Ask the Author: Manda Scott
Answered Questions (7)
Manda Scott
I will come wherever I'm invited... I'll be up in Harrogate for the Raworth Literary Festival on 20th October, staying over to 21st though I have to respect a 20 mile (I think - have to check) exclusion zone so I don't steal prospective attendees. So it depends where you are? Email me through the website and we can talk more.
Manda Scott
There are a great many strong women in this book. Ines Picaut is the Captain of police in Orleans who has to solve the assassination at the heart of the story - an old, old woman with an uncertain identity is found dead in a way that reflects back to the second world war.
And so there are also characters in the war: Sophie Destivelle is an assassin, one of the 'equipes de tueurs' mentioned by John Goldsmith in his book, 'The Accidental Agent'. Goldsmith was in the Special Operations Executive and his book is a gold mine of information, some of it entirely unique. Amongst his throwaway nuggets is a paragraph about these 'equipes' whose sole reason for existence was to assassinate men and women who had betrayed the Resistance to the occupying German army.
He says this: "Pierre, the man who betrayed me…had been assassinated by one of the Resistance's teams of trained killers – equipes de tueurs – within three days of my arrest… The killer teams normally did no other form of Resistance work and were therefor above suspicion. Their numbers included harmless-looking, under-developed students and one or two anaemic girls. I got the impression that the weaker thy looked the more deadly they were."
Once in a while, there's an explosion of ideas, and a character arrives more or less fully formed. Sophie was one of these - a nurse who is also an assassin. We follow her through the war and on towards the present day.
One of her counterparts is a woman we come to know as Celine, an English woman of similar age and similar competence, who is trained by the SOE and parachuted into France. They are very, very different women: Sophie is working class French while Celine is an English aristocrat a (moderately) closeted lesbian. But they become friends and their friendship is part of the core dynamic that drives the book forwards.
And so there are also characters in the war: Sophie Destivelle is an assassin, one of the 'equipes de tueurs' mentioned by John Goldsmith in his book, 'The Accidental Agent'. Goldsmith was in the Special Operations Executive and his book is a gold mine of information, some of it entirely unique. Amongst his throwaway nuggets is a paragraph about these 'equipes' whose sole reason for existence was to assassinate men and women who had betrayed the Resistance to the occupying German army.
He says this: "Pierre, the man who betrayed me…had been assassinated by one of the Resistance's teams of trained killers – equipes de tueurs – within three days of my arrest… The killer teams normally did no other form of Resistance work and were therefor above suspicion. Their numbers included harmless-looking, under-developed students and one or two anaemic girls. I got the impression that the weaker thy looked the more deadly they were."
Once in a while, there's an explosion of ideas, and a character arrives more or less fully formed. Sophie was one of these - a nurse who is also an assassin. We follow her through the war and on towards the present day.
One of her counterparts is a woman we come to know as Celine, an English woman of similar age and similar competence, who is trained by the SOE and parachuted into France. They are very, very different women: Sophie is working class French while Celine is an English aristocrat a (moderately) closeted lesbian. But they become friends and their friendship is part of the core dynamic that drives the book forwards.
Manda Scott
I connect to the web of life and love it with all my being. And I want it still to be alive long after I'm gone.
Manda Scott
The sequel to Any Human Power: Currently entitled 'All the Wild Islands' after the Illya Prigogine quote: “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have a capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
Change is coming. How do we build towards a future we'd all be proud to leave as our legacy - while the establishment flails around ever-more violently as it crumbles into insignificance?
Change is coming. How do we build towards a future we'd all be proud to leave as our legacy - while the establishment flails around ever-more violently as it crumbles into insignificance?
Manda Scott
Write how we move forwards - the time for dystopias and utopias is over - we don't need to see how bad things could be: half the world is living this reality. Utopias never show us how to get to a world we'd be proud to leave as our legacy. We need to SEE the way through - so write it - write what *you* would be proud to leave. Show us how you get there.
And whatever you do, don't write propaganda for the dying years of the death cult of predatory capitalism. It's not useful. Everything predicated on 'Business as Usual' is part of the scam. Please don't go there.
And whatever you do, don't write propaganda for the dying years of the death cult of predatory capitalism. It's not useful. Everything predicated on 'Business as Usual' is part of the scam. Please don't go there.
Manda Scott
Having the incentive to look forward to that future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us - and then having to work out how we get there...
Manda Scott
I think that once writing is your life, this doesn't come up. If I have characters who are alive for me, they will always do something. It may not be what I expect, but it'll be real. If they're not living fully, then I've gone wrong somewhere and I need to go back to the last place they were fully authentic and take a new track.
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