Tanith Carey started her career in national newspapers at the Daily Mirror in the days when Marje Proops was still the paper's legendary agony aunt. She went on become the paper's Woman's Editor, Features Editor and NY correspondent but has never lost her fascination with the women who long reigned over the problem pages. Tanith now writes on women's issues for a wide range of national newspapers and magazines.

Mark Thwaite: What first gave you the idea for writing Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe?

Tanith Carey: I was researching my third book, which was a collection of motherhood experiences from different eras -- and came across an article from a long-forgotten magazine called Mother and Home in 1915.
It said that babies should never be played because there was a danger it stimulated their brains!
As a parenting author, I was so appalled that mothers were told this, which is so contrary to what we know now, I decided to what other truly awful advice had been handed out in long-forgotten magazines and newspapers. Luckily there was lots of it!

Mark Thwaite:Your book is based on the "words of wisdom from the golden age of agony aunts" -- when was that golden age?

Tanith Carey:I would say from the 1860s when agony aunts become roughly recognisable in the format we know today -- to the 1960s when the advice started to get alot more sensible.
Until the 1960s agony aunts could be very prim and proper and would issue dire warnings that women would be ruined if they had sex before marriage etc.
When the Pill opened the floodgates of sexual freedom, not even their highhanded morality could keep them shut -- so Agony Aunts had to move with the times!

Mark Thwaite: How and why did agony aunts come about?

Tanith Carey: They were invented by a magazine publisher called John Dunton who first hit on the idea that his readers' own dramas were much more interesting than politics or current affairs -- as well as a very cost-effective way of filling his pages. It also maybe no coincidence that he was having a moral dilemma of his own -- he was having an extra marital affair.
However those first letters in the Athenian Mercury in 1691 were just as likely to be queries about the mysteries of the world, like the wonders of perpetual motion. But they also touched on such issues as: "Is a husband justified in divorcing a wife who tricked him into marrying her by wearing make-up?"
Soon Dunton had hired a group of women writers to answer the queries. But it was the Victorians who really turned the agony aunt column into the form we know today -- and basically used it as a way to map out and uphold their morals.

Mark Thwaite: Did they ever really give genuinely useful advice? Did society really need them?

Tanith Carey: Yes, I think at a time when information was so scarce, agony aunt columns performed an absolutely vital role. And to be fair, a lot of what was written was fair and applicable for the era in which it was written.

Mark Thwaite: When and why do you think their influence waned?

Tanith Carey: The advent of the Internet in the late Nineties meant that anyone with a problem could now find the answers to most queries within seconds. Problems pages are still popular today, but really they a quaint anachronisms, read more for entertainment, than information. The fact that many celebrities are now agony aunts -- Katie Price for example has a column in OK magazine -- shows they are more for fun than anything else -- and no longer to be taken entirely seriously, which in some ways is a great shame.

Mark Thwaite: What is your favourite bit of advice in your book?

Tanith Carey: I love the advice to a lady in 1928 who is told she can whittle away the excess pounds by rolling on the floor.
There's another from around the same time where a woman is told that you can lose as much weight visiting a museum -- through exercise of the brain -- as you can climbing the Alps. If only!
Then I still laugh at the advice given to a man called Peter in 1865 who can't swim, but wants to learn. He is told to wade into the sea, throw an egg ahead of him and dive in after him, to prove to himself that he will float!
Generally the ones I love the best are the hilariously high-handed pieces of advice -- or the ones that summon up vivid images of some of the ridiculous things people got up to in times gone by.

Mark Thwaite: Have you ever thrown caution to the wind and attempted to kiss anyone in a canoe yourself?

Tanith Carey: Well, I am not a big boat lover. The closest I've ever been in probably giving my husband a kiss on a cruise the year before last -- but the effect wouldn't have been quite the same as the boat was about the size of the QE2! The quote comes from a piece of advice given to a girl in 1895 who asked if she could go out alone with a boy in a canoe -- and who was brusquely told it was out of the question. I think she was told no because it was socially unacceptable, not because they'd tip over though!

Mark Thwaite: On the back of researching and compiling all these questions and answers, did you become very wise about the human condition!?

