Charlie and Mark Stay (The Witches Of Woodville) discuss writing humour into wartime, using period-correct language as well as slang, why community is important and how much we’ve lost over the decades, and the metric ton of projects he has on the go.

Please note there are various uses of very minor curse words.

General references:
The Bestseller Experiment
Claire Burgess’ YouTube video about jam roly poly
The Fortean Times
Mark’s newsletter
The Witches Of Woodville website
I spoke to Jacquie Bloese in episode 101
I spoke to Lucy Barker in episode 96
A Canterbury Tale (Powell and Pressburger)
Went The Day Well
Threads
The Day After
When The Wind Blows
Chernobyl
The Last Of Us
The transcript for Scriptnotes episode 403
Ben Aaronovitch’s episode on The Bestseller Experiment
Unwelcome
Nautilus

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Becky Brown: Blitz Spirit
C K McDonnell: The Stranger Times
Constance Miles: Mrs Miles’s Diary
Dennis Knight: Harvest Of Messerschmitts
Mark Stay: The Crow Folk
Mark Stay: Babes In The Wood
Mark Stay: The Ghost Of Ivy Barn
Mark Stay: The Holly King
Mark Stay: The Corn Bride
Mark Stay: The End Of Magic
Mark Stay: The End Of Dragons
Mark Stay and Mark Oliver: Back To Reality
Nella Last: Nella Last’s War

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 19th June 2024; published 28th October 2024

Where to find Mark online: Website || Twitter || Facebook || Instagram || TikTok

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

02:25 Where the series might go in terms of number of books
03:14 Jam roly poly, getting bell ringing correct, and the forthcoming inclusion of the Morris Dancers in a pivotal role
05:34 The very first beginnings of the Witches of Woodville series
10:05 All about Faye and her relative immaturity
13:10 Widening the scope beyond humour to be more serious
16:02 Creating Miss Charlotte and Mrs Teach
18:10 Does Mark have future plots in mind?
18:49 The characters of the community of Woodville, starting with a question about the librarian
22:45 On Bertie’s Battle of Britain diary
26:35 The language in the books – repetitions, and old-fashioned phrases
30:34 Mark’s inclusion of the work of German artist, Hannah Höch
32:57 Grief as a theme
36:39 Miss Charlotte’s sight and not wanting to make people invincible
41:19 Mark’s use of real people in the series, and where you might find pieces of himself in his work. Mark also talks about how we’ve lost a sense of community
48:05 Mark’s time co-hosting The Bestseller Experiment Podcast, why he moved on, and the various projects he’s planning
53:54 More about Mark’s current film project

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 108. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. And we are doing one of those ‘occasionally more’ episodes today. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Mark Stay. Mark has been, and is still in some cases, an employee of Waterstones, a podcaster, a screenwriter, a theatre company owner, and a sales rep for a couple of publishers, as well as being an author, so look out for a few extra questions at the end of the show. But for the most part we’ll be discussing his Witches of Woodville series – four published and one on the go. It’s World War Two, the Battle of Britain is afoot, and, later on, happens, and a young woman called, Faye Bright, has discovered she can do magical things. She’s found her mother’s book of magic – which also includes a recipe for jam roly poly – she now understands why two of the local women are thought to be witches – because they are – and her life is going to change; she’s an ARP volunteer, she’s a bell ringer, and now she’s a witch. Her Dad won’t be happy – he wants her working in his pub – but more to the point, we start the series off with a group of sentient scarecrows who the villagers are very good at finding all manner of excuses for that have nothing to do with magic, which is a bit of an issue because the leader of the scarecrows has an evil grin and death on his mind. It’s a bit of Pratchett, it’s a bit of Douglas Adams, it’s a bit of Carry On, and it’s a whole heap of Mark’s own work. Hello Mark!

Mark: Hello, Charlie, what a great summary. Thank you very much for that. I appreciate it.

Charlie: It’s been an absolute joy reading your series.

Mark: Thank you, thank you.

Charlie: And I’ll ask you later properly, but I’m hoping you’ve got quite a fair few more books in the future?

Mark: Yep, well, there’s at least one more on the go; I’m preparing a pitch for my publisher for a couple more after that. I’d love to get all the way through the war because it’s constantly changing and evolving, because the fifth one is with my editor, but the sixth one has just come to a point in the war where women are conscripted. They get a choice – they can go into military service, they can go in the land army, they can work in factories; there’s always an escalation during the Second World War. I do a lot of comic cons and things like that and I hand sell the books like a market trader. And I found the thing that tends to work is I tell people it’s a cross between Dad’s Army and Bedknobs And Broomsticks. So you’ve got that combination of comedy and magic and Second World War on the home front and recipes for jam roly poly and stuff like that, so yeah.

Charlie: I was actually very glad to see that your wife has a little YouTube episode there about jam roly poly, that was quite fun to see.

Mark: Yes, yes. Well, she’s… I mean, don’t come to me for cakes or anything like that, it’d be a disaster. But, yeah, and she was very influential in the first book as well, with the bell ringing, because Claire is a bell ringer, she’s been bell ringing since she was twelve years old, and she hates it when she sees bell ringing done badly in books and films. And there was one, I won’t name the author, but it was a cosy murder mystery that had bell ringing in it – we were in Dublin at the time – she got so angry, she left the book in the Airbnb [both chuckle]. So I said to her – I was working on The Crow Folk at the time – and I said, ‘what if we made the bell ringers the real heroes of the next one?’ And I said, ‘and I’ll get bell ringing, right, but we’ll add some magic to it as well’. And so she became my bell ringing consultant for the first book. And I gave her all the bell ringing bits of the book and she’d go through it with a red pen going, ‘wrong, wrong, change that!’ So it’s weird – I crop up on bell ringing groups on Facebook as, ‘someone’s actually got it right!’ And the challenge with the fifth book is I’m doing the same thing with Morris dancers now. So I’ve had the local Morris dancers have a look at it and they’ve given it the thumbs up, so yeah.

Charlie: Giving you the thumbs up despite Faye not liking the Morris dancers?…

Mark: There’s a massive rivalry, and I did point this out, and one of the Morris dancers said, ‘well, actually, a lot of our members are bell ringers too’. So clearly there’s been some sort of détente in the last 80-odd years. But, yeah, it’s a nice little running gag. They’re like the Sharks and the Jets, the bell ringers and the Morris dancers, they hate each other. For the fifth book, they’re gonna have to overcome their differences. So, I don’t want to say any more than that.

Charlie: Okay. All right. I might have to change that, ‘what’s next’ question I’ve got the end then [Mark laughs]. All right, fair enough. Well, yeah, you’re saying about bell ringing being really important from the start – as far as I’m aware, then, you have been effectively planning this, writing this in some way, shape or form since 2008, and–

Mark: Wow, you’ve done your research. Well done. Very good.

