doomed romantic subplots. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell for example, or Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. Fantasy fiction also features a few great romantic tragedies, including one that to my mind rivals Romeo and Juliet, at the conclusion of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.
As Sally Sparrow once observed in classic Doctor Who episode Blink, “Sad is happy for deep people”.
How many hours a day do you write?
I don’t really time myself, but I have a daily goal of writing 1,000 words per day on weekdays, and 2,000 words per day at weekends, whenever I take on a project (either a novel or a short story).
What is your motivation for writing more?
To silence the voices in my head.
When did it dawn upon you that you wanted to be a writer?
It evolved over a longer process that always involved writing to some degree. I’ve always written short stories, but my first ambition was to be a journalist. That evolved into wanting to be a film director, but then I realised I preferred writing screenplays to the production rigmarole. That then evolved into writing novels.
Are you satisfied with your success?
No. I’ve still got loads of things I want to share with the widest possible readership. I have a pathological urge to entertain, and I don’t think I’ll ever be cured of it. Nor do I want to be.
First Love also features stories from a bunch of other hugely talented authors. Whether you fancy reading about the romantic dreamscapes of the religiously oppressed, or love stories involving forest nymphs, mages, selkies, Native American mythology, or, as one of my fellow writers pitched her story to me, “Bridget Jones meets Morgana Le Fay”, this is a must for those who like their romance with a fantastical twist.
To pre-order in the UK click here.
To pre-order in the US click here.
Paperbacks of First Love will be available from the 28th of February.
It’s almost here! First Love, the romantic fantasy anthology from Dragon Soul Press, is out tomorrow. My short story Papercut is a part of this anthology. It concerns a lonely teenage boy living with his ultra-strict Jehovah’s Witness mother, who keeps being visited in his dreams by a mysterious girl made entirely of paper.
All great horror stories have, at their core, a simple and relatable fear which is then explored, exploited and exaggerated. In my opinion that is what makes for a really memorable scary tale, not blood and gore.
Simon Dillon Books 
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