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Interview

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Michelle Mee from Ultra Violet Lesbian Books (UV) interviewed Award Winning author Catherine Friend (CF). As we spoke to Catherine, she had just heard the news that she just won 2 Awards for her novel The Spanish Pearl at the GCLS Awards held in Phoenix, AZ.

Hi, my name is Michelle and I'm going to be chatting to Catherine Friend, she is the author of The Spanish Pearl and the The Crown of Valencia which is the sequel to the Spanish Pearl and she has also written another novel called Hit By a Farm. I'm going to ask Catherine a few questions. She is going to be our author of the month for August. Catherine I'm going to go through a few questions with you today and we are going to chat about some of your books.

UV - Catherine, what compels you to write?
CF - What compels me to write, um, that's a hard question. I was not a person who wanted to be a writer ever since I was a kid. I had a different career and just sort of stumbled upon writing. The reason I love to write know is because I love to tell stories and writing is a challenge and never boring and I learn somthing and then I forget it and I learn it again and learn the answers and new things all the time. So what compels me to write now is because it is so interesting and I will never stop learning.

UV - Catherine, was The Spanish Pearl your first novel that you wrote, as Hit by a Farm was a memoir. Was the Spanish Pearl your first fiction novel?
CF - It was my first fiction for adults. I had written a couple of novels for kids that weren't good, but the Spanish Pearl, I did not even know that I wanted to write for adults because I pretty much wrote for children but I wanted to do something totally different after The Farm, sort of hit my career, so the totally different thing was to do something fun and escape and that's what I wanted to do, so that's when I wrote The Spanish Pearl as a kinda escape from real life.

UV - When you started writing the Spanish Pearl, did you know you were going to have a sequel, and when you started writing did you have the end in mind. Did you know how it was going to end?      
CF - Right, I knew the whole story, I thought it was going to be three books and I knew how it was going to end. But I wrote the first one and then started writing the second one and I thought oh, I don't think there is enough here for three books and I can't stand trilogies where the second book is there to bridge the first and third book. There's not much story. I decided to condense the second and third book into one book. So, before The Spanish Pearl came out I had written both books and revised them over and over for many years (laughs). It took me a long time to get them published.
I knew going in how I wanted fit to end. Yip.
That's the kinda writer I am. I have to know my endings first.

UV - Do you do alot of preparation before you start writing?
CF - I do, I do alot of reading, and it is another reason I like to write because it's a good excuse to research, and read lots of books. I just read as much as I could on eleventh century Spain. There isn't alot on 11th century Spain but I tried to soak in the culture and the history and I picked out real people that existed in history and said okay, I'm going to use them in the story. So when I was just full, my head was full of details about the time period and the people then I put all those books away and sat down and started to write.

Catherine Friend

UV - We have quite a few or we get approached by quite a few new writers or budding writers. What advice would you give them about their writing?
CF - The best advice I can give is to persist and to just hang in there. I mean, that's the way to get published. I've been writing since 1991. I wrote The Spanish Pearl in 1999 and Valencia in 2001. So that's almost 10 years ago, and you have to hang in there and keep writing. Once you've finished one novel, start over and write another one and write then another one. Someone told me once that most published authors have 6 manuscripts in their draws that never got published by the time they got published. So just keep writing and hang in their.     

UV - Thank you very much for doing the interview with us.
CF - Thank you they were good questions. They were fun questions.

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