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24 Susan Allott | Crime Mystery Author, Editor and Writing Mentor
203 Plays4 years ago
Crime/Mystery author, editor and mentor, Susan Allott tells us about her literary debut, 'The Silence' and the long journey it took from secret hobby to published novel. We talk all about the personal discoveries we make through writing and the pressures of reviews and writing a second book.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
So our podcast is called Right and Wrong.
00:00:02
Speaker
Are these your notes?
00:00:03
Speaker
These are your notes about what we're going to say.
00:00:06
Speaker
What does it say?
00:00:06
Speaker
I thought it would be a good... I didn't even get the idea.
00:00:12
Speaker
Maybe I can just ask you the question.
00:00:16
Speaker
It's going well.
00:00:16
Speaker
It's going really well.
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello and... I can't even read it.
00:00:23
Speaker
We'll try this again.
00:00:24
Speaker
We've done this before, you know, Susan, I promise.
00:00:29
Speaker
Let's try again.
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Right and Wrong podcast.
00:00:34
Speaker
I'm Jamie.
00:00:35
Speaker
And I'm Emma and today we're joined by crime and thriller author Susan Allot, whose debut novel The Silence came out in 2020.
00:00:44
Speaker
Hi Susan, welcome to the show.
00:00:46
Speaker
Hello, thanks for having me.
00:00:48
Speaker
Hello.
00:00:49
Speaker
How's it going?
00:00:49
Speaker
How are you doing?
00:00:50
Speaker
I'm fine, thanks.
00:00:52
Speaker
Yeah, not too bad at
Overview of 'The Silence'
00:00:53
Speaker
all.
00:00:53
Speaker
Well, let's talk about your book.
00:00:55
Speaker
The paperback has come out recently.
00:00:59
Speaker
It's a thriller with multiple timelines and different points of view.
00:01:04
Speaker
Do you want to give us and anyone listening who is not aware of the book already a quick sort of teaser of the story?
00:01:12
Speaker
Sure.
00:01:13
Speaker
So it's good to hear you calling it kind of a crime thriller.
00:01:17
Speaker
I think it is those things.
00:01:19
Speaker
I've also heard it described as a literary thriller, whatever that means, and a mystery.
00:01:25
Speaker
I think that's flattery.
00:01:29
Speaker
Yeah, I quite like that.
00:01:31
Speaker
So it's got, as you say, it's got two timelines.
Setting and Themes of 'The Silence'
00:01:34
Speaker
It's set partly in 1967 and partly 30 years later in 1997.
00:01:37
Speaker
So it's about...
00:01:41
Speaker
The case of a missing woman, and it's what you call a cold case.
00:01:45
Speaker
So she has been missing for 30 years.
00:01:48
Speaker
And in the 1997 timeline, a character called Isla sets out to discover what happened to her because her father, Isla's father, is suspected in the disappearance of Mandy, this missing woman.
00:02:05
Speaker
So Isla goes back to her hometown of Sydney after living in London.
00:02:11
Speaker
because her father is accused of having something to do with Mandy's disappearance and she wants to support him.
00:02:19
Speaker
She fully believes that he's innocent.
00:02:21
Speaker
But after she's been back in Sydney for a while, she starts to have doubts and starts to wonder if it's possible that her father did do something terrible.
00:02:32
Speaker
she also starts to wonder whether maybe her mum knows more than she's letting on.
00:02:36
Speaker
So eventually she starts to kind of doubt everything that she's ever believed in, really.
00:02:40
Speaker
She starts to wonder if the things that she remembers from her childhood are accurate or not.
00:02:46
Speaker
And eventually she gets there and finds out the truth.
00:02:49
Speaker
It's powerful stuff.
00:02:52
Speaker
It really is.
00:02:52
Speaker
Did you have any inspirations for the story or the right story?
00:02:58
Speaker
I guess my inspiration is...
Inspirations and Research for 'The Silence'
00:03:00
Speaker
the book started out because I, um, I lived in Australia for a while in my twenties and experienced, um, real acute homesickness, um, and ended up coming back to London, um, and feeling a bit of a failure because I hadn't been able to make Australia my home.
00:03:19
Speaker
Um, and I kind of started writing out of that place really.
00:03:23
Speaker
So there's quite a strong theme running through the book about immigration and, and, um,
00:03:28
Speaker
the sort of strong pull that home has on us.
00:03:32
Speaker
And I had a character called Louisa who had been through some of those experiences.
