Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

She left right left right left right away.   I don’t know but I’ve been told I’m rough, not ready to be good as gold.   One, two. Sound off. Three, four. Sound off. Five, six. I miss the sound of her voice.   Lift your hands up to the sky she drilled the heart of this GI.   If I should die in this camp, bury me beside that tramp.   Her company halts.

Sometimes you finish reading a book you’ve enjoyed and are just dying to ask the author something about it. Well this week I got the chance to grill Andrew Shephard at the Writers’ Lunch about his newly published novel Nellie and Tabs, while he was waiting for the tomato sauce. Your novel comes with such a powerful sense of the sights, sounds and smells of the 70’s alternative culture. Did you write this from your own experience or did you do a lot of research? A lot of the details are dredged from my own experiences, and stories that I remember people telling me at the time. I didn’t do much research other than looking at old magazines and letters because I wanted to condense the main action into one year, and I didn’t want the facts to get in the way of a good story. When you write a novel do you start with character or plot? Or was it the 70’s culture that inspired the story? With this novel I started with the setting. The alternative society, as it was called at th...