Tanith Carey: Well, I learned that the human condition has always been fundamentally the same. People want the same things now as they have always done -- love, happiness, advice on how dress well and look good. It's only social rules which surround us that change.

Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing the book Tanith? How did you overcome it?

Tanith Carey: It was just the sheer number of hours that I would spend leafing through magazines looking for new gems that really surprised or made me laugh out loud. So in some ways, it could be an endurance test. But I really loved doing it, because I would open these magazines that looked like they hadn't been read since the year they were published and the letters felt as fresh and vivid as the day they were written. I just kept going until I felt I'd made it the funniest book I could.

Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing and compiling odd books about agony aunts?

Tanith Carey: Well, this is my fourth book, so when I am not writing books, I am looking out for ideas for new ones. I also write features and opinion peices for a range of national newspapers and magazines.

Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

Tanith Carey: Well, as I wrote this book, I imagined this book would appeal to a lot of different people -- but principally those with a good sense of humour. But also I felt it would appeal to those people who like history. That's because these letters bring the past alive by showing what people really thought and felt at different times over the last 150 or so years. You can actually see society evolving through the subject matter of the letters -- and the answers.

Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now?

Tanith Carey: Well, if I am not writing books, I am often writing journalism. I am also writing another book which is a memoir about a woman whose soldier husband forgot all about her when he suffered amnesia after an accident in the Gulf -- and how she made him fall in love with her all over again.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer Tanith? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

Tanith Carey: I have to say I mainly read non-fiction. I like books with a different perspectives that teach me something.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

Tanith Carey: A brilliant idea will always shine through. Also it's a good idea to spend as much time as possible browsing in bookshops to see what publishers want.

Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?

Tanith Carey>: As harsh and highhanded as some of the advice is, I think this book appeals so much to people because it harks back to a time when everyone knew the rules -- and stuck to them. In the past, agony aunts were very much moral enforcers -- so I think that chimes with the present day, when there aren't many morals left!
For that reason, the book seems to have attracted a lot of commentary on lots of different levels.
But my favourite comment was from a reviewer who said it was the perfect last minute present for absolutely anyone -- but the danger was that would end up keeping it yourself!

Neal Asher has been an engineer, barman, skip lorry driver, coalman, boat window manufacturer, contract grass cutter and builder. Now he writes science fiction books, and says he is "slowly getting over the feeling that someone is going to find me out, and can call myself a writer without wincing and ducking my head."

Mark Thwaite: Orbus is the third Spatterjay novel. Tell us about the series, Neal, and where Orbus takes it...

Neal Asher: The Skinner, which starts the series but can also stand on its own, was one of the two books I'd already written when Macmillan offered me a contract. It's one where I completely let myself go and I wrote it very quickly, subsequently expanding it from 80,000 words to 150,000. The whole novel thing grew from two extremely weird short stories I had published long ago called Spatterjay and Snairls. Here's a bit of the blurb:

Three travellers arrive on the world of Spatterjay: Janer brings the eyes of a Hive mind; Erlin comes to find Ambel -- the ancient sea captain who can teach her to live; and Sable Keech is a man with a vendetta he will not give up, though he has been dead for seven hundred years...

It's romp of a story on a world occupied by some seriously weird life-forms -- leeches whose bite imparts immortality, living sails -- and then a Prador, a vicious alien arrives with a little mayhem in mind.

Next came The Voyage of the Sable Keech in which our visitors return, only to be confronted by the "first-child" of the Prador in the previous book, a cruise liner filled with animated corpses, and then a Prador space dreadnought whose captain is quite prepared to take Spatterjay apart in his hunt for that first-child.

Orbus takes the story offworld, to the border with the Prador Kingdom -- the Graveyard -- the monstrous king of the Prador, a nightmare creature called the Golgoloth (which uses body parts from its own children to stay alive) and a confrontation that could easily result in interstellar war.

Mark Thwaite: What inspired you to write this particular story?

Neal Asher: I found the character Orbus, who appeared in Voyage, very interesting and wanted to take his story further. At the end of the previous book he was heading offword, which perfectly tied with an unresolved story thread about one of the alien characters, a Prador called Vrell.

