Steve Cole

Steve Cole

About Author

Born in 1971, Steve Cole spent a happy childhood in rural Bedfordshire being loud and aspiring to amuse. He liked books, and so went to the University of East Anglia to read more of them. Later on he started writing them too, with titles ranging from pre-school poetry to Young Adult thrillers (with more TV and film tie-ins than he cares to admit to along the way).
In other careers, he has been the editor of Noddy magazine, the voice of a Dalek and an editor of fiction and non-fiction book titles for various publishers.
He is the author of the popular Astrosaurs and Cows in Action series as well as the Z-Rex books and a number of stand-alone titles, including Magic Ink and Aliens Stink.

Author link

www.stevecolebooks.co.uk

Interview

STOP THOSE MONSTERS

SIMON & SCHUSTER

JUNE 2015


Steve Cole had just finished writing the next Young Bond adventure when we caught up to him to talk about his new book, Stop Those Monsters, a thrilling story about monsters (naturally), a boy who befriends a giant hamster, and the land where monsters live... It is aimed at readers aged eight years plus.

Bob is astonished when his house is picked up in a storm and plonked down in the land of monsters! He sets out to find his way back home with the help of Verity, a giant hamster, a Gorgon called Zola and a monster, Crudzilla. Along the way they have to confront and overcome a vast array of strange, terrifying and wonderful monsters.


Here, Steve Cole tells us what inspired this tale of darkness and daring!


Q: Why did you decide to write about monsters in this book?

A: I've been writing a series of books for publisher Simon & Schuster like Magic Ink, Aliens Stink, and now Stop Those Monsters, which has been an opportunity for me to go back to things that were quite significant for me in my own childhood and to bring them back with a magical twist. I wrote Magic Ink because I loved comics and superheroes as a kid and Aliens Stink was about my love of sci-fi adventures.

I also used to love drawing monsters and reading about them. I loved dinosaurs especially because they were like real monsters. I got my first proper introduction to monsters when I was eight and I bought a book for five pence at a jumble sale - Dennis Gifford's Movie Monsters. The monsters in the book all sounded very exotic and exciting and some of them looked really real!

As a child I was sure that monsters existed and I wanted to know how you fought monsters and how I could catch one. I used to leave food out for monsters overnight and if it was gone by the morning, that was all the proof I needed - I was convinced a monster had eaten it!


Q: There are lots of echoes from The Wizard of Oz in the book, why did you decide to include those?

A: My daughter loves the Wizard of Oz so I thought I'd include some images inspired by it. Bob's house is literally blown away during a storm and taken to another land - the land of monsters - where he meets three companions who join him on his quest, and there's an unconvincing authority figure. I also like to bring in some madness and mayhem along the way so you have things like the mad bouncer at the pub. I supposed you could describe Stop those Monsters as 'The Wizard of Oz meets Monsters Inc'!


Q: Most of your monsters are quite familiar but with a twist - can you tell us a bit more about them?

A: I knew I wanted an array of monsters that people would probably have come across before. Godzilla made a return last year in a new film, so I decided to include him with an endearing and rather rubbish version of him called Crudzilla. There's also a Gorgon from the Greek myths although my version, Zola, has aspirations to be an artist and instead of turning her victims into stone, she turns them into 'still life' installations. Then we have an enormous hamster called Verity. That idea, for an ordinary animal made enormous, came from a film called Night of the Lepus which was about a giant, carnivorous rabbit. So anything can be made into a monster, really, although I was careful not to make them too scary.

I also wanted to find out more about the monsters who didn't fit into their society. Lola is a gorgon with artistic ambitions and Crudzilla is small and feeble compared to his massive sisters. So although they are monsters, you tend to feel sorry for them and you want them to succeed.


Q: Do you have a favourite monster?

A: I do like Zola the Gorgon and the rather pathetic transformations she does and her whimsy during moments of peril. I also enjoyed Verity's (the giant hamster) ongoing state of panic and her inability to pronounce words like 'Bob' - she calls him 'Bob-ob-ob'.

If I ended up bringing one of them back to the real world with me, she's probably the one monster I wouldn't mind having around. It would be very cool going to the park with a giant hamster, although she's also a bit over-enthusiastic and would probably spend hours just gazing at people because she wants to find out more about them.


Q: Where do all your monsters live in the story?

A: I invented a place where all the monsters from history, myths and movies can live together and you can move down it through different levels, a bit like a department store. Each level has monsters with similar characteristics and their own habitat. The gorgons, for example, can't have ordinary animals around them because they'd all be turned to stone - so they have creatures that are already made of stone. The deeper you go down the levels, the scarier and more dangerous it all gets...


Q: Is there one level in the monster's house that you'd really not want to land up in?

