Today’s featured debut author is Tom Harris, who managed, in a single interview, to reference two of my favorite films (The Usual Suspects, Misery) and probably my all-time favorite board game (Clue). Although I don’t agree with Tom’s feelings on setting daily word counts (I am, after all, all about the #1kaday), I do agree with pretty much everything else he says. And because I did not do the formatting for ‘Baby Grand,’ I will try his Chopin trick the next time I have to fold laundry. :)
Name: Tom Harris
Name of book: The Amber Room
Book genre: Young Adult
Date published: April 9, 2012
Publisher: Kindle Direct Publishing/Smashwords
What is your day job? Recently made redundant, but lining up interviews for a part time job to sit alongside my writing – any tips? As a writer you have to be realistic and keep a job even if it’s part time. Without financial security, we’d all go bonkers! Lots of arguing, lots of fretting and certainly not enough writing and I’d be eating cheap fish fingers again, which I swore I’d never do.
What is your book about? It’s about a 14-year-old kleptomaniac, North, who gets a chance to use his compulsion to steal to save his sister, India, when she ends up in a coma. With the help of Dr. Tan and a fairy, Rosie Boots, North travels through a portal inside an amber room in a hospital into dark fairy tale worlds to steal amber treasures that can heal India. Yet all is not as it seems in the twisted reality of the Amber Room.
Why did you want to write this book? The characters made me do it! Writing North as a kleptomaniac triggered everything. I suddenly had a main character who was real and didn’t fit into the normal world and would easily be lured into escaping it with the right motivation. Once North was real, he kept nagging away at me, and then Rosie Boots, a feisty fairy who North is smitten with, arrived with her qualification from I.F.E.A – Intensive Fairy Educating Arenas, for those who are curious. She was followed quickly by Doctor Tan, who was originally a character for a short story about Cluedo – which had to be postponed when he was arrested for an incident with some rope and a candlestick – and that was that. I simply couldn’t ignore them.