Charlie: Well, I noted down, because I know you’ve talked about various things and there was just something in my head that I was wondering if you would talk about, so I’ve put it down because I really would like to know.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it.

Charlie: Yeah, you’ve got loads of changes but I would like to start at the very beginning because I think you said that first it was a contemporary novel [Mark: yep], maybe with vampires? And it had a different point of view. I would love to know more about that.

Mark: Well, it started as a TV idea. I’m a screenwriter, and you’re constantly having to come up with ideas that you can pitch and what producers in TV are looking for is that endless well of stories where you can have a location, you can come back to it again and again and again. And I’m a big reader of the Fortean Times, the magazine that talks about strange stuff that happens all over the world and so much strange stuff happens in the UK. And I wanted to do almost like a British Buffy The Vampire Slayer, where you have a village where weird stuff happens all the time and you’ve got… originally, I was going to have a local journalist on the local newspaper investigate these things, but I could not make it work. And I think it was because it was set in the modern day. There was something about it that didn’t quite click for me. I mean, if you want a great example of how it should be done, have a look at CK McDonnell’s Stranger Times books – those are brilliant and they’re fantastic – but for me, it just didn’t work. And I wrote it as a TV pilot and then I tried it as a book and then back as a TV… ping back and forth. And it was my TV agent who said, ‘why don’t you set it in the war?’ Because he knows I’m interested in that period, and he said, ‘why don’t you set it in the war?’ I watched Bedknobs And Broomsticks and thought, ‘yeah, actually, that could really, really work’. And it was about six years ago that we moved to this part of Kent. We’ve got Reculver over there where they tested the bouncing bomb, the Battle of Britain happened overhead, there are still all these pillboxes around us which would have been at the forefront of any invasion. So everything clicked into place for me and it could heighten the tone – I think that was the important thing. If I made it modern day, I just feel the tone would have been wrong, but going back in time, having that kind of remove, you can heighten the tone a little bit more, make it a bit more comedic, have a bit more fun with it. Yeah, and that turned out to be the case. And I was originally going to self publish it. I thought, this is a bit strange for traditional publishing, I might just self publish this as a series of novellas, about 60,000 words or something. But my agent said, ‘let me have a look at it, let me have a look at it’. And I sent it in and he said, ‘no, I can sell this’. The first draft was only 60,000 words, or so he says, but needs to be longer, and he gave me some suggestions. So I went away and beefed it up and, yeah, Simon and Schuster snapped up three and then snapped up two more. And, yeah, I’m so glad, because little things like Harry Goldhawk’s cover art, I never would have got that without the publisher’s involvement. Yeah, so it took a long time to click into place, an awful long time to click into place. But when it did, it then flowed very, very quickly. And it’s just been like I say, this endless well of story: I’ve got this ensemble of characters that I can come to again and again and again and we can have fun with tormenting all of them. It’s set in a period that people get very nostalgic about, particularly in the UK, particularly in this part of the UK. I mean, I’m just up the road from Thanet, which is like Brexit central. And, what I’ve discovered in doing my research, this was the time of mass observation and you had people writing daily diaries and you get books like Nella Last’s War and Mrs Miles’s Diary and the Blitz Spirit book, where you get all these diaries of people in that moment writing about their lives. And what you discover is we weren’t all in it together. We weren’t all side by side. There was a lot of unhappiness. People were really miserable – they didn’t like the rationing, they lived in abject terror of air raids. So I’m taking that nostalgia and I’m being subversive with it as well. So they’ve been described as cosy fantasy, but there’s a very dark undercurrent running through all the books. For film I’ve written horror and things like that, so it’s always there. One of my favourite things as a writer is taking a trope that you know and then subverting it and doing something a bit different with it, and that’s what these books are. Yes, they are Dad’s Army, but with a dark undercurrent, they are Bedknobs And Broomsticks but there’s real death and peril in these as well. And not everyone is completely on board with the Home Front war effort, either. This makes them sound awfully dark, but they are good fun as well. The review I get the most seems to be, ‘I don’t normally read stuff like this, but I really enjoyed it’. So I think [laughs], I think to Simon and Schuster’s chagrin, they’re very difficult books to market because they’re not out and out fantasy, not out and out comedy, they’re not out and out folk horror, which is another thing they’ve been described as, but they’re a little bit of all of that. They’re quite difficult to sell but once people read them, they seem to really like them and read them all.

Charlie: We need Mark Stay as a genre, yeah.

Mark: [Laughs.] Oh, I don’t know [laughs].

Charlie: So I would like to ask you more – if we can concentrate on Faye, I would really like to know more about her development because, and this is something I have seen in reviews, people say, ‘oh, I’m not sure about her age and stuff’ [Mark: yeah], which I actually think is a point you’re making, you’ve made her like this [Mark: yeah] to explore different things, and I would like to ask you, yeah, about her development, how you developed her?

Mark: The common criticism… I say, ‘common’, one or two people have said it, is that she reads a little young in the first book, and that was a very deliberate choice. I wanted to make her kind of naive, kind of unworldly, and then over the next few books, she grows up very, very quickly, which a lot of people had to do in the Second World War. They went from a 1930s idyll, where it was all happening over there, to suddenly bombs are landing all around you, people you know are dying, food is rationed, suddenly life is very, very tough, and you have to roll your sleeves up and do things that you might have found unpleasant otherwise. So, that was part of her journey, was to take her from someone who’s a bit wide eyed and… not exactly innocent, but to challenge her and to prod her and to make her grow up and to push her in directions she might not have necessarily gone. And this was a terrific time for women because all the men, most of the men, went off to war, as the books go on you see, there are women doing the post round, the milk round, there are the land girls on the local farms. Like I say, in the next couple of books, there’s conscription coming as well. They stepped up and did incredible things. Of course, that came at a cost as well. They all had their own plans and things that they wanted to do, and suddenly they’re thrust at the forefront. So Faye is very much an example of that, but with magic. And she’s a little bit… all of the women in my life, she’s a little bit like my mum, my sister and my wife and my daughter, none of whom take any nonsense from anyone and will speak truth to power – that’s another important thing that Faye does, is she’ll say, ‘hang on a minute!’ She’ll ask the awkward, impertinent questions and she’s got that kind of working class grit as well, that I like, too. So she’s great fun to write. She’s easy to write for me. I ran a theatre company with my wife and I wrote plays and she’d been to drama school, she was very good at giving me feedback and saying, ‘no, a woman wouldn’t say that’. We would develop characters together. You soon learned that you just need to treat each character as an individual, give them her own individual goals and needs and wants and test them and see them keep getting up again and again. I can’t talk about what’s coming in, say, the sixth book, but there are bigger, challenges coming for her. She’s going to have to really grow up very quickly. So by then she’ll be about 20 [or] 21 years old. I’ve read a few of Kate Atkinson’s books that are set during the war as well, and those have been a big influence as well. Just seeing how the characters in her books – you look at something like Life After Life, where you’ve got a young woman going through the Second World War and seeing death and destruction, and it’s certainly for this next phase of Faye’s life, I’m thinking, yeah, yeah, let’s get it a bit more real and a bit more gritty, maybe.