00:03:37
Speaker
And then I kind of, I guess, to be honest, I started writing before I had an idea of what was going to happen.
00:03:44
Speaker
And I kind of read and researched as I went along.
00:03:47
Speaker
And I read this book called Australia, the History of a Nation by Philip Knightley.
00:03:52
Speaker
And he writes, it's a nonfiction book, and he writes about the experience of a policeman who lived in Victoria, which is a southern state in Australia, who used to come home from work and cry on his veranda.
00:04:07
Speaker
And his son in the book, his son is remembering this.
00:04:11
Speaker
His son kind of never understood why that happened.
00:04:14
Speaker
But he found out later in life that his dad was a policeman and he was involved in the removal of First Nations Australian children from their families.
00:04:25
Speaker
So after I read that book, I kind of couldn't stop thinking about him and kind of wanted to climb into his head and understand how you could live with that sort of internal conflict.
00:04:37
Speaker
So I ended up, you know, I had a character called Steve already and that seemed to fit the way I saw him.
00:04:44
Speaker
So I wrote that line of plot into the book.
00:04:48
Speaker
So I guess those two things, my personal experience of homesickness and the experience of what we now call the stolen generation seemed to kind of fit together thematically.
00:05:00
Speaker
And I went from there.
00:05:02
Speaker
That's interesting because I was reading the author's note at the end of the book where you mentioned that the repercussions and the sort of difficult colonial past of Australia and then that relationship with the UK.
00:05:18
Speaker
So that's where it started for you was that book that you read.
00:05:22
Speaker
And then as you were writing and researching the silence, how much more kind of involved did you get in the research of that sort of aspect of it?
00:05:31
Speaker
So I started looking through the National Library of Australia.
00:05:37
Speaker
They've got this oral history project, which is incredible, really.
00:05:44
Speaker
The Stolen Generation is only one aspect of that project.
00:05:48
Speaker
And within the Stolen Generation section, there are hundreds of recordings and voice recordings that you can listen to online.
00:05:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:59
Speaker
Some of them I listened to several times.
00:06:01
Speaker
They're all kind of personal testimonies of people who were either removed as children themselves or whose family member was removed as a child.
00:06:11
Speaker
And there are some testimonies from people who did the removing.
00:06:15
Speaker
There's at least one recording of a policeman who was involved in removing children and some people who worked in the homes that they were taken to.
00:06:25
Speaker
So it's extremely sad.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yeah, to listen to.
00:06:31
Speaker
But I guess to me, that felt like a really good way of researching it because you're getting the story straight from the person who experienced it.
00:06:39
Speaker
So and of course, I live in London, so I wasn't able to speak to anyone directly.
00:06:44
Speaker
And that felt like the next best thing.
00:06:47
Speaker
So I did it that way.
00:06:48
Speaker
That makes sense.
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
00:06:51
Speaker
It's such a sad subject as well.
00:06:53
Speaker
It's really sad.
00:06:54
Speaker
Yeah, very dark undertone.
00:06:56
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:06:57
Speaker
I mean, we've spoken a lot on the podcast with a lot of debut authors and some which have books out already, like Just Came Out and others that are still waiting on their release date.
Publishing During the Pandemic
00:07:11
Speaker
What has the past year been like, you know, in the wake of publishing your very first book?
00:07:18
Speaker
Well, I had quite bad timing.
00:07:21
Speaker
There was this pandemic, I don't know if you've heard.
00:07:26
Speaker
Just a little bit.
00:07:28
Speaker
So the publication date for the hardback and also the e-book and audio was, I think, the 20th of April 2020.
00:07:36
Speaker
So right in the eye of the storm.
00:07:40
Speaker
They actually postponed the publication of the hardback to August.
00:07:45
Speaker
which was great.
00:07:46
Speaker
That was quite a good time because shops were open then and people were looking around bookshops.
00:07:52
Speaker
But even so, it was kind of quite a small window of time when shops were open and then we went back into the second wave.
00:07:57
Speaker
So yeah, it has been less than perfect.
00:08:02
Speaker
You know, there have been wonderful moments within that.
00:08:05
Speaker
Today I went to my local bookshop and I didn't expect them to have it in stock, actually.
00:08:09
Speaker
I hadn't really known what to expect.
00:08:12
Speaker
And they had several of them in stock on a table next to the till.
00:08:15
Speaker
They let me sign them and put them in the window.
00:08:17
Speaker
So exciting.
00:08:18
Speaker
Which was just incredible.
00:08:19
Speaker
And that's the thing that you dream of.
