The Laura Interview: Part Two

“Now this is an interesting one," I say. "When it came time for Valkyrie to get a boyfriend, we actually did have a few discussions about it. At first you hated Fletcher- what do you think of him now?"

“Oh I hated him,” Laura nods. “He was irritating and annoying and needy and clingy, everything I’ve always hated about boyfriends. I’m all Team Caelan, like. Bad boy. Cool, mysterious... He has that “oh my God I so shouldn’t be doing this, but I will anyway” kind of thing. And he’s sexy, and he’s...” She pauses. “Fletcher is what is expected. Caelan is what is forbidden.”

“It’s so funny,” she continues, starting to smile, “because whenever you’re talking about Skulduggery not knowing about the Caelan thing, about the level of attraction and, kind of, flirtation that’s going on when he’s not around, I always think of the times when you’ve found out that I haven’t told you something, and you go all quiet. It’s just like that. You write it exactly the same as how you act. You do that scary quiet thing when you get angry.”

“Yes, well, enough about me...”

“What do you mean, enough about you? This whole interview is about you! Finally you get a reason to ask me all this stuff. But okay, back to the question, which was, uh... Fletcher. Yes. I hated Fletcher at the start, I hated his arrogance, I hated the fact that Val fell for him, because I never would have fallen for someone so in love with himself.”

“Has he improved?”

“He’s not as annoying. He’s not as cocky as... no, actually, he’s still as cocky as he ever was.”

“But if you remember,” I say, “in the first two books you seriously did not like Tanith.”

“She annoyed me, too. She was too cocky. She just... You have a habit of writing characters that annoy me, don’t you? Or maybe I’m just intolerant.”

“I think that’s what it is.”

“I think you’re annoying.”

“We really don’t have to go there. But while Tanith finally proved herself to you, Fletcher still hasn’t, has he?”

Laura makes a face. “Ah... He’s saved the day a few times, and he’s been in agony in The Faceless Ones, and he’s come through, so there’s probably not much more he could do to earn my respect. I’m probably just a bit, you know... tough on him.”

“We’ve seen Valkyrie start out as an Elemental and then take up the Necromancer ring- which power would you prefer?”

“Oh, now that’s a question I’ve been struggling with. I’d love to be able to keep the two. With Necromancy, I wouldn’t want to go down that dark path... Well, actually, it’s not so much the dark thing, I’d just hate to be part of the Necromancer Order. I don’t like them. It’s like being in church. I love the scariness of it and I love the coldness and the shadows, and I love all that. I’d love to be able to keep both kinds of powers- it’d be like something out of Captain Planet, where you’d be able to have them all.”

I laugh, impressed that she’s managed to reference one of the worst cartoons of all time.

“I know she has to choose,” Laura continues. “I mean, you obviously know which way she’s going to choose...”

“I don’t actually.”

“Do you not? Could you not make it so that she can have the two, no?”

“Nope. When she gets to 19 or 20, she’s going to have to make a choice.”

“It’s kind of hard. The problem with Necromancy is that it seems to be kind of limited- the shadows can come around and grab the guy and whatever, and that’s it. Whereas with Elemental magic, you give yourself a lot more options, especially because Skulduggery is learning all these new tricks.”

“So if you really had to pick?”

“Oh God... Okay, if you take out the Order, Necromancy. It also just sounds cooler.”

“So how does it feel to know that you served as the inspiration for one of the main characters? Is it weird?”

“It’s not... weird. I mean, when people say that, that I’m the inspiration, it’s... Okay, the personalities are very similar, even when I read it myself I laugh because the comments that she makes are me all over. Especially early on, it was funny, I used to put a little star beside all the things that I’ve actually said to you in real life. There are conversations in there that we’ve actually had. But because it happened- and I’ve actually been thinking about this question- because it happened the way it did- the book was written, you got a deal- it’s just kind of snowballed. So it’s not like if someone turned around and presented me with a book about my life. It’s not like that. It’s something that grew organically. There’s never been one particular day where everything had just changed overnight. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I go to respond but, in typical Laura fashion, she talks over me and continues. “Not that it doesn’t have the wow factor,” she says. “Obviously it’s cool, when you see little things in the book... I don’t think anyone apart from myself will pick up on all of these little things, but still, it’s nice.” She shrugs. “And you’re my friend, so I’m glad I could be of service.”