Charlie: Okay. So, I mean, I noticed, definitely a step up, I want to say, in how you were telling the story in between one and two – you brought the kindertransport in. There was a lot more seriousness and never getting rid of the humour, but you brought more seriousness. Sounds like then you’re going to expand the scope more and kind of widen it almost to more?

Mark: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the second book, Babes In The Wood, you’ve got those kindertransport children. And originally I thought, ‘oh, we could have evacuees’. And then I thought, ‘actually, no, they were evacuated away from Kent, not into Kent’, where all the bombs were dropping. So I thought, who, who could come? Oh, kindertransport children. And I looked into that – and what they had to go through and then to come to this green and pleasant land but still confront prejudices and still have challenges to overcome. An author called Victoria Goldman was very helpful for me because, again, as with the bell ringing, I was out, of my comfort zone. So certainly when it comes to kindertransport children and Jewish culture, I gave it to Victoria, who gave me a report to set me on the right path with that as well. And you can’t shy away from the fact that there was some very dark stuff going on. That was more of a murder mystery as well; I wanted to have a bit of a riddle at the centre of that one, too. Dead bodies start appearing and piling up and that was fun. That was… [both laugh]. It’s a bit like boiling a frog, she series, they do get darker and darker and darker and by the time we get to The Holly King and the next one, The Corn Bride, which is next year, there’s some very disturbing things going on, but there’s still a sense of humour there as well. Which I think sums up the war, certainly the British experience of the war, because apart from Jersey and Guernsey, we weren’t occupied. So we never suffered under the jackboot, as it were, but we suffered with the bombings. But there was still a sense of humour, a sense of gallows humour that got people through it. And that’s very much in evidence in the books, I hope.

Charlie: Obviously, always staying with the comedy, but it’s going to veer towards horror a little bit more. Ever more as such, then, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, I think so. A few people have said, ‘you know, have you ever thought of writing anything without magic, without fantasy or whatever?’ Well, I get enough of real life as it is in the real world. I like injecting magic and horror and fantasy elements into stories because they’re very good at investigating big ideas. Thematically, each of these books are about quite big ideas. And horror I find very cathartic as a writer. I go to horror film festivals and literary festivals and stuff like that. Horror writers are the nicest, most well adjusted people you’ll ever meet because they get it all out of their heads and into the system, onto the page. They’re generally the nicest people to hang out with, the goths and the horror geeks. Yeah. And I think it’s quite healthy. There’s something very cathartic about reading, watching horror movies, and writing, – definitely, most definitely.

Charlie: Obviously, there’s so many characters in your world, and I’m going to get to the community in a minute – I would like to ask on Miss Charlotte and Mrs Teach, if you could just tell us a bit more about them as well, in terms of your creation?

Mark: Yeah, well, with those, you’ve got the Hecate, the maiden, mother, and crone, which is that great unholy trinity of witchcraft. So they’re fulfilling those roles. And people have compared them to the witches in the Terry Pratchett novels [Charlie: yeah] and of course, the witches in Macbeth. That was always going to be, the structure of their little unit, if you like. And they don’t like the word ‘coven’. ‘Coven’ was generally used for men, for warlocks. When you’re telling stories, you’re very often dealing with archetypes. They constantly argue who is the mother and the crone out of the two of them, because Miss Charlotte is obviously a lot older. They were fun to write, and initially there was a lot more antagonism between them but again, as the books have gone on, they are functioning much more as a unit – they still have their differences and ways of doing things, but I do like revealing things about them. So there’s stuff in The Holly King that’s hinted at about Mrs Teach’s dark past and also an adventurous past where I’ve left the door open a crack, maybe for prequels [chuckles], that’s always an option – so the young Mrs Teach having adventures. If you sign up to my newsletter, you get all sorts of free short stories set in the Woodville universe. And there’s a thing called the Miss Charlotte Quartet, which tells Charlotte’s history over the last 300 or whatever years since the last plague in London, right up to [it] ends in 1910, when she arrives in Folkestone, which eventually steers her towards Woodville. So there’s stories there where you learn about the great love of her life and how she lost her and what went wrong there. So they are archetypes, but I don’t have a great master plan: a I’m writing them, I think, ‘oh, maybe… maybe Mrs Teach did have adventures in London in the 1910s or the 1920s or something like that, maybe…’ – that allows me to have a little more fun with that and drop little hints and then maybe come back to them later. So I’m constantly discovering new things about them and who they are, which excites me and hopefully excites the reader.

Charlie: Whenever you decide to end the series and you work on it, you don’t know what’s there at the moment?

Mark: I sort of know where the ending is.

Charlie: Okay.

Mark: But I don’t necessarily know how to get there. If you look at the Witches of Woodville logo on the website, it says, ‘witch free since 1973’ – that’s an end point. I can’t say too much about it, but I do have an idea of a scene that happens at the end. But what happens between now and then? Who knows? There’s a finish line and I’m vaguely heading towards it, but it’s gonna be quite a bumpy road along the way. We’ll see. We’ll see if I ever get there.

Charlie: Okay, so 25 books, at least, I’m seeing them in this series [both laugh].

Mark: Stranger things have happened.

Charlie: You’ve touched on Woodville as a village and you have this community of people, which I like – I mean, you’ve got so many potential people that you can go to. I’m actually wondering if you’re going to bring the librarian in at some point because I know she’s all over your website and things like that and your acknowledgments. Is that possible?

Mark: There’s one line, maybe two lines, in The Holly king where there’s a hint. That’s all I’m gonna say. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Charlie: All right, maybe I have missed that.

Mark: Trust me, no one’s picked up on it! [Both laugh.] I’m really surprised! It’s one word, it’s a surname, and I think it crops up twice. And no one has picked up on it, so I’m not saying anything. If anyone wants to let me know what they think it is, drop me a line. And there’s a slightly bigger hint in the second book as well. In The Corn Bride, the sixth book as well.

Charlie: Well, yeah, I mean, you’ve got this community of people then – because I definitely went down a detour there – and I suppose I want to ask just the creation of them, because you’ve got so many different people and you do introduce more people with the new books as they open. You’ve got more people. How do you keep track of them, there’s limitless possibilities. We could have many more people join. Yeah, just ask about them in general?