00:08:22
Speaker
And there have been a few moments like that, which have been wonderful, particularly my local bookshops have been really wonderful.
00:08:29
Speaker
But there, but there was always this kind of feeling that it could have been a bit different.
00:08:34
Speaker
You know, I could have had a proper launch party, all of that kind of thing.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:41
Speaker
And in the US where, you know, they weren't able to delay publication because it would have run into the election.
00:08:49
Speaker
So it came out in May 2020, really.
00:08:52
Speaker
Things were quite bad in the US at that point.
00:08:54
Speaker
So not ideal.
00:08:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:57
Speaker
But yeah, like I say, there have been some great moments too.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:09:01
Speaker
Apart from the initial release, what sort of things, you know, it's been about almost exactly a year.
00:09:09
Speaker
It was April 2021.
00:09:11
Speaker
So have you been nonstop promoting it since then?
00:09:15
Speaker
Or how has it worked out for you?
00:09:17
Speaker
So there was a bit of a relatively quiet patch until the paperback came out.
00:09:23
Speaker
The paperback came out in April 2021.
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:27
Speaker
So again, once the paperback comes out, there's lots of promotion just, you know, in the run up to that and for a little while afterwards.
00:09:34
Speaker
But no, I had a relatively quiet patch where I wasn't doing too much and I was just trying to crack on with writing the second book, which, as you can imagine, is quite a challenge.
00:09:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:45
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:47
Speaker
How do you, how have you found the process of writing through this time?
00:09:51
Speaker
Do you think it's been, like you said, like, is it been sort of, you've had more time, so you're able to write or was it a bit more frustrating to write at this time?
00:10:01
Speaker
It's been mostly really frustrating.
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:06
Speaker
I'm so jealous of people who say, oh, it's been amazing.
00:10:09
Speaker
I've written my novel during lockdown and I've had no distractions.
00:10:13
Speaker
I think that's on my door.
00:10:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:18
Speaker
No, I found it really, really hard, actually.
00:10:21
Speaker
I think what it is, I find it quite hard to write when I'm worried about other people, particularly if I've got concerns about my family.
00:10:32
Speaker
And during the whole pandemic, it was quite a difficult time for kids because
00:10:36
Speaker
You know, it's not normal.
00:10:38
Speaker
My kids are teenagers and it's not normal to be in a room with a screen for a year.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, no, I don't.
00:10:45
Speaker
And that was just not good at all.
00:10:48
Speaker
They coped remarkably well and, you know, it's all fine.
00:10:51
Speaker
But, yeah, there's just something about having them in the house, even if they're in a different room doing their own thing.
00:10:58
Speaker
Somehow I couldn't quite switch off.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, it makes sense.
00:11:04
Speaker
It feels like time's been kind of taken away from you as well.
00:11:06
Speaker
So it hasn't been, I don't feel like I've been given a gift really.
00:11:09
Speaker
It's like, oh, here's the gift of time.
00:11:12
Speaker
Like you don't have to do X, Y, and Z, but actually you haven't really been given anything.
00:11:17
Speaker
It kind of feels robbed in a way.
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:20
Speaker
I found it very hard.
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:11:22
Speaker
Writing has been just, it's not so much just writing per se, it's just, I think being creative and kind of trying to find that spark has been very difficult.
00:11:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:35
Speaker
We've heard from a number of authors who have released their first book or are about to release their first book and are working on their second book.
00:11:44
Speaker
And obviously it's been a hard time to write for a lot of us.
Writing Challenges and Discovering Voice
00:11:49
Speaker
But there's definitely a sort of a pressure that comes with the second book, especially if the first one's successful.
00:11:58
Speaker
um have you found that or have you found sort of new or different struggles with writing the second book yeah it's a completely different experience writing the second really wow god yeah completely i mean the thing is that um writing my first novel um it was like my secret mission only my husband knew and um maybe a few other very close friends but for a long time nobody except my husband knew and
00:12:29
Speaker
I was working part-time, I was bringing up young children and my writing was my me time.
00:12:34
Speaker
It was the thing that I kind of snuck off to do when I should really have been doing something else.
00:12:41
Speaker
And those sort of dark days where, you know, sometimes you think everyone looks at me and thinks that I'm this woman who's kind of, you know, who messed up that presentation or who's...
00:12:55
Speaker
walking down around the supermarket with elastic weighted trousers on, but actually I am the woman who is going to write a book and get it published.
00:13:03
Speaker
You know, it's kind of like, um, it, it was just my reason for getting out of bed.