A: None of them! Please! But I definitely wouldn't want to be at the gorgon level because they'd all want to kill me by turning me into stone. I think that would be the bleakest situation.


Q: There are some great names for characters in Stop the Monsters. Is it really important for you to find the best name for your characters?

A: Yes I love finding their names. The Gorgon, Zola, has got to be the 'cheesiest' (groan) pun for a name, ever, and I quite liked Bosstradamus. Also there's Killgrotty whose name kind of sums him up; he's about as bad as you can get.


Q: What do you think of Jim Field's illustrations in the book?

A: I really enjoyed them, and the way he introduces things like the eyes around the edges of the pages which gradually emerge as you read through the book. The chapter headings, which are all a bit odd, have been picked out by the designer in bold lettering so they're even more outrageous - things like, 'BEWARE THE LASH OF FEAR OF MOTHER OF POISON (OF DOOM)' or how about 'THE GASP-MAKING REVELATION OF HORROR'.


Q: You've recorded audio versions of Ink and Aliens Stink, will Stop Those Monsters also be made available in audio?

A: Yes, I'll be reading this for audio, like the earlier books. That means I will be going down to Chiswick to sit in a room where I'll read the book straight through. It can take a full day to do the recording but it's quite good practice before I start reading out parts during school events.


Q: Do you plan the books quite carefully before you start writing?

A: I do usually know where the story is headed but when I wrote the first draft of Stop Those Monsters, it was quite different. Bob, my hero, was originally going to be a werewolf who only turned human every full moon and who is mistaken for a dog at the other times, but it became too sad so I had to start again. Sometimes you just have to accept that there is going to be a lot of wasted words!


Q: What are you writing now?

A: Well, I'm going to do another stand-alone book like this and I'm working on the title for that at the moment, plus I've got the third Young Bond book to write, and a fourth Secret Agent Mummy book. It's a juggling act to get everything done and there are times when you wish you had a spare week or three....


Q: Do you work long hours to meet all your deadlines?

A: I have been known to work a 28 hour shift! More usually, though, I start to write after the school run. I go to my 'writer's cottage' in a neighbouring village which is quiet and there are no distractions apart from a pool table and the internet, and I work there until late afternoon, read some of the stuff to the children, and then I work again in the evenings until the early hours of the morning, depending on where I am with deadlines. There's a lot of hard work goes into writing a book.

 


ALIENS STINK

SIMON SCHUSTER CHILDREN'S BOOKS

MAY 2014


Look out for talking goldfish, space travel, music on the moon and giant babies in Aliens Stink, the brilliant new novel by Steve Cole for readers aged eight years plus. Cole is behind bestselling series including The Astrosaurs, Cows in Action and Z-Rex.

In Aliens Stink, it seems that an outside force has arrived to clean up our planet for us. The pollution on Earth has disappeared overnight and has been replaced by a lovely new smell. But what is really behind the change and is mankind likely to benefit - or is there a darker plan afoot? Only Tim, his weird new friends and some frazzled scientists manage to uncover the truth - and it's not pretty!

Steve Cole talks to ReadingZone about writing, becoming an author, his fascination with Space and his latest novel, Aliens Stink!


Q: What did you enjoy reading as a child?

A: It was Spiderman and the Charlie Brown cartoons that got me into reading so even though I was a naughty and noisy child at school, I was a good reader.

I think people thought I was reading high quality literature but my vocabulary came from comics and Dr Who novels. I discovered them aged four or five and I stayed reading them into my teens; you could say I have a really balanced reading history!

I went on to take an English Literature degree, despite having been banned from English lessons by one of my teachers when I was in the sixth form. I think she thought I wasn't taking it seriously enough...


Q: Did you always plan to be a writer?

A: I grew up writing books and drawing funny characters with my name on and writing TV series that I starred in, in my head - but I had sensible parents who never thought of writing as a career.

I really had no idea at all what I wanted to do and ended up working on Noddy magazine, including a project with Enid Blyton's daughter, Gillian Baverstock. My first professional assignment was for the Noddy magazine - if you don't count the poem about Smurfs that I wrote and got published in 'Look In' when I was 11... I got a five-pound postal order for that!


Q: How did you get your first book published?

A: I later became the group editor of the BBC pre-school magazines and because we didn't have the budget to pay people to write poems and stories, I would do them.

They would be silly poems about various subjects which I sent to a publisher one Friday afternoon. By the Monday, I'd been asked to write four poetry pop-up books!

Later I wrote bits and pieces for the Dr Who books and then other BBC books and eventually an agent asked if I'd write some original fiction. I set out to write something dark for teenagers but it turned into the Astrosaurs series! A few publishers wanted to buy it, which surprised me, but that really started my career as an original fiction writer.


