Secret Serendipity Seven with Sarah Naughton

To mark the publication of The Blood List last week, I am pleased to welcome, author Sarah Naughton on to the blog to tell us seven secrets.

1.  I can’t be trusted.

Many of my characters are based on people I know or have known - Titus from the Hanged Man Rises is my granddad as a child, Barnaby was inspired by the son of my oldest friend.  I guess this isn’t a big secret when it comes to authors, but I’ve generally got a very clear physical image of the person I’m writing about in my head.  While writing a scene I often ask myself what this certain friend would do or say if confronted with the situation I’m depicting.  I hope (and pray) that their characteristics have been exaggerated so much as to be unrecognisable, but if you find me staring at you at a party just walk away, very quickly…

2.  I’m a moralist.

At the end of The Blood List a very strong moral judgment is laid on Frances, and it might seem unfair.  There are some archetypal fools in the book: Henry, Abel, Flora, and at the end we don’t really care what happens to them: they’re not worth worrying about.  But Frances gets a very harsh deal.  After all, she did try and save her first child, and she did try to love his replacement.  Basically Frances made a fatal mistake before the book ever began - she married a shallow, cowardly fool - and the story is a long working out of her punishment.  

3.  I’m a fatalist

Juliet did absolutely nothing to deserve her fate, apart from be loving, kind, hard-working and honourable.  It was just the arbitrary harshness of the world (or, in this case, me).  Because the truth of it is, however much we think our futures are made by our own efforts (hard work, determination etc) it’s mostly sheer blind luck: being born in a century and location where we are likely to survive our infancies, be educated, and not end up broken by relentless manual labour.

4.  Women like Naomi probably didn’t exist

Frances loses all her financial power and independence when she marries Henry and, though she is the rich and clever one, she becomes his possession.  In the seventeenth century women were regarded as physically, intellectually, morally and spiritually inferior to men.  Obedience, submissiveness and silence were considered the highest womanly virtues and your husband was legally allowed to beat you to ‘correct’ your conduct.  If Naomi hadn’t had all her feistiness thrashed out of her as a child, she would very likely have been put in a scold’s bridle for her controversial opinions, ducked on the stool or, as she is in the book, framed as a witch.  Bitter experience would soon teach such bold women to keep their heads down.

5.  I’m not as unsuperstitious as I pretend to be.

I take home hag stones (holed pebbles) from the beach for their magical powers.

I always salute magpies, with particular deference when there’s only one (for sorrow).

When I have to do something daunting I wear the bracelets my children made me, for protection.

I always touch wood.

I profess not to believe in the devil, but The Exorcist almost gave me post-traumatic stress disorder.

I don’t trust cats.

6.  I steal my writing tips.

When it comes to advice about writing, it’s pretty much all been covered now, so I just regurgitate all the best bits from the greats.  Listen to this one from Stephen King.  “For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there’s a house under there, and I’m pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want.” That’s exactly how it goes.  When I get asked in schools talks How did you come up with the idea?  I usually make something about being inspired by a news story or a place I visited, and sometimes that is the case, but mostly you’re walking along in the desert and your foot catches…

7.  This is my favourite.

It seemed to take me many decades to get published, and in that period I’ve written quite a number of books which now reside in my bottom drawer, waiting for their turn.  There’s only one I like even remotely as much as The Blood List.  It seemed to grow almost independently of me and the characters, as the cliché goes, pretty much wrote themselves.  My editor at Simon and Schuster barely touched it.  It’s hard to get historical fiction made into films because of cost of sets and costumes etc, but I can see the story playing in my head and could cast the characters for you right now.  Hope you’re listening, Mr Spielberg.

 

Sarah’s  first book, 'The Hanged Man Rises' (Simon and Schuster 2013) was shortlisted for the Costa Children's Award, the Sussex ABAs and was number 14 in the Telegraph's 100 best Books for Christmas, and the second, a teen thriller set during the witch trials of the seventeenth century, comes out on 27th February.

To find out more about Sarah Naughton:

Twitter / Website

The Hanged Man Rises by Sarah Naughton

Pages - 235

Published by Simon and Schuster in February 2013

The boy sat on the end of the jetty, skimming oyster shells across the water. It was too choppy to get many bounces but occasionally a shell would strike the dredger, moored further out, with a satisfying clang.  He didn't even bother to prise open the next one before he threw it. The thought of slurping out its slick grey innards, still quivering, made him queasy. A person could get heartily sick of oysters, and Sammy often wishes his father had been a cattle drover or a cheesemonger. Anything but an oyster farmer.

