How lucky am I to get to chat to Pippa Goodhart today in The Reading Realm!
Before we settle down in The Reading Realm for a chat, what’s your drink and snack of choice?
Oo, a de-caff coffee and a cinnamon bun, please.
Tell us about your book in three sentences and then three words!
It’s our new You Choose book, this time choosing for your ultimate party. Who will you invite? What will you wear and eat and do? Exciting! Fun! Beautiful!
If one of your characters could come to dinner, who would you invite and what would you cook them? What do you think you’d talk about?
I’m going to invite the orange and blue striped fluffy alien. I’d feed it rainbow jelly, and I’d ask it to tell me all about its home planet.
What’s the funniest word you know that always makes you laugh? (and why!)
‘Plop’ because it makes the sound its labelling.
What’s the silliest or strangest thing you’ve ever researched for a story?
I’ve done a lot of research on coprolites, fossilised dinosaur and other ancient creature poo. It was dug up in my village and made into fertiliser. It’s important in my Great Sea Dragon Discovery story.
Do your characters ever surprise you?
Yes, and I like it when they do. It means they’ve come to life and have taken over the story inventing from you!
If your writing desk could speak, what would it say about you?
Well, the desk I’m writing at right now used to be my father’s desk. It knows how, as a child, I would sneak into my dad’s study and open the big right-hand drawer for ‘clean-on-one-side paper’, or the middle drawer for Sellotape or the hole puncher.
Did you like reading when you were a child? If so, what?
I found learning to read hard, so I didn’t enjoy even trying to read. But I loved it when people read books to me. I loved looking at the pictures in books. I loved playing story Let’s Pretend games. I only really got reading when my Mum read me part of Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I was so keen to know what happened next that I had a go at reading it on my own … and was surprised that I could!
What’s your favourite book that isn’t yours?
Mr Tiger Goes Wild, written and illustrated by Peter Brown. It’s perfect; beautiful, funny, poignant, clever, kind.
What book do you wish you could read for the first time again?
Holes by Louis Sacher astonished me.
What’s the funniest thing a child has said to you?
Said with tears in her eyes after solemnly watching me through a whole session, ‘What’s it like to be an orphan?’ She’d misheard ‘author’ as ‘orphan’!
If you weren’t an author, what would you be?
I was a bookseller for some years, and I did train to become a primary school teacher.
What BAD advice would you give to someone who wants to be a writer?
‘Give up your day job. You’ll easily get published and that’ll earn you lots of money!’
SPEED ROUND:
Cake or biscuits?
Cake.
Dinosaurs or unicorns?
Dinosaurs.
Pirates or astronauts?
Astronauts.
Museums or theme parks?
Museums.
Cats or dogs?
I refuse to answer that one because it would be disloyal to either my cat or my dog!
Summer or winter?
Spring and autumn.
Aliens or robots?
Aliens.
THANK YOU Pippa for joining us in The Reading Realm today!
