Once the daydreaming has produced enough material, there comes a moment when I have to start writing it down or risk losing it. I start with a lot of daydreaming, and trying things out in my mind, often whilst on long walks. My writing process is a mess, I'm sad to say. What does your writing process look like? How do you keep track of all the moving parts in your novels? Other senses can get left behind, and I have to remind myself to describe smells, sounds, etc. Yes, I do, though what really counts for me is having a visual imagination. I still frequently start my note-making with sketches and doodles. I often go into writing a scene with a vision of how the moment will look before I know exactly what will happen. Do you think your experience as an illustrator plays a role in your vivid writing? The descriptions in your books are so visual. "Gargantis" came from mixing "Gargantuan" with "Gigantic" and "Atlantis." In the end, I collected a lot of words that suggested huge size, terrible weather, and the bottom of the sea, and worked at blending them to see what came out. Gargantis was much harder-I struggled for months and went through several different options. I spotted very quickly that changing the S in "Salamander" to an M gave me "Mal," which means "bad" or "evil" in Spanish and French, and that "Malamander" sounded like something very monstrous indeed. To do this I sought real animal words I could change just one letter of. How did you come up with the titular monsters in Malamander and Gargantis?įor Malamander, I wanted a word that sounded like it could be a "real" legendary beast. Such places are the perfect backdrops for mystery, not least because the ocean could be hiding almost anything! Moving to a seaside town, and discovering what life is like there in the winter once the tourist season is over. When the bright lights and attractions are shut down, and the weather's turned bad, that funny local legend about a monster that seemed so laughable in the summer is suddenly less of a joke, especially as you hurry home across the darkening beach and hear a strange sound behind you. What was the inspiration behind this fantastical adventure-mystery series? UK-based author/illustrator Thomas Taylor spoke with SLJ about the anticipated sequel to his delightfully eccentric fantasy. After making a splash in Malamander(Walker, 2019), young sleuth Herbert Lemon is back to solve monster mysteries with friend Violet Parma in the oddball town of Eerie-on-Sea.
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