00:13:09
Speaker
And, um, the more, the more you realize what an impossible quest it is to get a book published, which it is, the more it just kind of made me think, but I'm going to do it.
00:13:20
Speaker
I'm going to do it.
00:13:20
Speaker
It was, it was just this, um, pact I had with myself.
00:13:24
Speaker
And I guess the other thing is that, of course, you can write and you can tell yourself that nobody's ever going to read this.
00:13:30
Speaker
It's so extremely unlikely that anyone's going to read this.
00:13:33
Speaker
I can really open up and write whatever is in my head or whatever hits the page without my head even being a part of the process.
00:13:43
Speaker
So with my second book, you know, this is good and I'm not complaining, but I've got an agent and an editor waiting, you know, patiently to read it.
00:13:54
Speaker
And it's quite likely that it will be published.
00:13:59
Speaker
And I'm almost intimidated by my debut sometimes.
00:14:01
Speaker
You know, if I get a good review, I think, oh, I'll never write anything that good again.
00:14:07
Speaker
And if I get a bad review, I think, oh, my God, I can't write.
00:14:10
Speaker
There's no relief from the bad reviews.
00:14:13
Speaker
It's like, oh, thank God, the bar's low.
00:14:16
Speaker
No, I mean, yeah.
00:14:20
Speaker
Sometimes it is easier to get a bad review than a good one, strangely.
00:14:24
Speaker
That would sound strange.
00:14:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think, well, I don't know.
00:14:27
Speaker
I think I can understand that because I think it's more, you've already sort of beat yourself up about it while you're writing it.
00:14:33
Speaker
So it's kind of easier to sort of, I think, maybe.
00:14:36
Speaker
To qualify that, I would say if all my reviews are bad, I think that would be quite hard to take.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, of course.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:43
Speaker
Not all of them.
00:14:44
Speaker
The odd one is fine.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:14:47
Speaker
As long as it's the major minority, then you're good.
00:14:52
Speaker
For sure.
00:14:53
Speaker
Do you have plans for more books after the next one?
00:14:58
Speaker
What's your journey with writing?
00:15:00
Speaker
Do you think, are you going to try different genres?
00:15:02
Speaker
Are you going to stick to crime?
00:15:04
Speaker
That's a good question.
00:15:05
Speaker
I think at the moment I feel like I'm in a bit of a sweet spot.
00:15:08
Speaker
I feel like I really enjoy writing books.
00:15:12
Speaker
kind of mystery thrillers with kind of complex characters and kind of slow burning mysteries.
00:15:21
Speaker
I just really enjoy that.
00:15:24
Speaker
And when I first started writing The Silence, I didn't know anything about genre.
00:15:29
Speaker
I didn't know if it was going to be a mystery or a thriller or a crime novel at all.
00:15:33
Speaker
I just kind of thought I'll write and see what I come out with.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:38
Speaker
And it was quite late in the day that I sort of accepted, OK, this is what seems to be working.
00:15:45
Speaker
So going into it this time, going, OK, this is going to be a mystery is kind of a whole different thing.
00:15:53
Speaker
But it feels right.
00:15:54
Speaker
I feel like I am.
00:15:56
Speaker
maybe quite good at that genre.
00:15:58
Speaker
So I don't see myself.
00:16:00
Speaker
If the silence is proof that you are good at that genre.
00:16:04
Speaker
Exactly.
00:16:05
Speaker
Exactly.
00:16:05
Speaker
You've done well there.
00:16:06
Speaker
Thank you.
00:16:09
Speaker
So you went into, this is quite interesting, you went into the silence not knowing about genre.
00:16:12
Speaker
You just kind of thought, this is a story I want to write.
00:16:16
Speaker
You didn't really plan or you hadn't sort of observed those very technical crafty books and things.
00:16:24
Speaker
No, not a single thing.
00:16:25
Speaker
I mean, I was utterly clueless about all of that.
00:16:28
Speaker
I didn't know, and I wish I had, that it's fine to just slam down a rough first draft and then go back and start again, which of course is the thing everyone tells you, but I didn't even know that.
00:16:39
Speaker
So I was writing kind of word by word, sentence by sentence, trying to make everything perfect as I went along and despairing of myself because of course it wasn't.
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:52
Speaker
And I thought that if it doesn't sound like Tim Winton or Anne Enright or one of the kind of quite literary writers that I admire, then it's rubbish and there's no point.
00:17:03
Speaker
So I was in a state of absolute despair with it.
