CC Hogan is a writer and musician who loves growing hot chilies, cooking, and generally thinks that laughter is the best form of love. He spent many years in the media and entertainment industry but now enjoys peace, quiet, wine, and special moments. He is a very private person; he finds it cheaper. Welcome to author C.C. Hogan. Thanks so much for taking the time to fill out 27 Questions so readers can better get to know you and your work!1. What got you started writing to begin with? I find it very hard to pin point a time where I moved from not wanting to write to feeling I had to. I think I was probably very young. When I was older I moved into the media industry where words are the axis around which all ideas revolve. I have always been more creative than analytical so anything that moves ideas from my brain to someone else’s is very attractive. I find I get less headaches of frustration with words, so that is what I end up doing most. I am a little worried that it is becoming an addiction! 2. What was the first thing you wrote? I was trying to work this out the other day. Some years ago I made a conscious effort to chuck out all my school books which my parents had insisted needed to be kept for some unexplained posterity. Sadly, for you, this means that out went anything written when I was very young. It is probably a good thing, however. The earliest works I can remember, without the now discarded supporting evidence, tend to be poems. I love writing poetry, but I am not sure I am very good at it. It also can make me cry which is damned embarrassing! 3. What inspires you? This is an easy one: quiet moments. I come from an industry where the off switch is surgically removed from you as an apprentice; distancing myself from that world has allowed me to reinstall this vital human component and I can now find the time to sit, wonder and let what passes by inspire me in anyway it sees fit. If I were to try and find something in particular that inspires me, I think it would be what I call “natural comedy,” the ability for something to make you smile whoever you are and whatever circumstances one is in, however tragic. Seeing someone with a deadly serious face, trip very slightly and break into a tiny smile, can make my day very special. 4. Do you “people watch” for your writing? Oh, very much so, and so do my characters. People watching is something we all do all the time, it is a very important part of human communication. It is one of the problems with modern communications in that we remove some of the vital senses from our experiences with others like touch, smell, taste, and so end up with a very incomplete picture with our brains desperately trying to fill in the gaps from our library of experiences. Smell, the main character in The Stink, writes all his songs by watching others. He doesn’t try and second guess them or pretend he really knows them, he just watches and makes up a story. It can create the most beautiful moments too; lying next to someone in a park, making up stories of those you both can see, is probably one of the most romantic and sensory moments you can experience. 5. Who are you favorite authors? I struggle with this one often as I have the most terrible memory for names. However, a few authors I love, even though I rarely have time to read them: Charles Dickens, mostly for his wondrous character names, Peter Carey, for his strange and almost cartoon like characters, and Umberto Eco for just being too damned clever. 6. What is your favorite book? 21st Century Blues by Steve Walker. It is probably not the best book in the world, but it made me laugh in all the right places. 7. What genre do you most like to read? I think I end up with Fantasy rather too much. I am not sure why, but maybe because it sometimes offers a simpler view of a world, a simpler life. Let’s face it, when Tolkien invented Hobbiton, he described a village where he wanted to live. 8. What genre do you write? Is this reflective of what you read? At the moment I admit to two Genres. The Stink is set in London in the 1970s and is a young adult book about a young band. Dirt, on the other hand, is a huge, sprawling fantasy set on a world called Dirt. But really, everything is fantasy – even if I set a story around where I live at the moment, it would still be my interpretation of it, and that is going to be fantastical simply because it is not reality. 9. What genre do you have a difficult time with that you wish you could write? I fancy the idea of writing a mystery of some sort. I rather like Sherlock Holmes kind of stories, but I have yet to come up with a strong idea that doesn’t collapse in an illogical heap. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left should probably be chucked in the trash!” 10. What kind of research do you do or have you done for your story? The Stink has a slight autobiographical streak running through it in that it is set in my own teen era, so the research consisted of sitting in the corner, getting drunk, and remembering me and my friends. I did phone a few people I haven’t heard from for forty years and quiz them. That was scary. Dirt has been quite different. Although a fantasy, I wanted to make the world feel real. Like many other fantasies it is set in a medieval kind of environment, just with dragons attached. I was very keen that there was no cheating so that when I needed people to get from A to B nice and quick, there was no convenient wizard that could make up for the lack of a jumbo jet with a wave of a wand. So, I have spent time reading up about how fast people can travel in a wagon, about infantry speeds and supplies, about coping with