Mark: Yeah, well, initially, many of them… I don’t think I’ve ever admitted this before, many of them were based on characters from the Carry On movies, or at least the ensemble. I don’t want to name names, but I mean, Faye’s dad, Terrence, the description, he basically looks like Sid James. Mrs Teach could be Hattie Jakes. There’s a Peter Butterworth in there as well. So initially, just for my own thing, how am I going to keep track of these, I cast them in my head and then started writing. But then they become their own thing, they evolve into their own thing. I write using a piece of software called Scrivener, which is great because you can keep all your research in one place. And I’ve got an, essentially, Witches Of Woodville bible with everything in there. And I just keep track of them. And, my copy editor is brilliant, Lisa Rogers, she’s just fantastic. She will say, ‘hang on, wasn’t he with the blah blah in the previous…’ Oh yeah, you’re right. So, yeah, I keep track of it like that. Again, looking at things like the war diaries from the mass observation projects and village life at the time, you look at what people were doing and the different services they were providing and you want the butcher, you want the baker, you want the pub landlord, everyone’s got their role, and the vicar as well. Again, you’re dealing with archetypes here, which very often can be tropey and quite stereotypical, but then you want to have fun with them and so you present them as one thing and then you subvert it and have some fun with it. Definitely in The Corn Bride, the poor vicar is going to go through a lot. Yeah, and you pick and choose; it’s like having a theatre company where you have an ensemble, we have a rep company, and you’re casting a new show each time and you think, ‘oh, actually it’d be really fun to bring so and so to the forefront and have them’. So with The Holly king, we had the postie who got one mention in a previous book, I think, and then I brought him to the forefront in The Holly King and just made him a star for a night and then tormented him and did terrible things to him. That’s the joy of it. And very often when I’m working on one book, I’m editing or copy editing the previous book, so you think ‘I’ll just drop a mention of their name in so that it makes me look clever and like I planned the whole thing out’. Yeah, it’s nice to have a wide cast to choose from, because it just adds to the possibilities. But I think the mistake to make is to try and involve them all in every show, in every book. Just focus on a few of them in this story, and then when we’re done with them, we’ll move on to the next one. And unlike actors, they don’t get hurt or offended when you ignore them.

Charlie: That’s very true. That’s very true [Mark chuckles]. I am so here for the reverend having more of a place in the next book. He’s got that… companion, tenant… with him [Mark laughs], so that would be interesting to find out more about. So you have mentioned things like diaries and things like that, and you’ve got Bertie’s ‘Battle of Britain’, which I did want to just go into a little bit [Mark: yes] because I really liked it. Can you talk about including that?

Mark: Yeah, well, I came across something in a… was it a car boot sale? No, it was a book fair in Whitstable… and what’s the book called?… it’s called A Harvest Of Messerschmitts. And it’s quite a rare book and it cost me like £15 but I snapped it up because it’s all about this village during the Battle of Britain, and it has a day by day account of what actually happened. It’s magnificent and it shows you the local air base and everything, it was just so incredibly useful. And Bertie is the kind of lad who would keep a diary about what’s going on in the Battle of Britain. So it was a fun way to chronicle what’s going on around them without having it impinge too much on the actual story, without getting too expositional. So, yeah, that was great fun. And I wish I’d had it for the first couple of books, actually, because it was just so incredibly useful for the world building. But again, you expand the world with every book, you explore different places. I mean, Woodville itself is kind of a greatest hits of Kent villages. I could have said it in somewhere like Chilham, but by creating my own village, I can take liberties and I can have the kind of pub I want, I can have the kind of church I want, it can be the size I want. And also there’s a wood – which we don’t really have here in Kent. You’ve got Bluebell Wood and things like that but I wanted to have an ancient wood. And depressingly, mostly thanks to Henry VIII, we don’t have any big woods in this country, really, [Charlie: yeah] not ancient woods. New Forest is called the New Forest because they had to replant everything after he chopped all the trees down for the armada. So I had to invent that and create that. And it’s necessarily small, but a bit like the Tardis. It’s probably bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. You have to sprinkle just enough realism. I used to work for Headline Publishing and we published a lot of what they used to call ‘saga romances’, which would be set, I don’t know, say, in Portsmouth in the Second World War, or Southampton. And a friend of mine, she used to devour them and I got samples of everything so I’d give them to her and she gave me reviews, so it helped me sell them. And I remember saying to her once, ‘what is it about this genre that you love? What is it that makes all the difference?’ And she said, ‘well, it’s not necessarily the story’, she says, ‘it’s those little details about the number 75 bus from Clapham Junction or whatever’. She goes, ‘those are the things that take me back, that resonate, or at least that feel real’. Even if it’s set somewhere she never actually lived. It just adds that reality. I remember taking that as an important lesson. Those little bits of reality ground the story, so that when you’re adding witchcraft and magic and stuff like that, it just feels all the more real.

Charlie: Yeah, no, I agree. You were making me think back to conversations I’ve had with Jacquie Bloese and also Lucy Barker. With Lucy Barker, particularly, we got really into her location work, particular roads that she’d used and things like that, and she’d done lots of research, so yeah. [Mark: yeah.] And I’ve actually put down a note – I don’t usually note things for myself – but I put one; I’m going to look to see if there are indeed books about Southampton, if that happens to be one of the things you guys published, because that’s my city, I’d love to read that [Mark laughs]. So I’m going to find out if that is indeed a thing. Yeah, so you’ve got Bertie’s diary, then, and I love Bertie’s development over the series. You leave us off, I think, at the end of book one, wondering if he’s going to find out more, if he’s going to be more involved. And then, yeah, you have got what is effectively a, 50/50 at the end of book four, which is… I’m very interested to see where you choose to go with that. But, yes, I love his development. I also love the dad, Terrence, and I suppose I’m gonna have to leave it there with the characters because there’s other things I want to talk about and there are so many! I would like to ask about the language. It’s one of my favourite aspects of this book [Mark: yeah]. You’ve got the very British language, the old fashioned words, I also noted what again, I’m assuming is deliberate – you’ve got repetitions of sentences and ideas. I’ve put down, ‘like the mosquitoes going into Faye’s mouth’, which is quite a comedic thought and that’s why I’m thinking it has to be absolutely deliberate. You’ve noted that down and stuff. So can you just talk about your use of language and writing for these books?

