A glorious time travel full of despair - Michelle Smart puts her finger on the self-destruct button to hilarious effect
- CWIP
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
For readers who haven’t (yet!) read your ‘Butterflies’, can you tell us about it in one sentence?
Imagine if you could travel back in time to save the love of your life… only to promptly screw everything up!
What is it about the world wide web that you do or don’t like as a source of humour?
In the hope that I’ve understood this question correctly, I’d have to say tracking down old comedy skits from my childhood and adolescence is the best way I utilise the web for humour.
What inspired you to write a witty time travelling novel?
The inspiration to write Butterflies came from a conversation at the dinner table, when my youngest son asked the theoretical question, ‘If you could live your life again, would you do everything the same?’ After establishing that we’d be allowed to travel back in time with all our memories intact, I said yes, but my husband said no – he would do things differently and use his future knowledge to future-proof our lives. When I pointed out that the butterfly effect would come into play if he took a different path and that there was every chance our lives would diverge significantly enough that we’d never meet as we did the first time around, he simply said, ‘I’d find you.’ Not only did I choose to believe him, but by the time we’d finished eating, Butterflies had come fully to life in my head!
Which witty novel inspired you the most growing up?
Ooo, that’s a tough one! I think I’d have to plump for Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. I’d already read Riders and loved it, but Rivals was just so addictive and funny that I couldn’t put it down. My art teacher caught me reading it when I was fourteen and confiscated it – she only realised I was reading rather than painting because I couldn’t stop giggling!
How long have you wanted to write and finish a manuscript? Where do you write? Do you take coffee breaks or stick to water /wine/other? Any writing habits gratefully received.
My day job is as a contemporary romance author for Mills & Boon, so I’ve been a published author for 12 years. Butterflies, though, is a completely different kettle of fish to what I usually write, and my first foray into the world of self-publishing. For the first time I was able to write a book without any constraints – I wrote it entirely for myself and loved every single second of it.
When it comes to writing, I am very disciplined. I’m always at my computer in my little office by 8am (I’m an early bird, and by the time I’m sat at my extremely messy desk, I’ve drunk mucho coffee, walked the dog, and put myself through the torture of Pilates in the hope my flabby belly will miraculously turn flat). I spend a lovely hour or so procrastinating, and then I get stuck in and write until around 4pm. I tend to take a short break every hour or so, depending on how deeply my brain is in manuscript-land.
Finally, can you tell us why you think CWIP is important?!
For the whole of my life, it’s felt that witty women writers have been denigrated and dismissed as unworthy or beneath notice. Witty men, however, have been revered. Growing up, I was always hugely aware of the discrepancy between the sexes in both print and on the screen. Men took centre space in practically all the sitcoms and sketch shows, so much so that as a child, I automatically assumed women couldn’t be funny like men. French & Saunders and then Absolutely Fabulous (which is still my favourite sitcom of all time) completely turned that belief on its head. While television has come on in great strides since the eighties and nineties with its promotion of female-centred comedy, publishing still lags behind. Witty women writers are still, in many quarters, seen as lesser, and CWIP does a huge service in bridging that gap and celebrating the amazing talent of witty female authors.
If you could offer support we would love you to press the button below - so we can keep going!