weather, lighting fires and all the other things that can trip people up in a real world without technology. My notes for the books are now novel sized in their own right. Note taking and research have not only become vital for the books, but fun too! 11. Do you have any writing rituals like eating chocolate or lighting incense? I like this question! Roald Dahl, famously, had his little shed with his favorite armchair where he wrote all his books. Environment is incredibly important and getting that right is what rituals are all about. I have yet to get that perfect and part of trying to become an author is about eventually earning enough money to find my perfect tiny cottage where I can be as ritualistic as I need and write every hour of the day. Part of that is accompaniments, like chocolate and incense. For me it is the espresso coffee machine that sits by my desk and the queue of cheap wine waiting to be consumed. Incense is good too! 12. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what kind? I do sometimes, but since I am also a musician, this can create a conflict of interests. I also speak out loud when I am writing, especially writing dialogue, and that can be a problem if the music is vocal heavy. I do like the atmosphere created by music, however, and will chose artists like John Martyn, JJ Cale and Ry Cooder to jolly me along. Such creative gentlemen! Oh, very partial to Melissa Etheridge too. She has a challenging streak to her words that wake me up. 13. Introduce us to your current book. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome onto the stage, The Stink! (Please stand up and cheer.) London in 1976 was an interesting place. Industrial strife was building, the National Front was spewing out their vile messages, our parents were finding homophobic comedians funny and the economy was in a really bad place. So what happened? Well, the sun came out and refused to go away for the entire summer. It was the longest, hottest summer on record and if you were sixteen and had just finished your O-Levels, you were in Nirvana! Smell, Aroma, Haze, Stench and Fart are five friends putting together a band and trying to get their first gig. They are young, crazy, silly and innocent and determined to have fun. Getting mixed up with a group of murderous tramps, lugging generators around to power rehearsals, facing racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia was not exactly on their to-do lists, but when you are 16, creative and adventurous, anything can happen. And then there is that falling in love thing! The Stink is nothing if it is not a comedy, but it is also about real people and if you laugh with them most of the time, don’t be surprised if suddenly you are crying with them. They are the teens we all were or wanted to be, living at a time that was fun, occasionally creative and totally lacking in mobile phones! Read loads more at http://thestinkbooks.com 14. How long did it take you to write it? I started writing it several years ago and struggled with the first fifty thousand words. But then last year I kicked myself hard and got down to it properly and finished the first draft in five weeks, loving every moment of it. 15. Which character(s) of yours do you most relate to? The five heroes are all people I remember from my own teenage years, but the two I am closest to are Smell and Aroma. Smell is not really me, apart from the writing songs bit, but I understand him and his confusion about the world. I want to sit down and tell him that he will work it out one day and it will be cool. Aroma is simply my first girlfriend and I love her like crazy. 16. Who is your favorite character in this story? I am very fond of Frank, the old Jamaican who gives Smell a job and helps the band out when it all goes wrong. He is a warm and strong man who accepts young people as they are and does not judge too quickly. Parents in the 21st century have different relationships to their kids than back in the Seventies. They listen to similar music, went to similar schools and had the same teen angst. Back in the seventies that wasn’t so, and the gulf between the young generation and the older generation was huge. Characters like Frank who could bridge the gap were rare and are fondly remembered. 17. Which character is the best role model for readers? Ooh, I am not sure. All my characters have faults so I would not recommend role model status for any of them completely. Perhaps Smell is the one I would like for others to follow just a little. He is incredibly creative and just a touch anarchic inside. In one scene, he sees a young boy playing with his food in a burger bar and being told off by his mother. The boy is looking at a tomato thinking that it is staring at him. As the friends leave the restaurant, Smell whispers in the boy’s ear, “Yeah, I thought it was staring too.” The boy then gives the tomato a vicious stab. When one of the other members of the band asks what that was about, Smell replies, “Someone had his creativity trodden on. I was just giving it a bit of first aid.” I like that Smell would take the time to think about that sort of thing. 18. How did you decide on your cover? This was purely financial – I didn’t have any money. So, I drew my own using photoshop. It probably is far from the best cover, but I hope it is at least distinctive. 