00:17:05
Speaker
It's a miracle that I continue, to be honest.
00:17:08
Speaker
You did.
00:17:09
Speaker
I'm glad you did.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:12
Speaker
At some point, you know, it's almost like a journey of discovery, isn't it?
00:17:15
Speaker
Sorry for the cliche, but at some point you go, oh, this is what I sound like.
00:17:20
Speaker
And actually, I think that's OK.
00:17:24
Speaker
Once you accept that, then you start to just go with the flow of your own voice and it starts to work.
00:17:32
Speaker
But it took me quite a long time to get there.
00:17:34
Speaker
Do you think you found your voice as you were writing the novel then?
00:17:39
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:17:40
Speaker
Yeah, it took ages, absolutely ages.
00:17:43
Speaker
I mean, Silence took a good decade to write.
00:17:48
Speaker
And I would say that the first few years of that were me just almost trying to give up on it, actually.
00:17:58
Speaker
And every time I tried to give up on it,
00:18:00
Speaker
I would hear a line of dialogue in my head and I'd think, oh, that's what she would say to that.
00:18:05
Speaker
Or that's what would make that scene work.
00:18:07
Speaker
And I'd find myself going back to it.
00:18:11
Speaker
So in the end, I just kind of I kept going with it because it wouldn't leave me alone.
00:18:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:16
Speaker
And it's a bit like exercising, isn't it?
00:18:18
Speaker
It's a bit like a muscle.
00:18:19
Speaker
The more you do it.
00:18:20
Speaker
at some point you'll start thinking, okay, this is now getting easier.
00:18:23
Speaker
But got it.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:24
Speaker
It's like, like all crafts, you must practice it.
00:18:26
Speaker
The more you practice it, the better you get, I think.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:18:30
Speaker
But what's really interesting is that, so you went, you went straight in for not only multiple timelines, multiple points of view, but also multiple tenses.
Writing Techniques and Revisions
00:18:41
Speaker
It's not often that I read a book that,
00:18:44
Speaker
that has, uh, is sort of half in the present tense and half in the past tense.
00:18:48
Speaker
I also can't remember the last time I read present third.
00:18:52
Speaker
That's quite a rare one.
00:18:53
Speaker
And that's difficult to write.
00:18:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:56
Speaker
Was that always the plan that you were going to write the nineties stuff in the present and the sixties stuff in the past tense?
00:19:04
Speaker
Or was that something that changed as, as the kind of the process went on?
00:19:08
Speaker
So, um, the way I did it was, um,
00:19:12
Speaker
For years, for a very long time, the whole book was set in 1967.
00:19:15
Speaker
And it was all in the past tense.
00:19:21
Speaker
And for quite a long time, it was just two points of view, Mandy, Louisa.
00:19:28
Speaker
And my Mandy chapters were all set in Australia.
00:19:32
Speaker
And my Louisa chapters were largely set in England.
00:19:36
Speaker
And it was that I was writing that period of time where Louisa's left her husband and she's taken Isla with her and she's gone back to the UK.
00:19:44
Speaker
And my early readers, bless them, said to me very kindly, don't think the England chapters are working.
00:19:52
Speaker
And they said, you know, your chapter says in Australia in Mandy's voice are great.
00:19:59
Speaker
They're really vibrant and, you know, great sense of place.
00:20:03
Speaker
and your England chapters, frankly, are a bit dull.
00:20:07
Speaker
Which... Yeah, I'm sure they were nicer about it than that, but that's what they meant.
00:20:15
Speaker
And I just remember thinking to myself, but I can't set a book in Australia.
00:20:18
Speaker
I'm British.
00:20:19
Speaker
I don't have the right to do that.
00:20:20
Speaker
I'll get it wrong, you know?
00:20:22
Speaker
So I clung to my England chapters for quite a long time, but I put in some other points of view.
00:20:28
Speaker
So I wrote Isla's point of view as a child,
00:20:32
Speaker
And then I introduced Joe, Isla's dad.
00:20:35
Speaker
And then I, yeah.
00:20:37
Speaker
So it really went through, it went through a lot of phases, a lot of different forms and mechanics as you did it.
00:20:44
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:20:46
Speaker
And then much later on, I realized that I needed to cut Louisa.
00:20:49
Speaker
So although Louisa is still in the book and she's very much a character in the book, I don't write from her point of view in the finished book.
00:20:58
Speaker
And that meant deleting huge chunks of the novel,
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:21:04
Speaker
I remember feeling this awful terror, but it was so freeing because then you think I can see what I need to do now.
