For my second act of the Blogival festival I’m delighted to welcome A.W. Rock to the ‘stage’ author of the gripping Soho Honey.
Hi and thanks for joining me. I believe you spent a while working in Soho, are the characters in your novel inspired by real people?
I have spent both my working and social life in Soho. I have worked in the film industry shooting, editing and dubbing tv commercials, pop promos and short films. Then at the end of the day socialising with with a wide variety of people that I have met in the bars and clubs. Some of these people have influenced the characters I have created in Soho Honey. No character is based on any one person but I have taken a variety of characteristics from people and distilled them into the characters in the book. A couple of the characters are a combination of only two people I have known e.g. Snowman and Mikey. Whereas others are a mixture of people I have known.
There was a lot of characters within your first novel, do you have any kind of system for keeping track of them?
I know them all so well that they are like real people to me and so I don’t have a problem keeping them in mind. Also when they appear in the story they are relevant to that particular scene and since I know them so well I don’t have to give their characteristics a second thought.
What is your typical working day like, are you still involved in directing?
When it’s a day that I am going to spend writing I break the ice by taking an empty foolscap pad and writing my first thoughts down without trying to make any particular sense or being grammatically correct. I speed write one or two pages and then I’m ready to start the day on my latest project. It is a free thought process that allows me to open up my mind to work on the book or the screenplay. I then find it much easier to get involved in to the world that I’m writing about. I’m not making as many films as I used to but we had great fun shooting, editing, creating the music and dubbing the one and a half minute film trailer for Soho Honey which appears on the website sohohoney.com .
What is your ideal afternoon off work?
To go into Chinatown for a dim sum lunch. Then to Bar Italia for an espresso and one of their custard tarts. Then to watch a film in the cinema on Shaftsbury Avenue. Then go to one or two of my favourite bars in Soho and see who I bump into.
Do you read a lot yourself and if so who are your favourite authors?
Ross Macdonald – for his strong storytelling and strong dialogue. He comes from a crime writing period in the USA that for me is story-telling at its best. Raymond Chandler – for his wry observations of human behaviour and his dry ironic dialogue. Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books – because of the sense of foreboding that saturates her stories and her insight into the strange character of Ripley. Gogol – although not exactly a crime writer I love his engaging short stories that contain elements of crime, in an existential way.
What are you working on next?
I am writing a 60 minute pilot episode for a new tv series called Lying Low in Soho. It incorporates some of the characters from Soho Honey but with a totally new story. I have not shown it to anybody yet so it is as yet uncommissioned but I’m looking for a tv production company who would be interested in producing it. I have also got the skeleton of the story for Soho Honey, Book Two and will be writing it ASAP.
Thanks very much for joining me and I look forward to reading the next installment of Soho Honey.
A crime readers blog 