“Can you remember how you felt when I first told you I was writing a book about a skeleton detective, and that, basically, the lead female character was inspired by you?”

She looks a little sheepish. “I actually do not remember. Would you believe that? Like, I remember you telling me about the book deal... I was just like, “What? No way. Really?” I actually didn’t get excited about it until after you’d hung up, and I was sitting there in the car and I went, ‘Derek’s got a book deal...’ I couldn’t get my head around it. It came completely out of the blue. You’d told me that a few publishers had been on to your agent, but you were playing it very cool, very low key, you didn’t want anyone to get their hopes up, so I had no idea this was in the pipeline, you know?”

“I really regret telling you on the phone,” I say. “I regret not telling you to come over to the house, because I didn’t get to tell you to your face and see your reaction.”

“I know! It was like... ‘Oh right. No way. Cool.’ You know? I didn’t have the chance to go ‘What? Are you JOKING me?’ But yeah, anyway, that wasn’t the question. See, it was never, ‘hey look, I’ve got this book written, and this character is inspired by you’. It was ‘hey, I’m writing a book, I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it, but...’ Y’know?”

“So when did it hit you, about the deal?”

“It was probably the first time I saw you after that phone call, where it hit me that, wow, this is real, this isn’t a joke. But I don’t think I actually went ‘woah’ until I saw the book. The first time I saw the book on the bookshelf in Easons, I was all-” she changes her voice to a squeal- “‘Oh my God, look, it’s a book, and it’s hardback, that’s so cool...!’ And I can’t believe I just admitted that.

“I remember you were so excited when you showed me the book for the first time, we were both like ‘wooaaahh’. And the new books, you’re always excited about showing me the new books.”

“How much is Valkyrie actually like you?”

She laughs. “Ridiculously so. It’s ridiculous. Do you not think so? Well obviously you do. The conversations that Valkyrie and Skulduggery have, like, I actually sit and laugh because it’s like looking into a mirror at myself, and even the stupid comments, like oh my god, no, rolling the eyes, it’s all there. It’s ridiculous. It’s not how much she’s like me, it’s how much she is me. And even when I proofread the manuscripts, if the dialogue deviates from what I would say then I make you take it out, so by the time it arrives in book form, she is exactly like me. She’s younger, obviously, and I don’t have the magic powers, darn it, but apart from that, yeah. Ridiculous.

“And the times when Val and Skulduggery disagree about something, her reaction is identical to mine. Like, just sit and sulk. Do you know the way she’s like?” Laura folds her arms and proceeds to look very sullen indeed. “This is definitely my reaction. As much as I hate to admit it, I’d sit there and sulk, and you’d go all quiet... It’s funny. Unlike everyone else in the world, when we have an argument, instead of raising our voices, we do the complete opposite, it all goes totally quiet. What is wrong with us?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“There’s a lot wrong with you.”

“So, skipping over that, do you think you’d react in the same way that Valkyrie does in those situations? Like, the social situations, her interactions with people...”

“Yeah, like, she walks into rooms with Elders and sorcerers and Orders and she’s not daunted, at all, and I’m the same. I’d walk in anywhere, I don’t feel out of place, or intimidated...”

“You’ve always been like that.”

“Yeah.”

“Is there something about you or your life that you wish I hadn't put in the book?”

“God, I hate these questions, because they are all to do with you and how I feel about what you do and what you’re doing... It’s totally unfair how you get to ask me these things.”

