Miranda Mondays With TeamBea – Interview with Miranda Dickinson

This week I am hosting Miranda Mondays for the upcoming release of Miranda’s Dickinson’s new book, “I’ll Take New York”. And as part of #TeamBea, I have a video interview with the lovely author. So settle back and enjoy!

1. If you were to start your own book club, what authors would you ask to join?
   Now that is brilliant because I am hoping that this means that I could have Fantasy authors as well and not just people that I know. So I’m kinda working on that people that I know and people that I quite like to know. So the first person I’d invite would be Neil Gaiman, cos I am a huge fan of his, I just love everything that he does and I think that he would be very good at sort of discussing, I think we would have lots of great surreal conversations in the book club if he was there and also i think he would probably quite like the wine. So there we go, he’s my first one. My second one is Julie Cohen, the author of the brilliant ‘Dear Thing’ and ‘Where Love Lies’. She’s a Richard and Judy chosen author. She’s a brilliant friend, what she doesn’t know about books isn’t worth knowing. She always gets such a great insight into stories when we’re talking about books that we’ve read. I’m always amazed at what she can get from somebody else’s story, so I’d love to have her there cos she’d have a real insight into the books that we’re reading. The next person is Sarah Addison Allen who is my all time favourite author. If I just had to pick one to read forever, I would pick her books because I love them, their just so magical and romantic and different and they don’t fit the mould. I love her because she doesn’t feel constrained by moulds. So I’d want her there because I think she’d have a completely different view on the books and be able to see things again that perhaps I couldn’t see. And the last person that I’d choose is the very lovely Cathy Bramley who’s become a really really good friend over the last couple of years and she’s doing great guns. She’s doing amazing books, amazing serials, she’s done ‘Ivy Lane’ and she’s just brining out a new series now and I love her because she’s so excited about books. She just loves reading, she loves writing and I think her enthusiasm would be infectious. So there we go, so that’s the answer to that question.
2. What career would you have chosen if you weren’t a writer?
   Well I kind off always wanted to be a writer. The first thing I ever wanted to be when I was three, I wanted to be a fairy, so you could say that writing is my fallback career. But in terms of an actual career that I would have loved to have done, I would have been an actress because I actually studied drama at university and had every single ambition all the way through school, college and university to go into acting and it just didn’t happen. I went to one audition and I didn’t get it and it knocked my confidence. So I think thats why I probably I ended up becoming a writer because I think you sort of write the movies you can star in and I’m still living in hope that one day if my books get made into a movie that I will have a cameo role, which would be amazing, wouldn’t it be great? Maybe with Benedict Cumberbatch, maybe with you know. Yeah, I could think about those kind of things but I think that if I could write myself into a movie that would be great, so I would have loved to have been an actress.
3. Your stories are very topical, would you say that are influenced by current affairs?
   I try not to be too specific when I’m writing my books because I still want them to be enjoyed in ten years time and if you’re writing about something now that’s very current that can be old news very very quickly. So I tend to write about life experiences that people might be feeling. So take for example in ‘Take A Look At Me Now’ my last book, Nell loses her job and we’re in a very uncertain economic situation at the moment and lots of people are scared of losing their jobs and ‘I think that’s kind of a perennial thing, I don’t think that’s going to go out of fashion. So, it’s more kind off life experiences that everybody would have. I do like to have trends. In my day job that I finally quit in September last year I was a trend analyst and so I used to look at the food that we’re going to eat in the next five years and the reasons that we go shopping, what we’re looking for and what we’re doing and so certainly from the point of view of food, I do try to bring some of that in, the kind of things that people are looking for but again it’s more about the experience rather than sort of news and current affairs. I think I’d be careful of putting too much of that in because I like my stories to last beyond a couple of years. So, I hope this answers your question.
4. And finally do you have any new exciting new projects on the horizon?
   I’ve just finished writing book seven, it’s going to be my first book for Pan MacMillan, who are my new publisher next year and it’s going to be called ‘A Parcel For Anna Brown’. I’m very very pleased with it, it’s a step on from what I have been doing. Still lots of laughs, lots of tears. I think you’re going to like it. So that’s actually been right now and we’ll edit it next year. I’m pleased that I’ve got it written and that it’s done. So I’m starting to dream up ideas for book 8 which won’t be out until 2016, so I’m thinking of that. I’m also doing Nanowrimo this year, Nanowrimo, Nanowromo I don’t know National Novel Writing Month and I’m doing a comedy novel. I started doing my comedy novels under the name of Ellis Parker. You can follow me at EllisParkerBook on Twitter and find out all the crazy stuff that I’m writing, that’s where all the wombats and the tea ladies and zombies are living. And so my book for Nanowrimo this year, is ‘Elvis Versus The End Of The World’. It’s basically that the apocalypse happens in the middle of an Elvis convention and all these Elvis impersonators, are sort of mankind’s only hope against demon killer zombies that infests the Earth and I’m going to have fun writing that in November. I think I need to just get back to writing for fun and not having that much of a deadline, I think it’s important to keep me sharp as a writer. I’ve a couple of other projects which I can’t tell you about but I’m working on them. They are a very different style again probably being under a different name if anything happened with them. But just at the moment, I’m just doing it to sort of dare myself, to see if I can write it. So there you go, thank you so much for your questions, I hope you enjoyed them. Come and say hello to me, I’m on Twitter @wurdsmyth and I’m also on Facebook at MirandaDickinsonAuthor. Come say hello and ‘I’ll Take New York’ hits the shops on 4th December this year. If you’ve got any questions about it, ask me, it would be great to speak to you. Thank you for watching. Bye.

You can pre-order [amazon_link id=”1847562345″ target=”_blank” ]I’ll Take New York[/amazon_link] and will be available to buy from good bookshops from 4th December 2014.