Q: What was the inspiration for writing Aliens Stink?

A: I wrote Aliens Stink because I felt I'd never taken the time to write the alien book that was inside me. Space is a big fascination for me, I love the idea of travelling to different worlds and the enormity of space.

If we try to think about the universe, we can't grasp it, it is such a vast and endless void. The idea that life might not have evolved on one of the millions of planets out there is ludicrous although I am not sure we will ever be able to visit each other and we are probably all sitting there thinking we are the only ones in the universe....

That is what science fiction is for - we can drive ourselves through black holes! If someone tells me things like that can't happen, I start to think, how could we make that happen...?

That's what the imagination and storytelling are for. I started Astrosaurs by thinking, if they can't find any more dinosaur fossils from a certain point in history, maybe all the dinosaurs had escaped and the only place they could have gone to was space!


Q: If someone gave you a ticket into Space, would you go?

A: Yes, I would! But I can see myself doing training for days and weeks and then once I got there, I'd probably be travel sick and just want to throw up. I can't even go on a glass-bottomed boats without feeling sick, so chances are I wouldn't manage a space ship, but I very much like the idea of going out into space and looking down on Planet Earth.

I was born in 1971 when we had already been to the moon and it seemed ridiculous to me as a child that we've not gone back. I always assumed that I stood a good chance of visiting another world and a bit of me still wonders why we stopped our space travel there. I'd love to stand on an alien world!


Q: Was space your starting point for Aliens Stink?

A: Actually my starting point was a more serious issue, I was worrying about pollution and the environment. There's a big disconnect between what our lives are like and what they should be like to prolong our planet's resources, so I was thinking, what if someone came along and sorted it out? So it's like the TV programme Changing Rooms but on a planetary scale and I'm asking, what would it be like if someone cleaned up our planet overnight?

I like the idea of all these human experts thinking they are terribly clever but they get things completely wrong. They think that the lovely smell on the planet is for their benefit and they don't begin to understand the message that the aliens are communicating. Typical human arrogance, I'm afraid.

In my story, it's the children who hold the answer and they have to sort out the adults' problems just as in real life, it's children who will need to sort out the problems and mess the older generations have made for them.


Q: Where did the huggy alien Little G come from?

A: Little G became an unexpectedly important part of the plot. I once lost my luggage on the way to the Edinburgh Festival and I ended up with no costume for my show!

It got me thinking, what if you lost your luggage and if, when you got it back, there was something in it that wasn't there before? And what if it was an alien who wanted a hug?! I like the idea of a hugging creature bursting out from your luggage!


Q: How important are the gadgets in this book?

A: Although the story is about slightly mad things like UFOs and aliens and space travel, it has to have its own logic.

As the author, I have to take it seriously and the characters need to react properly to it all, or the whole thing falls apart. And so the children (there's a group of very bright scientists' children at the hidden base) need to invent certain things like a protective, matter-transcending suit to help with space travel. But I don't overload the technical, science-fiction side of things.

I don't think you should use gadgets like magic to get you out of any corner. It's better if you use your characters, and what they're like, and what they do, to solve your plot issues on your behalf.


Q: Are you planning to write a follow-up to Aliens Stink?

A: I think of the characters fondly and I enjoyed putting them together. I could see them going on to set up their kind of alternative Thunderbirds operation and saving the world from global catastrophe.... The ending is left fairly open, so I can come back to them if I want to.


Q: How does your writing day go?

A: I have a little writing cottage that I rent, it's in a neighbouring village and there's no wi-fi, phone line or TV so there are no distractions.

I work until about 6pm and then come back and see the kids and have tea and then start again at 9.30 at night and work until midnight, then I do the same all over again the next day.

I'm not a morning person though, so I rarely start writing before 1.30pm and I'll do whatever I can to distract myself, like playing pool. I get more done at night and if I need to, I'll work through until 4am, grab a few hours sleep and be up by 8am to meet a deadline!

I don't see writing as a job; I have a will to make up stories. And I like to get full value out of each day. So I push myself quite hard.


Q: What are your top tips for young people who are writing?

A: A story starts with an idea and it doesn't always have to be your own idea - just put a new spin on it! That also goes for style - don't be afraid to borrow from someone else - that can help you to isolate and define your own style. I used to write my own Mr Men books and would take those phrases and add my own words - I did the same with Dr Who books.

What you write about has to be something that interests you and you enjoy and it's important to try to finish something. When I was younger I would always start lots of things and not finish any of them.

Finally, you have to really enjoy writing for the sake of writing. If you want to be a writer, it has to be because you enjoy writing and not because you believe you will be published.

Author's Titles