I’m so excited to be on the blog Tour for Underwater Breathing by Cassandra Parkin today. I’m a huge fan of her books so I’m thrilled to be able to support her new one and I can’t wait to read it!
Underwater Breathing will be published on the 17th May 2018 in ebook and paperback. You can pre-order a copy of both here.
Before I share my Q&A with Cassandra Parkin here is a little about the book.
Book Blurb:
On Yorkshire’s gradually-crumbling mud cliffs sits an Edwardian seaside house. In the bathroom, Jacob and Ella hide from their parents’ passionate arguments by playing the ‘Underwater Breathing’ game – until the day Jacob wakes to find his mother and sister gone.
Years later, the sea’s creeping closer, his father is losing touch with reality and Jacob is trapped in his past. Then, Ella’s sudden reappearance forces him to confront his fractured childhood. As the truth about their parents emerges, it’s clear that Jacob’s time hiding beneath the water is coming to an end.
Q&A with Cassandra Parkin:
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I’ve been writing fiction all my life, mostly as Christmas and birthday presents for friends and family. However, because I am slow on the uptake, it took me a very long time to realise this meant I wanted to be a writer. It took about twenty years of sustained nagging from absolutely everyone who knew me before I finally caved in and started submitting my work.
My family is Cornish, but I live in the East Riding of Yorkshire (where Underwater Breathing is set), with my husband, my two children and my cats.
What do you do when you are not writing?
When you write for a living, it’s really easy to get lost in your own head and forget about the rest of the world. So I do try to leave the house and go for a walk at least once a day. I do Yoga for the same reason. Saying that, the main reason I do both of these things is because they make me a better writer. If something isn’t working in whatever I’m working on, getting away from the keyboard and doing some exercise gives my head the space to work away on the problem in the background. I think Stephen King calls this “the boys in the basement”. I’m pretty sure my basement is filled with down-to-earth Rosie-the-Riveter types, but I know exactly what he means.
3. Do you have a day job as well?
I teach Creative Writing and do some freelance copywriting. I’m also part of Hull’s Women of Words spoken word collective.
When did you first start writing and when did you finish your first book?
The first story I can remember writing was when I was seven. It was a Doctor Who fan-fiction based on the adventure “State Of Decay” (which was a mad gothic-y space-vampire Tom Baker story, featuring Romana in an excellent white dress and K-9, which is pretty much my Holy Trinity of Doctor Who brilliance). It scared the shit out of me at the time, so I think the fan-fiction thing was a way of processing my terror.
The first novel I finished was when I was fifteen. It was dystopian sci-fi, because I was fifteen, so of course it was, and I wrote it on an old Courier typewriter up in my bedroom.
How did you choose the genre you write in?
I don’t! I just write the stories that I have to write, and hope they’ll somehow turn out to fit into the market somewhere.
Where do you get your ideas?
For Underwater Breathing, I had an extraordinarily clear image of a house on the edge of a crumbling cliff, and two children playing a game upstairs in the bathroom – trying to learn to breathe underwater, in preparation for the day when their house would finally fall into the sea. The East Riding coast has a lot of soft mud cliffs, and a lot of villages that used to be quite a way inland but are now right on the edge. I wanted to explore what it would be like to live with the knowledge that your whole life was continually on the edge of crumbling away into the water.
Do you ever experience writer’s block?
I don’t get Writer’s Block, exactly – churning out something is never a problem – but I do most definitely get Writer’s Drivel. I actually got 40,000 words into an early version of Underwater Breathing and realised I hated, actually hated, everything about it and threw the whole lot away and started again. I’ve told a few people this and they all said it made them feel quite ill to think about, but it was utterly glorious to get rid of the whole hideous mess and start with a clean sheet.
Do you work with an outline, or just write?
I always start with a chapter-by-chapter outline, built with post-it notes and sheets of paper (one sheet = one chapter, one post-it = one idea, plot-point, scrap of dialogue, etc). This has to happen in the afternoon, on the living-room rug, and the the cats have to prowl around and sit on everything and poke the post-it notes out of order with their paws. (In fact, now I think about it, I should have known from the start that my first draft of Underwater Breathing wasn’t going to fly – the cats didn’t show up to bless the outline.)