00:21:09
Speaker
And I put in the 1997 timeline at that point.
00:21:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:17
Speaker
Well, it sounds like the book went on such a long journey.
Advice to Aspiring Writers
00:21:21
Speaker
If you could, if you could go back in time, reverse, go back in time 10 years and tell, and give yourself some advice about the silence, about writing this book, about getting it published, what would you tell yourself?
00:21:37
Speaker
I would tell myself to slam down a rough first draft and not worry about whether the sentences are perfect.
00:21:45
Speaker
that was such a revelation to realize that you can and should do that.
00:21:49
Speaker
And that actually, not to despair when it doesn't look perfect on the page, you know, you can go back and the magic is in the edit.
00:21:56
Speaker
You can make it shine later on.
00:21:59
Speaker
I think that's the main, that would have saved me years, to be honest, if I'd known that.
00:22:08
Speaker
And also, although I don't know if it would have helped to know it,
00:22:13
Speaker
because it just needs to happen in its own time, but not to worry about whether I sound, like I don't need to sound like Anne Enright because the world already has Anne Enright.
00:22:24
Speaker
And I would only ever sound like a pale imitation of her if I tried to write like her.
00:22:28
Speaker
Exactly, you've got to sound like yourself.
00:22:31
Speaker
You've got to be the first you.
00:22:32
Speaker
Exactly.
00:22:33
Speaker
That makes a lot of sense.
00:22:34
Speaker
Well, thank you so much.
00:22:35
Speaker
No, that makes so much sense.
00:22:37
Speaker
And now we are on to the dreaded last question.
00:22:40
Speaker
I'm sorry, Susan.
00:22:41
Speaker
Thank you.
00:22:43
Speaker
Um, it is, um, yeah.
00:22:45
Speaker
If you were going to take a book to a desert island and it was just one book and you were stranded on a desert island, I'm not really wording this very well, am I?
00:22:56
Speaker
I kind of ended it on a back foot and now I don't know where I'm going with it.
00:23:01
Speaker
But if you were going to take a book to a desert island, what would the book be?
00:23:07
Speaker
I'll go there in the end.
00:23:08
Speaker
Ah, yeah.
00:23:09
Speaker
so and why I think I I think I would take because it's on my shelf and I'm looking at it the Norton anthology of English literature because it's honestly the size of a breeze block and I've owned it for 30 years and it's got everything that I should have read in it so it's got C.S.
00:23:31
Speaker
Eliot's The Wasteland in it it's got it's huge honestly and the the
00:23:35
Speaker
paper is wafer thin.
00:23:37
Speaker
So I honestly think that that would keep me going until I got rescued.
00:23:40
Speaker
That'd keep you going.
00:23:41
Speaker
Yeah, that'd keep you going.
00:23:43
Speaker
That's not even cheating.
00:23:44
Speaker
It's all in one book.
00:23:45
Speaker
It is.
00:23:46
Speaker
You beat the system.
00:23:46
Speaker
You actually did it.
00:23:47
Speaker
That's so true.
00:23:48
Speaker
There's so many people that just, you know, they cheat the system and we let them, but you, you didn't cheat it.
00:23:54
Speaker
It was good.
00:23:55
Speaker
I feel very proud of myself.
00:24:00
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:24:01
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Susan.
00:24:03
Speaker
It's been really great chatting with you, really great hearing about your process and your own sort of self-discovery, it sounds like, with writing.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's a pleasure.
00:24:13
Speaker
Thank you.
00:24:14
Speaker
Well, it's our pleasure.
00:24:15
Speaker
It's completely our pleasure.
00:24:16
Speaker
And for anyone listening, if you want to keep up to date with what Susan is doing, you can follow her on Twitter at Susanalott, which is S-U-S-A-N-A-L-L-O-T-T, on Instagram at SusanalottAuthor.
00:24:35
Speaker
And you can find her website, Susanalott.com.
00:24:38
Speaker
That's right.
00:24:39
Speaker
And I'm also on Facebook.
00:24:40
Speaker
Facebook if you just look in Susan Allot author on Facebook I'm on there too also on Facebook brilliant there you go and if you want to keep in touch with everything we do on Twitter it's at right and wrong UK and on Instagram it's at right and wrong podcast and you can find all of
00:24:56
Speaker
our guests books and their desert island i can't speak tonight and their desert island library on our book list on bookshop.org um thanks so much susan sorry that i'm apparently inept of the english language tonight um thanks to everyone listening and we'll see you next time bye