My 3rd interview for eBook Showtime

I don't have favourites where my interviewees are concerned; it wouldn't be ethical and would show me in something of a poor light. However, this isn't to say that I don't have particular aspects of my guest authors that I greatly admire, and perhaps a good example is from my meeting with international best-selling author Lucinda E. Clarke, as is suggested in the opening of my introduction:

"To say that today's guest author is a bit of an all-rounder may be something of an understatement..."

Lucinda's done journalism, screenwriting, novels and memoirs, with eclectic mixes of humour, tragedy and pathos. I mean, how brilliant is that? She sounded just my sort of writer, which is why I jumped at the chance of meeting her.

But, as I'd already learned where online interviews are concerned, technology is all very well just so long as it's firing on all four cylinders, which is often not the case. I was in the north of England and Lucinda, on Spain's east coast, was only (only?) around 1,500 miles away, so not exactly Earth to Venus, was it? But I lost count of the times the audio got zapped or went off on a journey of its own, leaving us with little picture jerks and long freezes (less painful than it sounds). And every time that happened we had to stop and reconnect, do the pre-recording setups once again, and continue where we left off. I had almost 20GB of useless video footage.

Would you believe that it took three months to get finished? Now, you can't tell from the final cut that we are a quarter of a year older from beginning to end, can you? I'm joking! Actually, what we did was re-record it all again from scratch and this final session was done in just one take. Its success makes the headaches and frustrations pale into insignificance.

At the end of the day, it all made for getting to know each other whilst rattling on about the book business and putting the world to rights. I particularly enjoyed when Lucinda took me on a tour of her home and from out on the balcony could be seen palm trees, orange groves and, sizzling in the distance, the Mediterranean Sea. The heat was bringing me out in a sweat, even though here it was barely 20 degrees Celsius.   

In future posts I shall deal with my take on writing in more than one genre, and the next post will feature Lucinda, as guest blogger, telling how she came to be such a versatile writer. I'm looking forward to it.

Here's the interview

and here is Lucinda's website.