William Hussey's Essential Six: Author Interview with Dave Cousins

Huge thanks to the brilliant William Hussey for featuring me in his Essential Six author interview series. If you've not read any of the Witchfinder books yet, you're missing a treat. I had to sleep with the light on after the reading the first one! Superbly scary stuff!

William Hussey

Welcome to the first in an occasional series of interviews with some of my favourite authors! I’ve called this series ‘The Essential Six’ for two reasons: first, writers need to write! I love the work of these authors so much I don’t want to take up too much of their precious scribing time. Secondly, I wanted to narrow down my questions to a core half dozen so that we could get down to the real nuts and bolts of their life and work.

What follows is an interview with debut author Dave Cousins. Last year, I was lucky enough to get hold of a proof copy of his moving and laugh-out-loud funny novel 15 Days Without A Head - the finest Young Adult book I read in 2011 …

Read the full interview here

3 Days Without a Book! Countdown to Publication #13: 15 Days Without a Head Original Soundtrack

15 Days Without a Head will be in bookshops in 3 days time. By way of celebration, I will be publishing a new post here every day, leading up to publication on Thursday. The idea is to provide a few bonus items, such as you'd expect to find on the extras disc of a DVD – except these will be available before the main feature of course.

The start of my musical adventure – check out the carpet!

Music has always played a big part in my life. I was lucky enough to spend nearly ten years touring and recording with a band, and was nearly famous! My leather trousers have long since been retired, though I still pick up a guitar most days and keep a stack of vinyl records in the attic for those moments when I need a blast. I envy writers who can actually write with music on. I’ve read that Stephen King listens to rock while he works, but there are others who need absolute silence – William Hussey, for instance, often writes with earplugs in.


I think I’m somewhere in between. I certainly can’t write while listening to music with words, and usually work in silence, but during the final stages of 15 Days Without a Head, I created an eight hour playlist of instrumental music which helped me through the long, and often late, hours I spent revising the manuscript. (Big thanks to RF who introduced me to much of the music on the list.)


I’ll often compile a soundtrack for the book I’m working on, it provides a reference for the mood I’m trying to create. Playlists for characters can be useful too, as it helps to get inside their heads. (A couple of the stops on my Blog Tour will be dealing with this in more detail, including Mina’s playlist for Laurence)


The one below is a small selection of the music I was actually listening to while working on the book. The Original Soundtrack album, if you like … 


1. Biosphere – People Are Friends

2. Arctic Monkeys – The View from the Afternoon 

(I think the video for this is brilliant. It captures the cold concrete essence of The Heights and Laurence's belligerent determination to survive. Great track too!)

3. Gonzales – Overnight 


4. Max Richter – Autumn Music 1 
(I dubbed this one Laurence’s theme)

5. Max Richter – Sunlight 
(And this one for Mina) 

6. Elliott Smith – Taking a Fall 

(There had to be one from Elliott and some of the words from this seemed apt.)

7. Stars of the Lid – Down 3

8. Doves – Black and White Town 

("There's a saying round here that goes: How do you know when you reached rock bottom? Answer: You wake up in The Heights")

9. The Cinematic Orchestra – Prelude


10. Tord Gustavsen Trio – At Home


Tomorrow: is the first stop on my 15 Days Without a Head Blog Tour when I’ll be visiting Writing From The Tub to talk about Getting inside Laurence’s Head.

Writing a Novel (Part Two): A Place to Write

Welcome to the second part of my series looking at the process of writing a novel. Part One: What to Write? can be read here.

One of the great things about writing is that it doesn’t require a lot of equipment – something to write with and something to write on, and you’re sorted. If you're really stuck, you can breathe on a window and write with your finger! Obviously if you’re going to attempt to be published, eventually you will need to get your words typed-up, but there’s a lot of writing required before getting to that stage.

A common excuse for not writing, along with not having the time (which I’ll look at in a later post) is not having a quiet space. I know that some writers need absolute silence and solitude in order to work. Bill Hussey locks his door, and sometimes even uses ear-plugs; by contrast Frank Cottrell Boyce has talked of finding the clamour of a house full of children inspiring.

Miriam Halahmy wrote much of Hidden in cafés

Most of us are somewhere in-between, and try to write when and where we can. Miriam Halahmy and Candy Gourlay are just two writers I know who are part of a long line of café scribes, following in Ernest Hemingway’s espresso stained footsteps. Some of us write in libraries or on trains – I’m drafting this longhand in my notebook while walking, during my lunch break. Sometimes, in order to write anything at all, we have to adapt and learn to get the words down where we can.

Having said that, I think it is useful to find a more permanent space to write. This doesn’t have to be a beautifully designed bespoke writer’s study, though that would be nice. Stephen King wrote his early novels with a typewriter balanced across his knees in his laundry nook, Roald Dahl famously in his shed, and I read somewhere that Michael Morpurgo writes in bed. What’s important is finding a space you will associate with writing, so that as soon as you enter, your brain recognises it and thinks, ‘Ah, so this is what we’re doing now!’

My corner of the attic

I've written in libraries, on a laptop balanced on a drawing board in the bedroom, but about two years ago I cleared a space for a makeshift desk in the corner of our attic. It’s cold in winter and besieged by wasps in summer, but I love it. And when I climb the ladder each evening, by the time I sit down and switch on my computer, my brain already knows what’s required. It doesn’t always comply, but that’s another post altogether …