It's TheOrangutan!
To be perfectly honest, I was eagerly waiting for the answers for this interview to show up in my inbox and I was not disappointed!
Many of you know him, Many of you love him. Many of you think he's just a grumpy old ape! Well, maybe he is, but that's part of what makes him so great.
He has a lot of stories posted here on Wattpad; The Cubicle, World War Z, Blood Red Moon, Windblown Saviour, A Gift in the Dark, Another Chance, Where There Was Darkness, The Wheels on the Bus, Paranormality, Brain Dump, and A Grumpy Guide to Wattpad to name but a few. I highly recommend every single one of them.
So, here are a bunch of questions that I wanted to know about our favorite hairy orange guy. Enjoy!
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1. Are you as funny in real life? Do your wife and four kids get your sense of humor? Do any of the little ones take after you in that?
Am I funny? Compliment graciously accepted, but no, in real life I wear my underpants inside my trousers and wander around in brown clothes, while collecting pictures of interesting lampposts from around the UK.
The wife and I share humour such as The Vicar of Dibley, Qi, Mock the Week and perhaps the more gentle British comedies but when she's out (and I have control of the remote), I also enjoy the more satirical side of things like the wonderful Ross Noble, Red Dwarf, Blackadder and Who's Line is it Anyway. I love clever humour, although you can't lose with the odd fart joke.
As far as the kids go, my twin boys are definitely still at fart joke stage, but the girls who are a little older are definitely up for a giggle. My oldest in particular is a bit of a space cadet, and comes out with some wonderful comments during conversation.
2. What got you started writing? Was there one person or moment that really motivated you?
A combination of things got me going really. My father published a book on farming which was rather cool and I loved the idea of having work in print. I'd been doing a satirical magazine that went round the office, but to be honest it was just a thinly veiled hack at the management with the odd fart joke thrown in. A colleague and friend of mine who is wonderfully creative had been making films in his spare time, and at the time my Dad's book was published had just won an award.
We got talking and he suggested that perhaps I could supply him with some ideas. I jotted a few down, but rather than do something with them, he suggested that perhaps I should. I'd started reading Neil Gaiman books around the same sort of time and realised that short stories really appealed to me. With the ideas I'd come up with, and the help of a few friends, I put fingers to keyboard and off I went.
3. A lot of your writing is creepy, spooky, scary and/or just plain weird, but in a really good way. Where do you get the inspiration for your really original stories from?
I've always been fascinated by the slightly odd things in life, but perhaps more interested in how different people see things, well, differently. Again, writers like Douglas Adams, Christopher Brookmyre, Tom Holt, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett do things like that. I guess I never stop twisting things to a slightly skewed perspective.
Sadly, in some ways I think perhaps that's just how my brain is wired, maybe I am slightly creepy, spooky, scary or just plain weird. Weird I can handle. There always seems to be something banging around in there, sometimes I can tame it and pin it to paper, other times an idea just seems to go on the rampage and eat all the food.
