Mrs Darcy visits Scrivener's Progress

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!