Marcus Sedgwick Talks To Bookbag About Special Places

Marcus Sedgwick Talks To Bookbag About Special Places

Summary: Marcus Sedgwick, author of Midwinterblood popped into Bookbag Towers on his blog tour and if you look carefully at the feature below you'll find a link to some secret content on Marcus' website which is only available to our readers.

Date: 10 October 2011

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External links: Author's website

Special Places

Another of those questions you get asked a lot as a writer: where do you like to work? Do you have a special place?

Well, yes, I do have a special place - I am one of those lucky ones who has a shed at the bottom of the garden. It's bright, and my fingers don't freeze in the winter now I've put a woodburner into it, but it's very small and won't cost half a million pounds to move it when I'm dead (as we heard a week or so ago about the famous Dahl writing abode!) And I do love writing in there, but the truth of the matter is, when a deadline is pressing, or maybe when it's even gone by, the best place to write is anywhere that works.

I was running against time writing Midwinterblood, largely because I'd written 10,000 words of something else that I then had to abandon, being unhappy with it. As things fell out, I was living on an island off the coast of Sweden, in a small hut, though a small hut with wifi (well, Sweden's a modern place) and it was there that I wrote the bulk of the book. I knew a couple of people on the island, my landlord and landlady, and that was about it. I ate very simply, the fastest things I could cook, and I worked all day from early morning to early evening, taking usually one trip a day to go to the island's single shop, or to go diving off the rocks into the warm (yes, really) waters of the Gothenburg archipelago.

I suspect I went a little crazy with cabin fever, but the next time I lifted my head to see who I was, I had three-quarters of a new book. It all feels so serendipitous when it's going well - having the idea at the right time, having the chance to be able to work on it, finding that it's going okay, and I never take it for granted when it does, because any writer will tell you about the times when it doesn't go well, as for example, when you have to throw away 10,000 words. Something I've now done three times in my life, and which, I suspect, I will have to do again, one day...

- Marcus Sedgwick – 10 October 2011

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