What Are You Reading, Anne Perry?
We’re delighted to feature a really special guest author for today’s What Are You Reading - Anne Perry!
Anne is an internationally bestselling author with an estimated 26 million copies of her books in print. Her novella A Christmas Resolution is out now. The Christmas novella is an annual tradition with Anne, and our favourite review for one of them is from The Yorkshire Evening Post: “If you don’t have a lump in your throat by the time you finish the final few pages, you shouldn’t have had all that sherry.”
A quick editorial note - yes, Ki Agency also has a literary agent named Anne Perry. They’re not related; it’s just a delightful coincidence!
What are you currently reading?
A lot of GK Chesterton. Poems only. Got the entire three volumes. Enjoy dipping into them.
What's the last great book you read?
Troublesome Young Men by Lynne Olson. It is an amazing history of the young men in Britain who overthrew Neville Chamberlain to enable Churchill to come to leadership, which very possibly saved Britain. Two of them, Anthony Eden and Harold MacMillan, became Prime Minister later on. And both, incidentally, served with courage and distinction in the trenches in the First World War. There are dozens of other people whose names have gone down in history, for better or worse, in these pages. It is a vivid, understandable account of one of the great turning points in history, and brilliantly and lucidly told. I would recommend any of her books to anyone who likes their history full of real people, passionate and alive.
What's your best advice for aspiring writers?
Make a detailed outline of your story before you begin. Know who your characters are, what they want (either really, or what they think they want). Where your story begins (inciting incident) where it ends, and the things that happen along the way, and why. That will give you purpose and direction, and limit the number of rewrites you have to do. Also you will never get writer’s block!
What's the most interesting fact you've learned recently?
There is always so much I realize I don’t know! Recently, how much light has no structure without darkness: in physics, for example, with dark matter... and perhaps in morality also. That one can be almost anything.
Which historical epoch would you time-travel to?
Something pretty recent. I realize as I grow older how much I like the good things about today, and have learned to cope with the bad things. I am grateful to be warm enough, to have decent dentistry, all sorts of books available, and music, the best in all the world, available at the push of a button.
If I could visit, watch without being involved, never mind endangered, perhaps the 1890s, in London. Just to look!
Really, maybe most places, most times. There is always something worth seeing, hearing, etc. But I really am grateful for here and now!
Agency News
November is NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month, and we’re proud to be supporting all the NaNoers out there. Next week we’ll be sending out a special NaNo edition of the newsletter, and on December 1st we’ll be holding an open pitch event, where we’ll invite all unagented authors to pitch their novel and screenplay ideas to us on Twitter. Keep an eye on our Twitter account all through November - we’ll be offering tips, tricks and advice regularly!
Thank you, Anne! And thanks so much to all of you for subscribing to WAYR. We’re on Twitter @thekiagency Interested in our submissions guidelines? Find everything you need to know here.