Mark: Well, first of all, the mosquitoes in the mouth – when I first started working on this, back when it was a contemporary thing, I lived in Surrey and I went up to Box Hill one night. I said to my wife, ‘right, I’m going to drive to Box Hill and I’m going to get lost in the woods in the dark’, because it was the only place where I thought it could be remote and dark. And even there in the middle of Box Hill, I could still hear the M25 in the distance, the cars and what have you. Yeah, I remember walking through there in the dark and getting a mouthful of mosquitoes. So it’s like the mouth full of bugs, and it was like [onomatopoeia incoming] ‘Bleh! Bleh! Bleh!’ [Both laugh.] So, yeah, there’s a bit of sense memory there, but the language is… you’ve got the diaries, you’ve also got films set around that period. So films like Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, where they used a lot of non-actors, which is really important for me. There’s a moment in that where the American visiting Canterbury speaks to a farmer and the farmer says, ‘yeah’. And I thought, ‘yeah’. If I just put, ‘yeah’ – I thought, ‘oh, no, that feels too modern. I can’t put that in’.

Charlie: Yep.

Mark: It’s not the way we’d say it, necessarily now, kind of ‘oh yeah’ – it’s kind of a ‘yeeeahhhh?’ – it’s like a door creaking, but people did use it. So I was like, ‘yes!’ Little things like finding out how much a round of drinks cost. I was watching a George Formby film and you sit there with a notepad and it’s like, ‘oh, it’s so many shillings and sixpence for a round, excellent, I’m using that!’ There’s a fantastic film called Went The Day Well, which is about the Nazis invading a village. It was made as a propaganda movie by an Italian during the Second World War. It’s brilliant, it’s got Thora Hird shooting Nazis with a rifle. It’s a brilliant film. Big influence on the next book, actually, The Corn Bride. Little bits of language in there. So I will sit there jotting words down and phrases down and thinking, ‘that’s gold!’ It does give it that ring of authenticity. The only thing is, it’s leaked into my script writing, so I’m working with a director at the moment, and he was reading an article recently about how, like, the youth of today, words like ‘sod’ and ‘bugger’ and ‘bloody’ just aren’t used anymore. And it’s like the meat and two veg of my stories, that kind of language. Certainly when I’m writing the modern day stuff, I have to be a bit more contemporary. It has a kind of texture to it that I really, really love as well. I’m lucky in that I’m writing in a period that there are lots of movies to look at, there are diaries, there’s just an endless resource. But what you have to remember as well is that when you watch anything from the BBC, they’re speaking Received Pronunciation. They’re speaking a very formal language. So you look for the stuff that isn’t in presentation mode, where it’s a bit more informal, where people are talking like their real selves.

Charlie: I’m seeing where you bring your research into the book directly because you’ve got George Formby films.

Mark: He was huge! He was the Tom Cruise of his day. He was massively popular and Bertie would definitely have been a fan. This is the other thing, you find out people found him deeply annoying, people found Vera Lynn annoying again. You think, ‘oh, We’ll Meet Again, we’re all…’ No, people were like, ‘I can’t stand her’. People hated the BBC; I’m doing research for the next book, and you discover that people were deeply unhappy – when there was a bombing raid and the BBC would say, ‘well, there were a few casualties, light casualties’, and people were going, ‘but my friend died in that. My mother died in that. My family died in that’ [Charlie: yeah]. Once people discover that there’s propaganda, they get really upset. So you look for those things that people assume and then look for the truth behind it. Then add magic [both chuckle].

Charlie: Yeah. I wanted to ask specifically if it’s okay about an element of Babes In The Wood. You have used – and I’m going to try and pronounce it correctly, Hannah Höch?

Mark: Hannah Höch, yes.

Charlie: Yeah, I’ve tried to pronounce it many times.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie: But you include her art and Hitler’s response to her Movement. And I just wanted to ask what was important about exploring that?

Mark: You’re asking me about a book I wrote so many years ago [Charlie: that’s very true]. So I saw her work on a documentary, and I thought it was extraordinarily modern. And I love that it was a woman in Nazi Germany doing this in defiance of what was going on. And it was incredible art, and it foreshadowed the war and the industrial revolution that would come after it as well. It was new to me, so I figured it’s going to be new to some of the readers and surprising. When you’re an author, your radar is always on. You can never have a normal conversation with an author because there’s a little bit at the back of their brain going ‘hmm, hmm, I’m going to steal that.’ [Charlie: Yeah, yeah.] You’re always looking for little things. So I remember seeing that on a documentary and doing some research into her work. If I recall, she was gay. So anything – and particularly the Germans as well; I grew up watching war films in the 1980s, where the Germans were always the blank-faced bad guys to be mown down, and actually, there were a lot of people in Germany who were anti-war, anti-Nazi, who were defiant, who usually had to flee the country, had their art destroyed or whatever, or went to America and made movies, and Marlene Dietrich and people like that – so just to give a bit of texture to it that might otherwise have not been there. So you’re always looking for little things like that. So her work, it’s not like I’d grown up admiring her all my life, I just thought, ‘that’s really fascinating. That’s interesting. I love her work, the collage kind of style’. It was just something that just seemed a rich scene for me. And when you’re a writer, you see anything like that, you think, ‘great, grab it with both hands’.

Charlie: Well, I did indeed look up the picture that doesn’t exist, and then got to the end of the book, [Mark: yes!] and you said, ‘don’t look for it, it doesn’t exist’.

Mark: Don’t look for it. Doesn’t exist. Yep.

Charlie: Yep! Already been there.

Mark: Yeah, I took a complete liberty there, yeah. But, you look at her style, and very often with artists, there will be early works that go missing or what have you, so I thought I could have some fun with that.

Charlie: Yep. I found it a theme – you’ve got, across the books, different ways that people deal with grief. You’ve got Faye’s visions and magical messages for her mum. Terence’s grief of Faye’s mum, his wife, is a bit more open but then there’s things he hasn’t talked about. We’ve got something with Bertie that’s in the fourth book that we find out then. Mrs Teach accidentally summoning a demon in book one – would it be right, do you think, to say it’s a theme, something you explore quite widely in the book? I mean, Crow Folk, the end of The Crow Folk, where Faye has that experience… that was very moving [chuckles]!

Mark: Oh, thank you. I’ve been very lucky, I’ve been largely untouched by death. I’ve had close friends die. But this is the war where people would go off and you’d never see them again. [Charlie: Yeah.] It’s very much something that a lot of people had to cope with, but also, it’s just been an obsession since I was a kid! I grew up in the eighties. Nuclear war was going to happen any minute now. You had records like 99 Balloons and Frankie goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes, and then you had Threads and The Day After, and I just lived in constant fear of being obliterated, so it became a bit of an obsession. I used to go to the local library and go to the science fiction fantasy section. Then I go to the war and military history section, and there were books on how to survive a nuclear war. And then you watch animations like When The Wind Blows, the Raymond Briggs thing. I’m dealing with my own issues there as well, which is probably why I’m using magic and such to dig into it. I don’t know; it’s also that tropey thing of the hero: very often the hero is either an orphan or they’ve lost a parent, one or the other. There’s often a piece of the puzzle missing in their life. They’re looking to fill a hole, a gap in their own psyche. You have to be an Old Testament god to your characters, you have to test them and make life horrible for them in order for them to dust themselves off and grow stronger. So, yeah, it’s definitely a factor. Absolutely. And as the books go on, it’s just gonna get worse! [Laughs.] Sorry.