19. What do you hope people discover while reading your story? This will depend on the audience. For people my age, in their fifties, I hope they will rediscover the world of their youth; a world where the teenager came into their own, but had yet to be ensnared by modern communications. When we left our front door, our parents had no way of tracking us down, had no computer to spy on and we could be as private as we liked. That was true freedom. For young people now, I hope they will discover that despite the lack of mobiles and the internet, us oldies were exactly like them. We struggled with love, with parents, with life and with friends and we fell in love/hate on a minute by minute basis. We were the original teens and the world the teen has now is our gift to them. 20. Have you written anything else? Tell us about it/them. The big book is Dirt which I am currently proofreading and working on the artwork for the first three books. It is immense and I have just finished writing book 5 plus a short story and a novella with another 7 in the pipeline. Dirt is a world of humans and dragons, but possibly not a world that many dragon lovers have encountered before. Like many fantasy dragons, my lot speak and have opinions, but it struck me that an intelligent dragon if she were real would be less than happy living in a damp cave. So dragons on my world have a culture, have opinions, have politics, sex-lives, families, villages and the rest. They are just rather bigger and can fly. The first three books tell the story of Johnson Farthing, a poor cart-pusher in a small coastal town, whose sister is kidnapped by slavers. What starts out as a simple chase across a continent slowly evolves into a huge political saga as Johnson and the girl he loves, try and transform their world from one of autocratic and tyrannical leaders to one where the ordinary person has a say in their own lives. The world is complicated, multi layered, detailed and as real as I can make it. The characters love and hate, laugh and cry, are heroes and are silly, and all, humans and dragons, have needs, fears, pain and sorrow. But despite the world encompassing story, the politics and the wars, ultimately this is a story about friendship and family and the need to find somewhere to call home. Like The Stink, it will have its own website where I will be putting up maps, background histories and much more over time. http://aworldcalleddirt.com/ 21. Do you experience writers block, how do you deal with it? I am not a believer in writers block in that I think it is rather a vague term to cover lots of other problems and not something to be dealt with in itself. The real problems can be anything from not feeling well to messing up the plot or creating a useless character. If you are suffering from “Writers Block,” maybe rather than trying to find some mad trick, try and work out what the problem really is. Loads more about this here: http://cchogan.com/i-dont-have-writers-block/ 22. What do you not like about writing? Quick and easy – my terrible spelling and occasional blindness to words. I am not dyslexic, but sometimes I think I am close and I get frustrated. Word processing has been my savior! 23. Are you working on anything now? I think “Dirt” is going to be my full time project for the next couple of years, but I also want to squeeze in a sequel to The Stink which will be set 2 years later when they are 18 and go on the road. It will definitely be naughtier and a lot less innocent. I also have a couple of other comedy ideas up my sleeve. 24. How do you market your work? At the moment it is down to social media since I am broke. So, wonderful ideas like this 27 questions is perfect for me! 25. What would you say to readers? READ MY BOOKS! Too subtle? One of the biggest kicks I get out of writing my books is reading them back which I do out loud, often standing up to get a bit of a performance going. I am a great believer that people are basically funny and even a psychopath will giggle at something silly. I try and get that into my books and my characters, so if you find that my characters are not “terribly dark” all the time, maybe it is because what they really are is real people; even my dragons. 26. What would you say to writers aspiring or otherwise? Aspire! I have written a million words over the last year and even if I only sell one book (which would be very depressing), I have really enjoyed the process of writing. The trick is to keep writing, even if it is rubbish. Make loads of silly notes, try not to make the process academic, and remember that in the end you are a story teller. You are the person sitting in that old tavern, telling a story to a group of people while drinking big pots of frothy beer. Make your audience laugh, cry, think, dream and, most importantly, want to spend time with you and your characters. Some authors love to talk about the “loneliness” of writing, the pain of being an author and so on. Well, load of self-indulgent rubbish, basically. How can one be lonely if you are spending time with such wonderful people like Smell or Aroma, or dragons in my Dirt books like Fren-Eirol and Mab-Onin? Get your pencil out, open your laptop, or however you are going to write, create your characters and fall in love with them. It is a complete joy! 27. Where can one purchase your book(s)? The Stink is available through Amazon at the moment in both Kindle and Paperback. Here is a link: http://getbook.at/the-stink-kindle Links Blog: http://cchogan.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/Its_CCHogan Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/cc-hogan Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cchoganauthor Dirt: http://aworldcalleddirt.com/ The Stink: http://thestinkbooks.com/ Audio of The Stink, Chapter 1: https://youtu.be/gHpARYuWd_g The Stink Trailer: https://youtu.be/njIVj1ewwk8
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
OTHER BLOGS
CHARACTER ARGUMENTS Archives
May 2016
Categories
All
|