10 questions with James Forrester (The Final Sacrament)

1) Where do you write?
The best ideas come from walking. Whether walking in a city or in this wonderful landscape where I live - Dartmoor. It is a living library of several thousand years of life, and is more inspirational than any research library.

2) What is the first book you remember reading? and 3) Do you have a favourite literary character?
Strange to say, I've rarely enjoyed reading, and so it is not surprising that I cannot remember reading anything before school days. My mother used to read poetry to me at bedtime as a child. I loved The Iliad and the Odyssey as a boy, and traditional tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur. My favourite reading expereience at 15 was James Clavell's Shogun, at 18 Pride and Prejudice, and at 19 Doctor Zhivago. But since then I've realised that I prefer writing to reading, and I prefer talking about new ideas more than reading about them.

4) Is there a book by an another author that you wish you had written?
No.

5) What's the best advice you have ever received?
"If you really want to be a writer - write, and keep doing it until someone or something forces you to stop" Ron Tamplin, University of Exeter, circa 1987.

6) What's the worst advice you have ever received?
My housemaster at school, who urged me to to do a chemistry A level (with maths and economics) instead of history. It took six weeks to persuade everyone this was a big, big mistake.

7) What are you currently reading?
I don't have 'a book on the go' - ever. I never read a book from cover to cover unless I am reviewing it. I don't have the time. I do read to all three of my children at bedtimes, however. I am reading a Caroline Lawrence 'Mysteries of Rome' book to the eldest (13), a Roald Dahl to the eleven-year old (light relief after finishing Tarka the Otter), and an Anthony Horowitz 'Alex Rider' book to my youngest (9).

8) Who is your hero or heroine?
The answer to this question is either 'none' or 'too many to mention'. Among the latter you would find the people I have written biographies about (Roger Mortimer, Edward III, Henry IV - but not Henry V), Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jean Genet, Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas, Francis Drake, actually quite a large number of poets, thinkers, rulers and explorers

9) Where are you happiest?
Apart from 'in bed or anywhere, making love' (is that not a universal truth?), talking to someone who is smiling at me. It helps if the someone is intelligent - and even more if she is pretty. Or if he/she is just one member of a large audience.

10) Who would be at your dream dinner party (can be living or dead)?
A round table, set for twelve, with the following people seated opposite one another:
Beethoven opposite Elvis Presley
Leonardo opposite Picasso
Elizabeth I opposite Elizabeth II
Marilyn Monroe opposite Cleopatra
Jesus opposite the current archbishop of Canterbury
an empty space opposite me.

The Final Sacrament
James Forrester's website .

10 questions with Trisha Ashley (Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues)

1. Where do you write?
When I moved to this house at the end of last year, I’d earmarked the little annex room at the back as an ideal study, but because I had a book deadline I had all the boxes stacked in there at first and set up a temporary office in the dining room. When eventually I moved into the annex, I decided I much preferred the dining room! My son said he wished I’d realised this before he’d moved everything the first time…The dining room looks out over the garden and the two little apple trees and it is very quiet: bliss.

2. What is the first book you remember reading?
I was an early reader and had a set of children’s books called The Golden Pathway, full of poetry, stories, fables, legends and fairytales. Dipping into them was endlessly exciting and I particularly remember reading The Water Babies for the first time.

3. Do you have a favourite literary character?
I really, really like Coco in Aphrodite’s Workshop for Reluctant Lovers by Marika Cobbold. He’s an imaginary clown that one of the characters sees when she is very stressed, so I suppose you could say he is a fictional character created by a fictional character. I have clown envy.

4. Is there a book by another author that you wish you had written?
No.  I admire books by other authors, but I’m happily writing the books I really want to write.

5. What’s the best advice you have ever received?
When I first went to London to meet literary agent Judith Murdoch, I had been writing satirical novels for a few years and not getting anywhere. I’d sent her one of my books and she said to me: ‘Trisha, this romantic comedy hasn’t got any romance in it!’ which of course it hadn’t. Then she explained to me how I could rewrite the novel and sent me away with my head spinning.  It was a real lightbulb moment, realising that simply by adding another strand to my novels, I might actually find a publisher. That novel became Good Husband Material (to be reprinted in a fresh edition by Avon in March next year), and fourteen or fifteen books down the line, three of them Sunday Times top ten bestsellers, I’m still with Judith Murdoch and listening carefully to everything she says!

6. What’s the worst advice you have ever received?
I can’t actually think of any! When my first novel was published many years ago, one or two ‘friends’ did commiserate with me because it was ‘only’ a romantic novel rather than Great Literature, but I thought this shed an unappealing light on their characters. There is still a lot of that kind of literary snobbery about, isn’t there? Very odd.

7. What are you currently reading?
I have just finished Jill McGivering’s second novel, Far From my Father’s House, which was excellent and thought-provoking.

8. Who is your hero or heroine?
I think I would have to say that I admire all those men and women of my parent’s age who lived through the war: all were affected in various ways, all have stories to tell.

9. Where are you happiest?
As Stephen King says: writing is the most fun you can have on your own.

10. Who would be at your dream dinner party?
I’d just like to have all my friends round – novelists all of them! We’d have such a great time and never stop talking and laughing.  Now, how big is this dining table…?

Trisha has a page and is on Twitter at . Visit Trisha's website to write in her guest book, sign up for her quarterly newsletter or email her, and check out the complete booklist on the homepage.