Goodreads Summary

When their parents are killed in a fire, Titus Adams and his little sister Hannah are left to fend for themselves in the cruel and squalid slums of Victorian London. Taking shelter with his friend and saviour, Inspector Pilbury, Titus should feel safe. But though the inspector has just caught and hung a notorious child-murderer, the murders haven't stopped. Now everyone is a suspect, even the inspector himself, and unless Titus can find a way to end the killings, he will lose all that is dear to him.
For this evil cannot be contained, even by death.

******

The Hanged Man Rises is a rather dark tale that drags you into the rough and dangerous parts of Victorian London. A child killer is on the loose and everyone is scared. The first chapter was really rather scary. I struggled reading it as any mother would do. You feel chilled to the bone, by the events that unfold.

Titus and Hannah are brilliant characters. Titus is such a strong and brave boy and deal with the death of his parents and his new position as his sister’s guardian. He will do anything to protect her, even if it means hurting her.

The story continues in it dark tone all the way through, with the arrival of some rather sinister characters that will make your skin crawl. I enjoyed reading the parts with Lilly in, who is a young girl with the power to speak to ghosts. It was brilliant to see a medium represented as having real skills instead of a charlatan, which is often the case with Victorian novels.  The story is quite fast paced all the way through, culminating in a rather dramatic ending. Sometimes I got a little lost in the narrative and found myself rereading passages, as I didn’t always understand what was going on. On reading it at a slower pace, this probably wouldn’t be an issue.

This book is recommended for 11 years +. Personally I would suggest it to older readers or young ones with excellent reading skills as the writing is quite mature at times and the content is often quite dark.

On the whole, this is a very promising debut, representing the darker side of Victorian London.

 

Inspire Me with Sarah Naughton

Today, I am happy to welcome debut author Sarah Naughton onto the blog, to discuss what inspired her to write her historical teen book, The Hanged Man Rises.

Living in the country is pretty boring once you get past the age of nine.  Especially for a girl with zero interest in sport or other outdoor activities.  

With nothing better to do me and my friend Ellen would go on interminable walks down country lanes and on these walks, when the conversation ran out about Andrew Stowford (the only boy in the village not intimately-related to everyone else), we played a game called What If.  I probably don’t need to explain this game.  It went along the lines of: what if your best friend’s boyfriend told you he loved you: would you tell your best friend?  Or, what if your mum and Andrew Stowford were trapped in a burning building and you only had time to save one?

I’ve been playing it ever since.

Lots of things trigger the questions: documentaries, conversations, news stories.  What if that asteroid that just missed earth actually hit us?  What if they found fossilised human bones in a dinosaur’s stomach?  

I’m sure it’s where most writers begin.

The medical advances in the 18th century, particularly in anatomy, probably inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.  Genetic engineering provided the chilling but wholly believable premise for Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’.  A planet running out of resources: Independence Day, reality TV gone mad: The Hunger Games.

Ok, I suppose I should admit that I’m a big fan of dystopian fiction.  But it works equally well with other genres: what if you lived in Elizabethan/Roman/Neolithic times?  What if a man got killed in a completely sealed room?  What if a billionaire sheik disguised as a doctor came to work at the hospital of a pretty young nurse?

They’re all good starting points (apart from possibly the billionaire sheik doctor in disguise).  Where you take them is the hard part.  There’s a dusty old folder lurking in the depths of my computer containing a stack of these premises which I haven’t managed to turn into stories.  I’ll go back to them one day.  What if the sheik met the dinosaur on the way to the hospital and the pretty nurse had to clone him using the DNA from a scrap of his half-digested flesh? (now that’s an idea…)

Though it didn’t feel like it when I was a kid, having an active imagination is a far more exciting and rewarding skill than being a hot shot at BMX stunts (unless you’re Andrew Stowford, in which case it’s just the Best Thing Ever).

So if you want to write, just be curious.  Ask yourself questions.  Chances are lots of people will have asked themselves the same questions before and written brilliant books exploring the answers, but one day you’ll hit upon something no-one has asked yet.  But you’d better be quick - what if I get there first?

The Hanged Man by Sarah Naughton is published on the 28th February by Simon and Schuster.

To find out more about Sarah:

Twitter