Charlie: No, no. I mean, I think it works. Well, like the whole thing with book two becoming more serious without losing the comedy, it absolutely works.

Mark: Tone is difficult. It’s a balancing act – if you go too far one way or the other, it can get too dark or it can get too comedic and you’re doing a tightrope act as you balance the two. The thing is, people will always laugh in the most darkest, grimmest situations – I’m always wary of anything, any story that has no jokes in it, that there’s no humour in it. Even in the darkest places, people will find something to joke about, if only to alleviate their own tension. So it will always be part of the books. And I’ve got beta readers and editors who know my bad habits and my predilection for a dad joke [Charlie chuckles]. So they will say, ‘no, it’s too far’. So sometimes I’ll put it in and then take it out again just so I can scratch that itch and then move on. Getting the tone of this right was probably what took it so long – I, think those early versions, contemporary versions, had a necessarily darker tone than I think was right for the series. And like I say, by setting it in the war, by giving it that remove, elevated the tone, heightened the tone just that little bit where I could have a bit more fun with it. So by the time we get to book six, it gets a bit more serious but the humour will definitely still be there, don’t worry about that.

Charlie: Okay. All right. I will not ask about book six.

Mark: I’ve written one chapter of book six and I’m still not sure of that [Charlie laughs]. So, yeah, we’re a long way from finishing that.

Charlie: Yeah, no, absolutely. Will Miss Charlotte regain her sight?

Mark: Er no.

Charlie: I wondered.

Mark: I’m a big believer in that if you injure someone, they stay injured. If you kill someone, they should probably stay dead. I am a bit fed up of superheroes regaining limbs and coming back from the dead and that kind of thing [Charlie: yeah]. Otherwise, what are the stakes? So, no, she’s lost that eye. And I think that was why it was such a shocker, because, again, I didn’t know it was gonna happen. I thought, ‘oh, what if she lost an eye?’ I mean, suddenly that means your bad guy is serious. [Charlie: Yes.] Because she’s been kind of untouchable up to that point. And I made a point in the text of Faye going, ‘I thought she was going to be around forever. I thought she was invincible. And now she’s not’. And actually, in the next book, the eye patch, she carries it off with style. So we’re all going to be wearing eye patches next year after we see what Miss Charlotte gets up to, so yeah.

Charlie: I haven’t read the short stories, I have to say, but I wasn’t surprised when I found out about them because there is just so much to Miss Charlotte there. But yeah, no, that’s an interesting thing to contemplate because I was wondering if she would, and I was thinking along the long lines of what you said, that you have a lot of stuff where things have been fixed – I can’t think of an exact thing in my mind right now, but there are areas where magic has helped, definitely, because magic can be a deus ex machina almost [Mark: yeah, yeah], but then you’ve definitely got some moments that you have chosen not to use that magic. I sit here thinking, ‘oh, well, you’ve got a bit of Faye’s mother around’, but not really, I think, ‘oh, there’s a possibility she’ll come back. And then I’m thinking, no, that’s not going to happen, etcetera’. Yeah.

Mark: The thing is, what you’re constantly trying to do as an author is deliver a satisfying ending, which isn’t always the ending that people want.

Charlie: Yeah.

Mark: So I’m a big fan of central dramatic arguments with story. Craig Mazin, who wrote Chernobyl and The Last Of Us and all sorts of other stuff, he does a great talk on the Scriptnotes podcast about central dramatic arguments, the theme, and how it all ties into story, and it all goes back to Aristotle, and it completely blew my mind. I listened to it while I was working on the edits of The Crow Folk, and it changed the way I’ve written. And you want to deliver a story that’s satisfying but resolves that argument. And each book has its own argument. Each book asks its own question. By the end, you have to deliver something that’s satisfying but feels truthful. If you start bringing people back from the dead just because it would be nice to reward the character, I don’t think that’s truthful, I don’t think people are going to believe that. It’s like people say they want cake and custard or jam roly poly, but if you keep feeding it to them, they’re just going to be sick. You’ve got to give them their greens every now and then [laughs]. I mean it’s how characters evolve – you knock them down and they get up again, they dust themselves off and they’re a little bit stronger. And Faye, with each book, and most of the lead characters in each book, have had to grow up a bit and become a bit tougher and stronger, to the point where they’re going to defeat the Nazi war machine, which in 1939 seemed impossibly overwhelming. It went through Europe, like a hot knife through butter. We missed out an invasion by a series of flukes, frankly. If there wasn’t the channel between us, we’d have been occupied, too. I mean, in The Holly King, Dunkirk is mentioned a lot, and it was a terrifying time. Those men who were sent there completely poorly prepared and sent running, it was really, really, really tricky. So you’ve now got the build up over the next few years to the point where they can be strong enough to take the terrible decisions and do the terrible things they need to do. Okay, so, I don’t want to say too much, but book six, the thematic question is, to fight evil do you have to fight evil with evil? This is the old pacifist’s question. People, Faye, especially, are going to be doing a lot of growing up in that one. So how do you defeat something that is so evil without becoming evil yourself? You’ve got to do this to your characters; you can’t just let them off the hook with a bit of magic at the end. The magic is like any other tool. There has to be consequences, and it can’t just be a wave of magic wand and everything goes back to normal… JK Rowling [pointed cough]. Sorry. [Both laugh.]

Charlie: Yeah. So… well, all right, so we’ve got book five, The Corn Bride, I have written down. Has book six with its first chapter, is there a working title there?

Mark: There is, but I’m not going to say what it is.

Charlie: Okay.

Mark: Yeah, I’m gonna. Yeah. Yeah. [Both laugh.]

Charlie: All right. So there was one thing I wanted to ask – I said I hadn’t noticed this, the words or the name you said about the librarian – but something I did think… and I think I’ve got it right, I had my ebook. I was looking through it. I couldn’t quite find it. Am I right in thinking from what I’ve researched and putting it together from what I’ve read in your book, you’ve got real people in your book in a way, I think you’ve got an… Andrew Bowden?… as the flight–

Mark: Wow.

Charlie: … I want to say the flight captain…

Mark: You’re good. You’re good!

Charlie: Thank you! [Mark laughs.] And you have got Miss Burgess, which I wondered if that was a nod to your wife as well?