10 questions with Rachel Johnson (Winter Games)

Winter Games by Rachel Johnson

1) Where do you write?
It is a source of enduring marital tension that I am the one who works from home (or has done for most of our 20 year marriage) and I don't have a study or indeed any space of my own in the house. So I write at a desk in the sitting room, but when it's cold I sit at a little table in the kitchen which I push as close to the AGA as I can. I also write in bed, propped up against pillows, because that doesn't feel like work.

2) What is the first book you remember reading?
My mother was reading a Ladybird to me called The Little Red Hen. She was pointing the words as she said them out loud and I suddenly understood how to read. I was four.  



3) Do you have a favourite literary character?
I love Becky Sharp - she's an enduring counter-heroine. I'm reading Nicholas Coleridge's new novel in proof and the heroine is a classic Sharp - a chancer on the make, ruthless in the boardroom, heartless, terrific in the sack, endlessly bettering herself at the expense of others...the truth is from 18th century novels onwards, bad lots make much more vivid characters than milky misses.

4) Is there a book by an another author that you wish you had written?
Too many to list, and there are probably books I've published under my own name I wish I hadn't written!

5) What's the best advice you have ever received?
The best advice is to plot your books properly in advance. I wish I'd taken it with my new novel Winter Games. It would have saved me years of work.

6) What's the worst advice you have ever received?
I can't think. I probably deleted it instantly.

7) What are you currently reading?
The Adventuress by Nicholas Coleridge. It is making me laugh out loud. Agonisingly pleasurable, total page turner, and surprisingly  dirty!

8) Who is your hero or heroine?
George in the Famous Five

9) Where are you happiest?
In our house on Exmoor.

10) Who would be at your dream dinner party (can be living or dead)?
Bill Clinton, Steve McQueen, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, PG Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Christopher Hitchens, Clive James, and Marie Colvin.

10 questions with Fanny Blake (Women of a Dangerous Age)

1) Where do you write?
I write in a small room that’s just off our kitchen so in all too easy reach of the biscuit tin and the fridge - bad idea. When we moved in, this room was the kitchen but, by the time I started writing, we’d moved the kitchen into a larger room. I wanted somewhere I could shut myself away from the rest of the family and write – this was the answer. The desk runs around three sides, so there’s plenty of room for me to accumulate clutter – and I do!  Many of the shelves are crowded with proofs and books that I’m sent for my work as books editor of Woman & Home. Sitting at my computer, I look out over the garden, and in particular at an old apple tree which attracts many different birds. I’m not a gardener, but I do find looking out there very calming. They say a tidy room is the sign of a tidy mind – I long for both.

2) What is the first book you remember reading?
I remember reading many children’s books very clearly. I turned to the old favourites again and again, but to be honest I’m not sure which one of them I read first. Before I escaped into almost every adventure and schoolgirl book ever written by Enid Blyton, there was Noddy, of course. And perhaps even before that: Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter – I still remember the lettuce making the rabbits sleepy and Peter hiding in the watering can. I read the books about Orlando the Marmalade Cat by Kathleen Hale – I loved the kittens in particular; the Babar books by Jean de Brunhoff; and the Pookie books by Ivy Wallace. So animals, pictures and a good story did the trick.

3) Do you have a favourite literary character?
This is the most difficult question of them all. But I think I’m going to choose Madame Bovary. Not because I particularly like her but because I think she’s such a fantastic creation. Flaubert captures perfectly her wilfulness and her self-absorption, making her utterly convincing as a character.

4) Is there a book by another author that you wish you had written?
Oh, plenty. But among them is Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler – a pitch-perfect novel in my eyes. Tyler is wise, astringent, subtle and an observer of the smallest most telling detail.

5) What's the best advice you have ever received?
The best advice I ever received was when I worked at Penguin in the days before we had computer terminals on every desk. Instead there were three trays – In, Out and Pending (the graveyard). A friend told me that you should ‘only ever touch each piece of paper once. Deal with it or ask someone else to.’ I did my best. I think the same probably applies to emails nowadays – except of course there isn’t a ‘someone else’ now I’m self-employed and working from home.

6) What's the worst advice you have ever received?
The worst piece was perhaps from my husband who advised me not to stop working for a publishing company where I was acquiring and editing fiction and general non-fiction. He was certain I’d miss the company of my colleagues and end up miserable and lonely – and probably unemployed (but he never said that). I ignored his advice and became a self-employed journalist and writer. I’ve never ever regretted it.

7) What are you currently reading?
At the moment I’m reading the new novel by Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour. I’ve been a big fan of hers since I read The Poisonwood Bible. This latest story of a Tennessee farmer’s wife trying to escape a failing marriage when a miraculous event transforms her life doesn’t disappoint.

8) Who is your hero or heroine?
I hugely admire the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, for her extraordinary courage, altruism and political conviction. Kept under house arrest for the best part of 15 years, she refused the chance to leave the country to visit her dying husband and children fearing she would not be allowed to re-enter. She has devoted so much of her life to championing the people of Burma and doing all she can to bring about democratic reforms to improve their lives now and their future.

9) Where are you happiest?
Bicycling down the roads and tracks in Formentera when the sky is blue, the sun is warm, the smell of herbs is in the air and I’ve got nothing more pressing on my mind than getting to wherever I’m going.

10) Who would be at your dream dinner party (can be living or dead)?
Apart from family and friends, I’d have Yotam Ottolenghi to do the cooking (I’d help a bit, of course), Dorothy Parker, Dirk Bogarde, Ella Fitzgerald, Cleopatra and Barack Obama.

Fanny Blake’s novel is out now