Once I’ve got the outline, about the first thing that happens is I start going off at wild tangents and generally ignoring it. But I can’t write without doing the outline first. I think I like to have a roadmap of the place I’m wandering away from.
Is there any particular author or book that influenced you in any way either growing up or as an adult?
My true and proper answer would be a list of every single book I’ve ever read! But I can probably narrow it down to a few standouts…when I was little, I had a fairly unexpurgated and horrifying edition of the Grimm fairy-tales. They definitely had a huge impact on me. The “Alice” books have haunted me pretty much since the first day I read them, and I think there’s something of Wonderland of Looking-Glass
land in everything I write. When I was about fifteen, my English teacher gave me a copy of Roald Dahl’s “Kiss, Kiss”, which absolutely blew me away with its darkness and its brilliance. And finally, one day I’d like to write a first line that’s even remotely as haunting as the first line of “Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier.
Can you tell us about your challenges in getting your first book published?
This is going to sound pretty unbearable, but it’s true; my biggest challenge was admitting that I wanted to try. I was utterly convinced that I wasn’t good enough.
My first toe in the water was a short story, Interview #17, which was set on Wall Street and based on Jack and the Beanstalk. Legend Press had an open call for short story submissions on the theme of “Journeys”, so I swallowed hard and went for it. I was astonished when Interview #17 was picked for the final anthology. I finished The Summer We All Ran Away about a year later, and Legend were the publisher I was most hoping to work with.
Is anything in your book based on real life experiences or purely all imagination?
The settings are based on real places I’ve been to and loved, and what happens to the characters is loosely inspired by research into the real-life experiences of others, but the story is all my own.
What was your hardest scene to write?
There is a scene on a beach between the two central characters that was very challenging. I can’t say any more because it would spoil the plot, but when you read it, you will know why.
How did you come up with the title?
The title comes from the game that Ella and Jacob play in the bathroom on stormy nights: the Underwater Breathing game. The game is to lie underwater and hold your breath for as long as you possibly can – but of course, no matter how good you get at the game, eventually you have to either drown, or come up for air. I liked that sense of tension and inevitability, and knowing that whatever happens, you can’t stay where you are for ever.
What project are you working on now?
I’m hacking my way through the wild and brambly tangle that is the first draft of a new novel, provisionally called The Slaughter Man. My central character is a “twinless twin”; her identical twin sister has recently died, and her entire family is struggling with their loss.
What has been the toughest criticism given to you as an author? What has been the best compliment?
The toughest criticism…that’s got to be the one-star Amazon review for The Summer We All Ran Away, which simply said “Worst book I’ve read so far”. I think what I especially like about this was the way the reviewer very generously left room for the faint possibility that at some point in the future, they might read a book that they hated even more than mine. Which was nice.
The most beautiful compliment I’ve ever had was given to me recently, by a friend who gave a copy of my recent book The Winter’s Child to a terminally-ill friend in hospital. The Winter’s Child was the last book she experienced, read aloud to her by her mother. I feel so massively honoured and humbled by this that I don’t think I can even put it into words.
Is there anything that you would like to say to your readers and fans?
I’d like to say a huge giant massive Thank You! I’m grateful every day for the opportunities I’ve been given to share my work, and every time someone chooses one of my books to read, I know how lucky I am. You make everything worthwhile.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions, I wish you the best of luck with the book.
About The Author:
Cassandra Parkin grew up in Hull, and now lives in East Yorkshire. Her short story collection, New World Fairy Tales (Salt Publishing, 2011), won the 2011 Scott Prize for Short Stories. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.
The Summer We All Ran Away (Legend Press, 2013) was Cassandra’s debut novel and nominated for the Amazon Rising Stars 2014.
Legend Press have also published The Beach Hut (2015), Lily’s House (2016) and The Winter’s Child (2017. Cassandra’s fifth novel is due to be published in 2018.
Visit Cassandra at cassandraparkin.wordpress.com or on Twitter @cassandrajaneuk
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