Mark: God, yeah, you’ve done your research. Well, Andy, is an old friend, old colleague from Orion days, and he does the cover art, designs the cover art for the short stories that I do. And, yeah, he’s helped me – I’ve taken Harry’s artwork, and he’s animated it. So Andy’s done that as well, he’s a bit of a magician. When you’re going through the books and you need to name the odd incidental character, I thought, ‘oh, he’d love that’. And weirdly, he’s a pilot of… I’m going to forget the name of the aircraft now, but it’s like a Spitfire with a little dome in the back. What’s it called? A Paul… a Paul Bolton [Charlie: yes!] and it’s got this little dome and… yeah, yeah, yeah. And funnily enough, Andy’s been making an air-fix version of one of those because I name-checked him in the book. And I do check with him first, I say, ‘are you gonna be okay with this?’ And he’s like, ‘yeah!’ And yes, Miss Burgess is clearly some descendant of my wife. Yeah, there are a couple of others in there as well. There’s also a load of prog rock references, too, that no one ever seems to pick up on either. They’re quite obscure. So lots of Pink Floyd and Moody Blues. A couple of Beatles things, too. Yeah, so it’s just one of those things when you’re scrabbling around for a name and you want something that might be fun, you can dip those in there. But, yeah. Well spotted. I’m impressed. Good work [chuckles].

Charlie: Well, I’m a fan of Peter Gabriel, but I don’t know much about, like, Genesis or anything, so that isn’t something I would have picked up on. But, no, that’s interesting. Might have to go through at some point and find those.

Mark: Babes In The Wood, Babes In The Wood – loads of Moody Blues references; my dad was a big fan. Yeah. So if you’re a fan of that band, go check that out. I’ve had a couple of people notice things about that. But again, it’s just a nerdy thing.

Charlie: All right, so something I saw in research, and you’ve said here, you went to the library a lot as a kid, you were reading about military history. So there’s a lot of you in these books in that way. But obviously, as I’m focusing on different people, is there any of you, particularly, within the village?

Mark: I guess the closest to me is probably Terence and a little bit of Bertie as well, I think. I’m an old romantic like Bertie. If I’d been around in the war, I would have been collecting shrapnel and looking at the dogfights above and getting very excited about that. But, no, there isn’t. I mean, for the fantasy books, alright, like The End Of Magic and The End Of Dragons, there’s a character in that called Sander Bree, who is basically a much grumpier version of me [Charlie chuckles]. That’s me on a bad day. And he’s such a doddle to write because I just [laughs] get all my venom down on the cynicism down on the page. And there’s something I’m working on at the moment as well, just tinkering with, which would be a science fiction idea, which would be like, me in space, getting very grumpy. [Charlie: Right!] But there’s no direct analogy. I like the idea of the community; I think that’s what’s important about the Woodville books, is very often thematically… talking about central dramatic arguments, so I think it’s Ghost Of Ivy Barn, the simple question is, are you better off working on your own or working with others? Which works out very well for some people, working on their own, but working with the community tends to be the greater thing, and that’s the challenge that Faye faces and the other witches – trying to bring all these witches together is like herding cats. Poor Bellamy, who is trying to get all these women who are used to working on their own and doing their own thing, their own way, and then trying to get them to work together. And that was very much what people had to do during the war, was, ‘well, we’re going to have to pull together and make sacrifices’. I think the idea of community, particularly as we’ve… you know, not to get too political, we’ve just endured 14 years of a Tory government that celebrates the individual and has been dismantling – closing libraries, dismantling community centres, revelling in the number of food banks they’ve created [Charlie agrees]. It’s like, bloody hell. Cameron talked about the big society, but he never understood it, he never understood what it actually meant. So you’ve had this dismantling of all these great institutions that did bring people together. I guess that’s the big nostalgia thing for me – a community that actually did that. And I say that as a writer who stays inside most of the day and barely engages with other people, whereas my wife is a gardener, she’ll go out and meet people every day and is very community minded, which I love and admire. It’s something – without becoming too much of a grouch [puts on an ‘in my day’ voice], ‘it’s something that’s missing from today!’ People are closing pubs left, right and centre, which is why it’s important to have a pub in the centre of the village, because it was that community hub [Charlie: yeah] – you would go to church, you would go to the pub. I mean, I’m an atheist, I’m not religious at all, but I appreciate there is something to be said for a place where people gather on a weekly basis [Charlie: yeah] and meet and say hello and gossip and do all those other things that groups do. Churches, attendances, is dwindling; they’re closing churches down. What do we lose when we lose that? Which is, as a die hard atheist, is a tough question. So, yeah, that theme of community, that idea of community, runs through the books in a very, very big way. Because I also think the war was the last gasp of that idea of people all agreeing on something. But again, book six, I’m going to challenge that a bit. This is good. This is good. Talking to you is inspiring me to actually get off my arse and make a start on book six, do it properly [both chuckle].

Charlie: Given what you said, then I am really interested to find out what you’re going to do about St Irene’s having fallen apart.

Mark: [Laughs.] Yeah, you’re gonna have to find out. Yeah. Yeah, and The Corn Bride, well, the title suggests there might be a wedding on the horizon, but what happens when your church has lost its bell tower? So, you have to wait and see [laughs].

Charlie: Community and people, not buildings.

Mark: Yes. Yes.

Charlie: Okay. Yes. Yes, definitely. So then, okay, we have talked about The Corn Bride quite extensively, and we’ve talked about how many you’re going to write, etcetera, etcetera. So I think I’m actually going to ask more about The Bestseller Experiment, because that’s how I know you. So, yes, you got to doing The Bestseller Experiment, and it was the Best Books Podcast at the 2023 Independent Podcast Awards for good reason, I think. [Mark: Oh, thank you.] There are a great many episodes. There’s like, well, it’s 500 now, isn’t it?

Mark: 500 now, yeah, yeah.

Charlie: Yeah. I know that you’ve moved on from it to focus on your other work, but can you tell us about your favourite interviews from doing it? If you can pick three, I suppose, if that makes it easier.