Mark Thwaite: In Orbus, "the cold war is heating up, fast." Our own world is still pretty war-riven, is SF a place for you to think about our world as much as a space to write about imagined ones?

Neal Asher: Not really. It's a place where I can escape our world and where I can create something to help others escape from it. Certainly comparisons can be made, but they're not intentional, just a product of the fact that I live here and some of what happens here has to penetrate my skull.

Mark Thwaite: What/where next in Spatterjay series Neal?

Neal Asher: I don't have anything planned for Spatterjay. In fact I'm starting on something new, a new series based on The Owner stories that appeared in my collection The Engineer ReConditioned. But I will probably revisit that place in the future.

Mark Thwaite: Tell us a little about your latest short story collection, The Gabble.

Neal Asher: The stories were first published in magazines like Asimov's and sprang from a creature I created in The Line of Polity (second book in the Cormac series): the Gabbleduck. This creatue has grown in the telling. It's a massive alien creature with a duck-like bill, tiara of green eyes and pyramidal body. It speaks nonsense and is likely the descendent of aliens that once had a star-spanning civilization, which they sacrificed when they committed racial suicide.

Mark Thwaite: Besides length, what differences do you find between novel writing and writing short stories? Do you prefer one form over the other?

Neal Asher: I like them both. Writing a novel allows for a relaxed approach to developing the plot but can sometimes be a bit of a slog. Tighter writing is required for a short story, and it is very satisfying when you get it right. They are both the work I enjoy but, unfortunately, only one of them pays the bills.

Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing Orbus Neal? How did you overcome it?

Neal Asher: Same thing as usual with all my books, I let myself go crazy for about 80 to 100 thousand words but then I have to produce a satisfying ending. I have to tinker with plot threads, cut some of them out entirely, rewrite sections and write entirely new sections. That's it really: delivering and ending. Beginnings are easy.

Mark Thwaite: You've been an engineer, barman, skip lorry driver, coalman, boat window manufacturer, contract grass cutter and builder -- I'm suspecting writing ranks as better than all and any of those?

Neal Asher: I don't have to clock-on, use Swarfega to get my hands clean, visit an osteopath, or tolerate idiots. This is the kind of thing some writers seem to forget when they whine about struggling with their art, either that or they never caught sight of it in the first place. Yeah, writing SF books as a profession is good, but don't forget I spent twenty odd years running at a brick wall with my head before I broke through.

Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing?

Neal Asher: Eat, read, drink wine, swim, spend far too much time mucking about in the Internet, socialize (a bit) and generally what most people do in their free time. Though I have to add that writing is a life and not just a job to pay for a life.

Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

Neal Asher: The reader I write for is me, but I'm lucky that many other people like what I like. It turns out that the demographic seems to be mainly males between the ages of 20 and 40 who work in IT -- or at least that's the way it was last time I enjoyed a beer with some fans.

Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now?

Neal Asher: Right now I'm working on a book with the provisional title Gabbleducks but, since it's turning into something not entirely focused on those creatures, the title may change. Thus far I have the only living survivor of a hooder attack trying to recover his sanity. Polity medical technology would be able to sort him out in a trice, were it not for the fact that the AIs are reluctant to meddle with his mind since the hooder that attacked him was a near mythical creature called The Technician, and it did something to him that even they don't quite understand. I have an odd character called Chanter who pursues the Technician in his mudmarine, trying to understand the grotesque sculptures of bones the creature makes with its victim's remains, trying to understand its art... This is all complicated by the history of the Atheter's (gabbleduck's) racial suicide, a world-destroying machine built to ensure they are never resurrected, a black AI called Penny Royal and a mean war drone called Amistad (from The Shadow of the Scorpion). I'm about 20,000 words away from tying this up.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer Neal? Both SF and not... What is/are your favourite book(s)?

Neal Asher: I don't have any single favourite writer, nor a single favourite book. This is always a difficult question because, if a try to answer it, later I'll remember, oh yeah, and there's so-and-so, and there's that book. For example, I was recently reminded of how much I enjoyed a couple of books by F Paul Wilson, The Keep and Healer.

