I feel as though there should be a drum-roll followed by a
crash of cymbals on Scrivener’s Progress today.
We have our first guest. Please
be upstanding and welcome Mr Jonathan Pinnock, author of the decidedly odd, unequivocally
funny and strangely clever Mrs Darcy Versus the Aliens.
This is the sequel to Pride and Prejudice that Jane Austen
would never in her wildest dreams have imagined would be written. It sees Elizabeth Bennet, now Mrs Darcy, of
course, a few years into her marriage to her dear Fitzy, heirless and missing a
sister. Wicked Wickham has reappeared,
poor Jane and Mr Bingley have hit a snag or two and as for Lady Catherine over
at Rosings, well …
Good morning, Jon. I
can't imagine how it must feel to see your book nestled on the shelves and
looking quite at home in the books charts at WH Smith. Can you describe
the emotions that have accompanied this wonderous event?
It's
a weird emotional roller-coaster, having a book published. Once you're over the
fantastic elation that you've finally achieved your earliest ambition (and it really
was my earliest ambition to be a writer), you almost immediately switch to
panicking about your Amazon ranking, wondering why no magazines have reviewed
it yet and why isn't the whole world knocking on your door. It's the old story.
However much you get, you always want more. But it is still massively cool to
be able to walk into a bookshop, point to your own book and say "Yep, I
wrote that".
How has your life changed since your book launch?
Too
early to say yet. I suppose I feel a bit more confident about calling myself a
writer. But if someone asks me what I do for a living, I'll still probably say
I write software rather than write books.
What's been the response from your family and friends and,
indeed, from your work colleagues and have you noticed anyone treating you
differently?
The
response from my family has been along the lines of "When will you stop
going on about that sodding book?" Which is fair enough. The response from
non-writing friends occupies the entire spectrum from being seriously impressed
through to the kind of embarrassed silence that one would adopt with someone
who's been caught having intimate relations with a farm animal.
As Mrs Darcy began on-line, did you have thoughts about
bringing her out as an e-book?
Oddly,
that never crossed my mind. It might have done had I reached the end without a
publisher in sight, but fortunately one appeared at the last minute.
Writing as an on-line serial instead of being able to present
a novel in an edited and polished state must have brought its problems.
Would you do it again?
Good
question. I think the positives far outweighed the negatives. On the plus side,
I had an audience to write for and deadlines to meet, and those were the key
things that kept me writing. On the negative side, I could never go back and
re-write an earlier section in order to prepare the ground for something that
happened later on, but that never seemed to be a problem in this case, possibly
because the plot is a bit mad anyway. Besides, there's a school of thought that
says that all the emphasis on re-writing is not necessarily a good thing and
that your first instinct is right - most of the time. As it happens, I did
re-write a few scenes at the (entirely correct) request of my editor, but
fortunately they were all self-contained and had no effect on the rest of the
book. Would I do it again? I don't know. It would be slightly different coming
at it from the position of being a published author.
I know there have been mutterings regarding a sequel to Mrs
Darcy and wondered if you had intended to take other well loved classics down
roads hitherto untravelled?
I've
no great desire to wreak havoc on any other well-loved classics, but I would
like to do more with this one because there are some unresolved issues at the
end. Then again, who's to say that other classics won't get dragged in?
Thank
you, Jon.
Mrs
Darcy Versus the Aliens, published by Proxima, is on sale in WH Smiths and
on-line bookshops NOW!
