Skip to main content

Jodi Taylor - Four Way Interview

Jodi Taylor is the internationally bestselling author of the Chronicles of St Mary's series, the story of a bunch of disaster prone individuals who investigate major historical events in contemporary time. She is also the author of the Time Police series - a St Mary's spinoff and gateway into the world of an all-powerful, international organisation who are NOTHING like St Mary's. Except, when they are. Alongside these, Jodi is known for her gripping supernatural thrillers featuring Elizabeth Cage together with the enchanting Frogmorton Farm series - a fairy story for adults. Born in Bristol and now living in Gloucester (facts both cities vigorously deny), she spent many years with her head somewhere else, much to the dismay of family, teachers and employers, before finally deciding to put all that daydreaming to good use and write a novel. Nearly twenty books later, she still has no idea what she wants to do when she grows up. Her latest book is Hard Time.

Why time travel?

The story wasn’t supposed to be about time travel at all – it was supposed to be about history. I wanted to write about all my favourite historical events and it seemed to me the only practical way to do that was to invent some time-travelling historians who could actually visit them in person. Thus was born the Institute of Historical Research at St Mary’s Priory.

Initially, St Mary’s itself wasn’t supposed to be that important. It was the history that was supposed to be the star of the show and St Mary’s was simply the mechanism for getting the historians to whichever event they were supposed to be observing. But, in the way of characters everywhere, they developed and became a bigger and bigger part of the story.


Why this book?

Well, having invented a bunch of irresponsible, feckless, time-travelling disaster-magnets – or historians as they prefer to be known - I thought I could then go on to write about the hapless organisation tasked with keeping them and the time-line straight so I invented the Time Police. A bunch of humourless thugs who don’t give a rat’s a**e about history and whose policy is to shoot everyone within a five-mile radius, torch everything in sight and then arrest any survivors.

Hard Time is the second in the Time Police series. It was an interesting book to write, as I tried to explore some of the darker aspects of time-travel and the uses to which it could be put. I don’t want to give away what is laughingly known as the plot, but should time travel ever become possible it will certainly raise ethical issues concerning the exploitation of people and resources from the past.


What’s next?

I think that’s a bit of a hard question to answer. No one really knows where we’ll be in six months’ time, do we? Hopefully my lockdown waistline will be under control and I’ll have tamed my lockdown hair – although I’m not optimistic about either of those.

Bookwise – the traditional St Mary’s short story is out on Christmas Day – The Ordeal of the Haunted Room … dum … dum… dum … Followed by the next full-length St Mary’s story in April. Look out for Another Time Another Place. Followed by the third Time Police novel – Saving Time – in October, I think.

So – busy, busy.


What’s exciting me at the moment?

Books mostly. New books to read and new books to write. I have notes for new projects and new genres to explore. For instance, I have another supernatural thriller out next year, notes for an historical novel, a couple of Regency romances and the story of a family having the misfortune to labour under two family curses.  Ironically, it’s time that is my problem. There’s never enough of it to get everything done.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more