I've been looking at some of my answers published on-line yesterday, pleased to remember those foothill years as a novelist when I was planning my first novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love.
Sometimes, I'm amazed that I ever got it together and that it finally made it into print. Amazed and thrilled.
My fellow Ward Wood novelist, the Irish writer, Shauna Gilligan came up with some great questions when she asked me to do an interview with her for her blog, A Girl's Writing Is Never Done. We did a question and answer session on my novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love and it was a useful exercise for me to go back into my memory to find some of the reasons and motivations for my writing about Stephen and his progress through the late 1960s in his hometown of Brighton, Sussex. Shauna's impressively sharp line of questioning drew out of me thoughts I didn't know I'd had or that I'd forgotten. So thanks Shauna - much appreciated, especially the stuff about James Joyce and one of my favourite books, The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.
Shauna Gilligan
I hope, some time, that she will let me pose her a series of questions about her terrific novel, Happiness Comes From Nowhere.
If you'd like to read our interview, here's the link to Shauna's blog:
http://shaunaswriting.com/wordpress/2014/09/colin-bell-on-brighton-music-and-his-own-stephen-d/
Thanks for asking me to do this, Shauna.