Odd stuff that springs to mind: Half-Past Human by T.J. Bass, anything by Terry Pratchett, Roger Zelazny and Larry Niven; Minette Walters, Graeme Green's Claudius, Jack Vance, Iain M Banks, Richard Morgan and Alastair Reynolds and Gary Gibson... dammit, I see that I'm going to have to note down a list of everything up in my loft and stick it up on my blog.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

Neal Asher: One writer's reply to this is "don't" in the sure knowledge that those who want to write for a living will ignore him. My advice: write, write, write. There is no funny handshake you need to learn to be successful. Never think you've nothing left to learn, buy books on the process, read English books, read, read, read and just keep running at that brick wall with your head. I think that one of the main traits you'll find in those who have "made it" is pig-headed stubbornness!

Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say.

Neal Asher: You're gonna get your first book published, the one it took you years of struggle to finish and finally get published? Just remember your publisher will now tell you they want another one, next year. Publication isn't success, constant publication is.

Nick McDonell was born in New York City and is a graduate of Harvard University. The wunderkind of American fiction, he has published two previous novels: Twelve and The Third Brother.

Mark Thwaite: What first gave you the idea for writing An Expensive Education Nick?

Nick McDonell: There was no moment in particular. Because I had was traveling in Africa and recently graduated from college I started thinking about how the two places might be connected. Waiting in airports or hotels or dirt roads I started thinking about what kind of book I'd like to read, and kept returning to stories about spys and colliding worlds.

Mark Thwaite: An Expensive Education is your third novel. Do they get easier or harder to write!?

Nick McDonell: It is difficult to compare the process. I do know that as I get older more options present themselves, and so making decisions about what to write is becoming more difficult. But with practice some of the forms are getting easier -- like the narrative prose in this book -- or if not easier than clearer, I hope.

Mark Thwaite: Your novel moves between Africa and Harvard, and deals with the inner workings of the American intelligence service -- was there a lot of research involved then? Was that something you particularly enjoy? What was the trickiest aspect of writing your book? How did you overcome it?

Nick McDonell: The research was really just hanging out in places were people talk about and sometimes are involved in the intelligence business. I enjoyed that tremendously -- particularly when it was in the form of researching a piece of journalism. I got a great deal out of a trip I too to Sudan to write about a mediator there. I wasn't embedding with the CIA or anything like that, but I was listening to stories of former guerrilla fighters in the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front.

That sort of stuff always gives me ideas for fiction. I don't know what the trickiest aspect of writing the book would be -- probably trying to stand inside the shoes of one of the characters, authentically see the word from another point of view.

Mark Thwaite: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

Nick McDonell: I write straight into a laptop, print, edit in longhand, and then repeat that process for as long as it takes to finish the book. I keep notebooks too -- ideas for the novel go in there along with whatever else I am working on.

Mark Thwaite: Did you know how An Expensive Education would end before you began, or was writing the novel a journey of discovery for you?

Nick McDonell: I had an idea but only on the larger level. I wanted the characters to all make decisions that seemed 'right' but whose consequences were 'wrong,' at least in this particular fantasy.

Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing Nick?

Nick McDonell: I am writing, reading, or researching most of the time. When I am in New York I run a weekly basketball game. I spend as much time as I can in the natural world.

Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

Nick McDonell: I think about how the book is read more than the reader. An idea I got from Joan Didion is to always try to write something that can be read in one sitting. I remember something about John Updike saying that his ideal reader was a kid in a library in Kansas but I have never been able to visualize anything like that. It is important to me that I like what I write at least, and that is not so easy as it sounds.

Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now?

Nick McDonell: I'm doing more reading and thinking than writing just now. I am interested in the motivations for intervention abroad, whihc is connected to this last novel. Now I'm more interested in pursuing the question in non-fiction, so I am trying to work out how to do that.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

Nick McDonell: Too long a list to write, but right now my favorite piece of writing is an essay by Isaiah Berlin called The Hedgehog and The Fox. The title is taken from a but of greek positing that the fox knows many things while the hedgehog knows one big thing. Dante was a Hedgehog, Shakespeare was a Fox, and so on. Berlin uses this idea to look at Tolstoy's War and Peace and concludes that Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. I have been thinking that this piece has some resonance in the world of international intervention in conflict zones and, considered with Berlin's nuance (hard to do!), I think there might be something to the motivations of interventionists to be seen more clearly in this light.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

Nick McDonell: Robert Stone, whom I admire tremendously, once said about writing, that writing "is goddamn hard. Nobody really cares whether you do it or not. You have to make yourself do it." I think that was something that helped me. The idea that you have to 'make yourself do it.' That is the 'tip' I would give to anyone who wanted to write, besides read everything.

