When our mutual friend, Tessa, introduced us by announcing I'd be a good reader for Chris' book, I was definitely intruiged. Cut to a couple of days ago when I was holding my kindle, having finished said book, almost giddy with many emotions. It was fantastic to say the least.
Chris was even kind enough to agree to an interview about Each Little Universe and we had such a brilliant chat!
1. I have to ask, what were the thought processes when writing this book? (Any scribbling with crayon on a laminated blanket?)
Honestly, I don't really know! I don't think there was much of a process with this one at all - it emerged kind of from a few specific scenes I wanted to include, and then I just had to fill in the gaps... which I did by working in as many bad puns as possible, basically.
If I have a process it's a kind of oversaturation of specific vignettes; I just jot down little exchanges, concepts, things that don't really make much sense, and when I have a whole lot of them I look for ones that seem like they fit together in a theme and go from there!
2. The names make me laugh, were those picked at random?
I would say... probably 75% of the names have some significance. I can't say all of them do - some definitely were just 'that sounds funny' - but the majority of 'em have at least some rationale behind them. I can explain in more detail, but it'd be spoilers!
3. Ziggy is a little ball of adorableness at one point, then a fierce firecracker the next. Tell us more about what went in to making her character.
So I think all of the characters are me to some extent, different bits of me expressed in different ways, and perhaps that's true of any character ever written by any human. Ziggy is the bit of me that desperately wants to just live the most authentic human life, but doesn't really know what that looks like.
I think there's something really special about being a person living a person life, but I don't think I've ever quite worked out how to feel like that applies to me! She can come off, I think, as kind of quirky for quirk's own sake at times, but in my head she's a bit of a deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope - y'know, the very outgoing love interest who comes along and is just sort of unreasonably exciting in an unattainable and maybe even slightly annoying way.
Ziggy's odd because she really, really wants to fit in and understand what it means to be a person, so she throws as much out there as she can and hopes some of it sticks. That doesn't always work out, though; she picks goals on a whim in the hopes that it'll help her feel she's experiencing something, but realising she didn't know why she wanted it is kind of devastating for her. I think that's profoundly human, though: getting something you thought you wanted and then realising you aren't sure what you actually wanted it for.
Life is weird and complicated and important, and I think Ziggy was born a little bit out of my attempts to make sense of that!
4. You get likened to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, how does that feel?
Y'know, I think I'm the one who started that comparison by including their names in the blurb as, like, 'if you like X maybe you'll like this!'. I am unbelievably flattered any time anyone actually agrees with that, though, and there have been a few reviews (your lovely self included) who have made really complimentary observations about the style being similar to Pratchett or Douglas Adams, or the storytelling being like something Gaiman or Murakami might do.
I never quite know how to handle it when people sincerely suggest that I deserve to be compared to writers like that, except to go 'OH HECK THANK YOU'!
5. If your book was ever made into a movie, who would you want to cast?
I actually did a hypothetical casting a while back, when the novel was a little bit different from how it ended up, but here are a couple I would still stand by..!
TM - Alfred Enoch
Veggie - Clark Duke or Evan Peters (but British, of course)
Ziggy - Chloe Bennet or Jessica Henwick
O'Ryan - Angela Scanlon or Karen Gillan
Al Tyer - Clark Gable (time travel required, naturally)
TM's dad - Terry Crews or Selasi Gbormittah
I'm not a massively visual person, I don't think, so I tend to think of the characters much more in terms of who they are and how they behave than what they look like, but based purely on appearances I think those would match pretty closely to what I have in my head!
6. There is a LOT of role-playing in this book, are you yourself a gamer?
I am! I don't get to do as much tabletop gaming as I'd like, but I am a big video gamer. I actually just released a book about video games! The games depicted in the book are based on real games (Dungeons & Dragons, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, Dark Souls, etc) but are not actually those games - partly so I don't get sued and partly because I didn't want to have to get all the details right! Hero's Adventure is very D&D-ish, but because it's a fictional game I get to make up all the rules however I like rather than have to stick to the actual ones.
7. The opening of the book is definitely bizarre, where on earth did you get "octobike " from?
I have absolutely no idea. The opening is the first thing that sparked it all off; I had to write a scene of dialogue for a creative writing class, where the only real brief was just to make the voices distinct and make it entertaining, and that initial exchange between TM and Veggie is what happened. It's pretty much unchanged since then, in fact! I think that's something I used to do a fair bit: just make up something that made very little sense and write an interaction of people trying to make sense of it. Stumbled across something the other day that I must've written years ago in which two characters somehow rationalise 'cheeseburgers therefore the government', so... yeah. That's just how my brain works, I guess! Sometimes it yields useful stuff, sometimes not so much.
8. Would you ever write another book like this?
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooh. Another book like this? That's a heck of a question. I don't know, to be honest. I guess it depends by what you mean by 'like this'! I think the prose style is probably going to be something that you'll see again, 'cos that's just sort of how words come out for me so there's not a whole lot I can do about it.
I think there'll probably be more of this sort of urban fantasy magical realism ish vibe going on, too, but I think exploring different things. I have this idea for a book (it's been germinating in my head for years and one day I will write it but it's very important to me so I'm terrified of getting it wrong D:) that I think of as kind of a spiritual successor to ELU that explores identity in the same way ELU explores love (which is to say by looking at as many versions of it as possible through as many lenses as possible), but... something tells me nothing will ever feel quite the same as ELU. We'll just have to see!
Thank you so much for answering my questions, Chris! And if anyone would like to read Each Little Universe, you can order the book here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1656968223/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_QC9TKM5XKGVGDH2AW7KR
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