“Yes,” I say happily. “I know. There are, obviously, elements of your life that I stay away from, that I don’t include, but in terms of who she is, her personality, you don’t try to get me to write her as super-cool, or super-nice, or super-anything. In fact, you get amazingly embarrassed if I go overboard on any of those things.”

“At the end of the day, if I’m reading it and she says something stupid, and I cringe and go ‘oh my God, I can’t BELIEVE you made me say that’, and it’s like, I’m not saying it, it’s not me, but I still cringe. I just cross out things like that, stupid things I’d never say, or something like poking myself in the eye when I’m applying mascara, like you had in Mortal Coil. I would never do that. I hope you took that out.”

“I did.”

“You had better.”

“I did, I swear.”

“I actually get embarrassed myself, and then I go ‘why am I embarrassed, it’s Valkyrie, it’s not me’, but that’s still the way I look at it. I refuse to let her do stupid things, or... And you remember, in an earlier book, you were going to have her getting dumped?”

“Absolutely. In fact my plan was, by the fourth book, she’d get a boyfriend and then he’d cheat on her. That guy obviously turned out to be Fletcher.”

“Yeah, and he dumps her, and when you told me that, and this was when you were writing the third book, I said no way, there is no chance of her getting dumped. That was a huge thing. It was obviously a part of the story you wanted to tell, but I wouldn’t allow it.”

“It turned out to be a major issue," I say, "because I had introduced Fletcher as this cocky character who was going to break Valkyrie’s heart, and suddenly I had to change my plans completely- and because of that, actually, Fletcher himself changed. He stopped being so arrogant and he developed real feelings for her and I was forced to view him through new eyes.

“It’s like what happened with Tanith- my original plan was to kill her in the first book, but my agent convinced me to keep her alive. So I had to rethink the whole thing, and Tanith became Valkyrie’s big sister, in a way. That wasn’t part of my original plan but I’m really happy it worked out the way it did, the same way I’m happy that Fletcher is so much different to how I’d intended him to be. But getting back to the issue, you were just not prepared to accept her being cheated on.”

“No,” Laura says, “no way. Because that makes her a victim. And Val is not and never will be a victim.”

“Is that because you are never the victim?”

“Yes.”

“And is that because no guy would ever cheat on you?”

“Exactly,” she says, completely matter-of-factly, “and if they did they wouldn’t be alive.”

“Okay,” I nod. “Okay. Kind of scary. So would it be right to say that you feel protective over her?”

“In a sense, protective is the wrong word, but the thought of someone cheating on her that time, it was ‘no, that’s not going to happen’. I think... I wouldn’t let you do something to her that I didn’t like. I’m not talking about people attacking her or anything, but someone cheating on her, no, that’s not going to happen. She says something stupid, no, not going to happen. I like the way when someone says something smart to her, she has a smart answer back. If she didn’t, yeah, I’d be offended.”

“So basically, you would be protective of her dignity. The core of the character itself. You don’t want that-“

“-to veer off,” Laura finishes, “and become something weak and false. No. Not going to happen.”

“Is there any aspect of your personality that, if I did write it into the books, you’d tell me to take out?”

“No. No, I’m fairly confident in who I am, and you’ve kept to that really closely. That’s what makes Valkyrie so good, it’s because she’s real. She’s not perfect, but she’s real. The same with Skulduggery. He’s you. You’re not making up stuff, it’s not fiction, this side of things. That’s why it’s so easy, like, that’s why it comes across as so natural.”

“Yeah,” I say, “yeah, the, uh, the...”

She watches me while I try to figure out what I want to say.

“That’s shut you up, hasn’t it?” she asks.

“It has, kind of, yeah.”

“Go on, next question.”

“You don’t tell me what to do.”

“Ask me the next question or I will kick you in the head.”

“Yes dear.”

Join us NEXT TIME for the third part of this interview, when Laura talks about all the things she makes me change in the early drafts of the books, why she doesn’t find me funny, and how many bones she’s broken while riding horses (hint: it’s a LOT).