Born in Bromley, England, Helen Rappaport studied Russian at Leeds University, but ill-advisedly rejected suggestions of a career in the Foreign Office and opted for the acting profession. After appearing on British TV and in films until the early 1990s she abandoned acting and embraced her second love -- history -- and with it the insecurities of a writer's life. Between 1999 and 2003 she wrote three books back-to-back for a leading US reference publisher: Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion, the award-winning An Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers and Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion. In 2007, Helen wrote No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War. She followed this with Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs and her latest book is Conspirator: Lenin in Exile.

The Book Depository: Why were you as an ordinary person interested in a figure such as Lenin? In Russia there is still much variance in how people regard him, though of course, in the main the assessment of him there is as a leader, and not as a man.

Helen Rappaport: Lenin interested me as a subject because I wanted, as a woman, to get behind the political facade and try to see him as he really was, as an ordinary human being. There are many political biographies of Lenin available -- some good, some incredibly boring and impenetrable. There is also of course a huge amount of Soviet-produced hagiography that is now totally worthless because it doesn't tell us the truth about him.

I wanted to tell the human story of how Lenin lived with Nadya in exile on a daily basis. It seemed to me that the only place I might find honest answers about him was in Europe, before the revolution and in the memoirs and reminiscences of people in exile, who were free to say what they thought and not forced to write laudatory material about Lenin under the constraints of Soviet Realism.

It is nevertheless still very hard to get at the truth about him -- so much was hidden from the record in order to preserve his highly sanitised public image as a Great Leader. But by searching for material about his life in exile I did get a picture of him; how he lived; where he lived; how he and Nadya coped financially; how they existed on a day-to-day basis, and how Lenin interacted with the people around him. It struck me very forcibly that it was the women who remained the loyal constants in his life, while Lenin quarrelled, one by one, with all his male political colleagues. Nadya, her mother Elizaveta Vasilievna, Lenin's mother Mariya Alexandrovna, and his sisters Mariya and Anna, as well as his lover Inessa Armand -- all these women provided an essential back up team to Lenin in his years in exile and I wanted to say something about their contribution.

The Book Depository: How long did you spend collecting information for your book; what sources did you use: archives, documents, memoirs?

Helen Rappaport: I spent 15 months researching and writing the book. I decided not to visit the Russian archives, as all the material there is to see about Lenin has now been found, since the fall of communism, by historians such as Dmitri Volkogonov and Robert Service. My book was about Lenin mainly outside Russia and so I concentrated on searching for material about him during 1900-1917 in France, Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Poland, England, Italy, etc. This meant I had to cover a wide range of sources in several languages: Russian, French, Italian, and English are languages I know; but I needed help with sources in Finnish, Polish and Swedish. I decided as part of my research to visit the two countries that Lenin spent time in, about little has been written in English in the West -- Finland and Poland. I visited Poland with a friend who is a Polish speaker and we travelled south from Krakow to the Podhale -- visiting the places connected with Lenin's story at Nowy Targ, Bialy Dunajec, Poronin and Zakopane as well as walking in the Tatra mountains.

In Finland I was given wonderful help by the Lenin Library in Tampere, the last library devoted to Lenin that is still open full time. They were very helpful and drove me down the south-west peninsula of Finland, following Lenin's trail from Turku to Prostvik when he escaped out of Finland after Christmas 1907.

The Book Depository: What interested you as a woman about Lenin? What struck you about him most forcefully and aroused your distaste about his behaviour as a man? What was, for you, new about what you discovered and why? How demanding was Lenin about how he lived -- where and in what kind of accommodation? How did he dress, how did he spend his time? Did he go to the theatre or concerts, what books did he read, who was he friendly with? So many questions!