Mark: Gosh! Yeah… it was so much fun. It was such a great privilege to speak to authors and have proper, long conversations with them. And I learned so much about being a writer from that podcast; it changed me for the better, I think. It was a real privilege to do it and enjoy it. And I’ve got bookshelves two deep of people who listened to the podcast and got published, self published, won awards, all sorts of stuff. So, yes, if, you’re listening to this and you’re a writer, do check it out because there’s hundreds of hours of free advice from people like Ben Aaronovitch and Sarah Pembroke and Joe Abercrombie and Joanne Harris, Lynwood Barclay – major bestselling authors. Michael Connelly’s on there as well. I remember doing Sean Connery impressions with Ian Rankin while he was signing books and I think he’d been to the pub. He was quite relaxed and cheerful [laughs], so that was fun. But I think, the Ben Aaronovitch episode has been voted the listener’s favourite because it’s called the Ben Aaronovitch Bollocking. Because – for those of you who don’t know – the first year of the podcast, my co-presenter and myself, Mark Devereux, challenged ourselves to write a book in twelve months and get up the Kindle charts, self publish it and get up the Kindle charts. And we challenged our listeners to beat us to it. But we were about halfway through the year and we’d written an extensive outline but hadn’t really made a start, and Ben gave us a proper bollocking [Charlie chuckles] and that was quite a wake up call because I know that he went to lunch with the Gollancz gang afterwards and probably said, ‘have you heard what these clowns are up to?’ It made me buck my ideas up and just get on with it. So I’ll always be grateful to Ben for that public humiliation! I’ve made friends from these as well, authors like Julian Barr and Caimh McDonnell and Ian Sainsbury. These are, people who read my stuff, I read their stuff – that I shall be eternally grateful for. And then just seeing authors blossom and do their own thing and become guests on the show. Those have been the most important ones. It’s not necessarily the big famous names because they’re fun to talk to and you learn something from them, but very often it was those authors who were one or two books into a career that you learned the most from, because they are at that tipping point from, ‘oh, this is just a fun hobby’, into, ‘okay, this is serious. I either go all in or I back out at this point’. Because publishing can be quite disillusioning once the reality kicks in of how you’re not necessarily going to get that massive marketing campaign or that big tour, or that they might not even give you the title and cover that you want. You realise that you are kind of working at the behest of the publishers who, most of the time do a really good job and know best, sometimes they don’t. And then you’ve got people who self publish, and there are those who make an absolute mint doing it, and there are those who really struggle with it. So, yeah, the people who are like two or three books into it, who aren’t necessarily the big names, those are the really interesting ones because they’re at a crossroads and they’re deciding if this is a career or just something they can tick off as a dream come true. It’s tough. It is tough.

Charlie: Well, obviously, listeners, there is a link to The Bestseller Experiment. I expect everyone who listens to this podcast has listened to The Bestseller Experiment because it’s massive, but if you haven’t, go over and listen to some of them. As said, Mark isn’t on the team any more, but he was for, many, many, many episodes.

Mark: But, I mean, it was very friendly; Mr D’s still doing it. But after seven years, I’d done everything I wanted to do. I handed him my notice before we won the award – some people said, ‘oh, you won an award? And then buggered off!’ [Charlie laughs.] I was like, ‘well, actually, no. I gave Mark three months notice so he could sort everything out.’ And then we won the award – I was kind of like, ‘oh, God, should I stay or should I go?’ But I went. I just had so much on. I knew this year I was going to be working on a lot of stuff. I was finishing off The Corn Bride, I was working on The End Of Dragons, which is the sequel to The End of Magic, I’ve got three film TV projects kind of on the go, I’m writing a thriller, co-writing a thriller with another author. So I just did not… I don’t have to tell you this, Charlie – the podcast is a lot of work [Charlie: yup]. You’re a talent booker, you’re doing research, you’re reading books, you’re interviewing people, you’re editing them, you’re doing the social media. It’s a lot of work. And it was taking up about half my working week [Charlie: yeah], which I needed back in order to get this stuff done. So, yeah, I’m immensely proud of it. It was great working with Mr D all those years, and I’m glad it’s still going, and it’s a force for good out there. But, yeah, it’s time to move on.

Charlie: You can always be a bona fide guest, I suppose [Mark: yes!]. I know you’ve been a ‘guest’, in quotes, before, but, yeah, there’s always you being a proper guest, as such, as well, which would be good.

Mark: Yes, it’s true.

Charlie: So there’s quite a few things that you’ve listed there then. So I’m gonna have to be selective, I think [Mark chuckles]. So, first, have you got a rough date for The Corn Bride being published?

Mark: Spring next year, I think.

Charlie: Spring 2025, yep.

Mark: Without giving too much away, it’s a May Day book. So I would hope it would be around May Day. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? So, yeah, we’ll see.

Charlie: May I ask more about this film product that you’re working on?

Mark: There are a few. There’s a few things bouncing around. There’s a rom-com I’ve been working on with the author Rowan Coleman for about four years now, which started as a lockdown lark. And again, it’s not been announced, so I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s a rom-com with musical elements to it, very different to anything I’ve written before [Charlie: yeah!]. Actually it has a bit more in common with maybe some of the plays I wrote early on and a bit like Back To Reality as well. But it’s huge fun, really, really huge fun. It’s a proper, feel good movie set in the current day, but still has magical elements to it. And the script went to Cannes this year and we’ve had some very strong interest from people who get things made. So we’re doing frantic polishes on that at the moment before we send the script off to all these producers. So, yeah, can’t say any more than that. And I know enough about the film industry to know that you can be there the day before shooting and it can fall apart horribly [Charlie: yeah] so I’m not saying any more than that. There’s a horror project that’s just gone off to a producer – low budget horror, a bit more along the lines of Unwelcome, which was the film that came out last year. And there’s a YA TV series; we’re having a reading tomorrow, in fact, with some young actors. Because again, we’re talking about this language thing [Charlie: yeah] where I’m using ‘sod’ and ‘bugger’, and so we’re getting some young actors to read it to hear what it sounds like from them. And they can say, ‘no, we wouldn’t say that, we’d say this, this is wrong, blah blah blah’. And there’s a TV show coming out later this year called Nautilus, which was my idea, but I’m not a writer on it. I have a strange credit which is, ‘based on a pitch by Mark Stay’ [Charlie laughs]. That’s going to be coming later this year; I’m not exactly sure when but I’m assured it’s coming Q3/Q4 2024, so keep an eye out for that. That’s about the young Captain Nemo and looks fantastic. But yeah.

Charlie: Gosh. Plenty to keep track of then.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can see why I had to quit the podcast! It’s quite full on.

Charlie: Yes, I absolutely can. Yeah, yeah. No, I struggle sometimes and I haven’t got anywhere near as much as that on, so yeah, [Mark: yeah]. I certainly haven’t got any films coming out or anything [Mark chuckles]. Yeah, Mark, this has been fantastic having you [Mark: it’s been great] and I am looking forward to where this series is going to go, yeah!

Mark: Thank you very much, Charlie, and I appreciate you doing all that research and reading and looking into it! It’s been really, really good fun. Really good fun. Thank you.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I do hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time, and if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Alternatively, you can leave comments on YouTube and Spotify. Thank you! The Worm Hole Podcast episode 108 was recorded on the 19th June and published on the 28th October 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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