Helen Rappaport: I cannot say that I discovered anything startlingly new about Lenin, that I didn't have an inkling about before I started. It was rather that I got confirmation of some the things I had thought about him. He was incredibly self-disciplined and very driven -- he drove himself to physical and mental collapse on numerous occasions in his relentless quest for political supremacy over his rivals. I suppose I admired his determination, his iron will but I hated his cruelty and ruthlessness. He didn't care what damage he did to other people along the way. His one obsession was the Revolution -- at any price -- and he would not tolerate any disagreement with his particular vision. If his political colleagues ventured to suggest a different point of view he would never compromise and always fell out with them. It always had to be his way and nobody else's.

I suppose like other great dictators in history he was a monomaniac. If you put him on a psychiatrist's couch today he'd probably be diagnosed as a compulsive-obsessive. He was very modest in his personal needs -- never ever wanted much for himself. He hated extravagance, ate very simple food, his clothes were shabby, he lived in very small, cramped flats with only the most basic furniture. Some people think Lenin and Nadya lived comfortably in exile, but that is not true. They were both very frugal and their only occasional indulgence was a trip to the theatre or the opera. For most of the time Lenin worked obsessively on his political writings and his journalism. The one thing he and Nadya both did enjoy and took time out for was walking -- particularly in Switzerland. Lenin also loved the Tatra mountains of southern Poland. Fresh and air exercise were a great obsession with him -- he believed in keeping himself fit and well so that when the time came he could lead the revolution.

Having said all this I am not convinced that the public image of Lenin as a moral puritan -- who did not drink, did not smoke and did not have much of a sex life if any -- is the correct one. There is, I am sure, a darker, sexual side to Lenin that has been totally suppressed in the Russian record. I do believe that whilst he was in Paris he went to prostitutes -- there are clues in French sources about this, but it is very hard to prove. We do at least know now that he did have an affair with Inessa Armand, which left her very wounded and bitter. I do so wish we could get to the truth about Lenin's relationship with her -- and possibly other women -- but I suspect that no Russian ever wrote it down because it would have been immediately censored. The only place where I did find evidence of a different life is in French sources. The answer may yet lie there.

The Book Depository: When you had all your research and began to write the book what was your primary objective? What did you want to convey to the reader? Will the book come out in Russia?

Helen Rappaport: My main objective in the writing the book was to say something new about the real man -- not the leader of the Soviet Union during the years in power, but during the crucial period of his exile when he was working towards revolution and the political domination of the Bolsheviks. But I also felt very strongly that it was time to offer a woman's perspective on Lenin. Till now, all the big books about the Soviet leaders -- Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin -- have all been written by men. I felt a woman's perspective might bring something new to the story. I felt particularly passionate about foregrounding the role of Nadezhda Krupskaya who is so consistently marginalized in Lenin's story and who deserves more credit for the crucial role she played in keeping him sane and healthy during those long years in exile.

People also underrate the tremendous practical help and moral support of his mother and sisters -- who sent money, books and food parcels from Russia. Lenin's mother in law Elizaveta Vasilievna followed him and her daughter around in exile for most of those 17 years, sharing their cramped living conditions and working for the party, and yet her contribution is hardly mentioned. Lenin's sisters in Russia took enormous risks in supporting his work and suffered repeated arrest and imprisonment for the cause.

Finally, I wanted to say something about the many unnamed and unsung women in Russia, especially during the revolution of 1905, who took enormous risks working the Russian underground as couriers of illegal literature and bomb carriers. Their names are hardly ever mentioned in Russian sources, but in my book I have tried very hard to say something about them too.

Having lived and worked in Japan and China, Jayne Joso now divides her time between London and Wales. Soothing Music for Stray Cats is her first novel. Joso's first children's book, How do you Feel? was recently published by Benesse in Japan and her first play, China's Smile, commissioned in celebration of China's Children's Day, enjoyed a long theatre run and was later televised. As well as fiction and drama, Joso has a huge fascination with Architecture and has written for publications such as Architecture Today magazine and German publisher, Prestel Art.

Mark Thwaite: What first gave you the idea for writing Soothing Music for Stray Cats?

Jayne Joso: Well, several things. I wanted to explore writing a novel as a man; I wanted to explore using music and fiction as a way of fathoming things, you know... understanding and dealing with life; and I was very interested in writing about suicide, mainly because it's a subject people quite naturally shy away from discussing. I wanted to explore how people react, and the often overly simplistic ways people have of pigeonholing those who feel that way. I wanted to look at the effects on those who are left behind and write a character trying to better understand what suicidal feelings are, and then trying to work out if it's possible to see when someone else is really close to the edge. Although the book contains quite a lot of humour, and I think is predominantly warm, I needed it to be somewhat discomforting otherwise it wouldn't be affecting. I wanted to open things up a little rather than close things down or oversimplify... or I felt I would be doing a disservice to the families and friends of people who've taken their own lives. I could talk about this for hours, but I guess that was the most potent set of feelings and motivation behind the book.

Mark Thwaite: Soothing Music for Stray Cats is your debut novel, Jayne, but it isn't the first thing you've written, is it...?

Jayne Joso: No, I've written 3 other works of fiction, novels, though one is more of a novella. Soothing Music is the first to be published, and it looks as though Perfect Architect will be next. I've also written a wee children's book; plays; journalism; and ghosting. Am also partial to the writing of postcards (wink).

Mark Thwaite: Tell us a little about how you came to get published.

Jayne Joso: Oh... 'rejection', that fits into ye olde pain bucket doesn't it? Suffice to say, it took longer than I wanted, and was harder than I thought. Glad it's over.

Mark Thwaite: Your lead character, Mark, uses music and literature to help make sense of the difficult things in life -- do you!?

Jayne Joso: Sure, life for me would be very much harder to navigate if it wasn't for reading great lines and listening to top lyrics. Some of my best friends are fictional, but that's the beauty of it, reading is a very intimate relationship. I think George Eliot said something about how we meet characters in fiction we might aspire to be, or aspire to meet... I think novels are often populated by characters who are better/wiser than ourselves...

Mark Thwaite: Mark feels very "real" -- how difficult was it to make him so convincing and authentic?

Jayne Joso: I don't know to be honest, is my clumsy answer. I walked around with him in my head for a very long time before I wrote him. Once his 'voice' was clear to me, I felt I could get on with things. But I needed to feel I knew him really well, that I knew his life, thoughts, feelings and so on to any situation, in or outside of the book. I think of it almost like method acting... I now know Mark better than I know myself.

Mark Thwaite: What was the trickiest aspect of writing your book? How did you overcome it?

Jayne Joso: Research into suicide. Makes you blue. Writing my kids' book, which was all about happy feelings, was perfectly timed (slap in the middle of writing the novel) and a beautiful antidote. It also helped me feed light stuff and humour back into the novel.

Mark Thwaite: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

Jayne Joso: I fill a couple of notebooks longhand before I touch the keyboard. And when I type I re-write constantly. Soothing Music took me roughly two years.

Mark Thwaite: Did you know how Soothing Music for Stray Cats would end before you began, or was writing the novel a journey of discovery for you?

Jayne Joso: I always know the ending at the start even though I might decide to change it. Endings are really important to me.

Mark Thwaite: You've lived in China and Japan -- tell us something about your time there?

Jayne Joso: How long have you got? Perhaps I'll just mention that this novel was influenced by the slightly different cultural landscape of suicide in Japan... hence the Japanese character, Kazu, who shows up later in the novel.

Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing Jayne?

Jayne Joso: Nice ordinary stuff, sleep is a favourite; swimming, walking... going to gigs... anything from: Ian Brown or Glasvegas to Don Giovanni.

Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

Jayne Joso: No, not at all. (I'd like millions of readers, would like to think they were all ideal!)

Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now?

Jayne Joso: Finishing a play, and working on the edits for the next novel, Perfect Architect -- which is loads of fun.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer?

Jayne Joso: I admire loads of people... Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, John Steinbeck, Pynchon...

Mark Thwaite: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

Jayne Joso: Yeah, and this is a quote from another writer, whose name I cannot recall, sorry... 'Only write if it is essential to your wellbeing to do so.' Other than that, enjoy! Or play guitar.