Hello and welcome, Stuart. Thanks for taking the time to provide me with an interview. Let’s get to it, shall we? For starters, why don’t you share what inspires you to write?
Well, call me self-sufficient, but I was a loner as a child who simply wanted to be himself and live in a lighthouse. School didn’t inspire me but I was learning that:
- Teachers liked teaching kids to recite parrot fashion and that I was no parrot.
- Being different was frowned upon.
- Asking difficult questions was frowned upon to the point that it was likely to put you in front of the principle. (Yes I’m old enough to have been thrashed by a headmaster).
- Schools had rules and if you didn’t follow them out came the cane and in my case often!
But … there were some bright spots — our English teacher challenged students and welcomed new ideas and actively encouraged individuality and I liked that.
“The easy way is not the memorable way,” he would say and I carry that line to this day.
He would give us a title, for example: “The Tree,” and the bulk of the class would write short lyrical pieces about abundant apple trees in orchards or majestic oak trees beside deep, slow moving rural rivers etc. Whereas I would go and sit in the darkest corner of my father’s cellar and light a candle and find a way to twist the story line.
My stories were always longer than the rest of the class; full of brooding and horrific secrets — gnarled tree roots that ran deep under the house and lurked as if posed to strangle a human … beneath rooms full of creaking floors!
Nice…
So what was it that inspired you to write The Far Out Café?
I was living in a country that I had grown to dislike, with a woman I needed to leave … working in a job that I had begun to Loathe!
One day I simply thought to myself, Why am I doing this? Money? Ease?
The answer was a resounding “No!”
Because I realized that every single day my boss chipped away at me; that my wife had changed me to the point where I barely recognized myself (and certainly didn’t like being the man ‘she’ decided I would be) and in that one second, it was like my kind of epiphany — I knew that I need to be totally who I wanted to be. And I thought NO, I am not going to do this anymore. I’m not going to be the ‘me they like me to be.
That very night, I opened my laptop and sat for an exceptionally long time before I finally typed the words “The Far Out Café.” It’s actually the title of a painting I own of a real cafe by an incredibly talented young artist named, Sarah Raphael. Sadly, this artist died very young from pneumonia, yet the title really pleased me.
The next morning I thought a lot about ‘me’ and what life really means and what ‘truly’ matters in life and how we take so very many things for granted. I wondered what kind of hell you can put a man through before he finally stands up and shouts, “I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
I decided I wanted to salute a talented girl who had left us so young … and embrace the kind of happiness that money can never buy. I thought about how I wanted to bury a man so very deep in a horrible hell that he would never get out, and I was totally 100% determined I was going to write something solely for me — and a girl called Sarah.
I had written two unpublished novels, but I had had luck selling my first screenplay to the BBC when I was seventeen – It was called non-returnables and largely about a group of misfits being punished.
The first proper book I wrote was called The Dance of the Daemon Clowns; about a time traveling Soviet private detective named Nietsky who stumbles upon a wealth of secret biblical manuscripts that have been hidden by monks from before Christ, beneath Lindisfarne Abbey.
A literary agent loved the story, but thought I would be compared to Douglas Adams and didn’t see it in the positive. He recommended I move away from what I personally liked to write about and suggested I ask a close friend to give me a subject I knew very little about. My girlfriend at the time suggested ‘relationships!’ (Yeh. Yeh. Very Witty!!!!!!!) and so The Last Big Valley was spawned; a long rambling thing, all about a group of people in the wilds of Scotland who drop off the face of the known earth and create their own.
The literary agent loved the style of writing but thought that the story was not mainstream enough. Not mainstream enough. Hmm. Not mainstream is not me. My favorite quotes are, “Two paths diverged in a wood and I took the one less travelled and that made all the difference,” and “If they give you lined paper, don’t write on the lines.”
Simon and Shuster showed a lot of interest in the first Far Out draft and invited me for meetings in London before the UK management changed and reheated Barbara Cartland became their thing. A big-name London literary agent also took the first draft very seriously, but ultimately suggested I needed to ‘dumb’ the story down… I didn’t think ‘dumbing it down’ brought any reason to continue writing, plus, writing The Far Out Café solely for myself was becoming incredibly liberating.
That certainly makes sense. In, The Far Out Cafe are any of the key 
characters based on real people?
I think there’s a lot of me in Daniel. He has a deep-rooted sense of ‘self,’ of being who he wants to be — and fighting for the right to be exactly who you want to be is probably the hardest fight one will ever have in one’s life and that’s true to me. (Although Daniel is forced to fight a far deadlier enemy).
Daniel has been in hell and is trying to get out, and has no idea he is on the path to paradise. The character, Beth, on the other hand, was far harder to write because I wanted her to have already lived in paradise and had it taken away from her. If Daniel was lost, Beth was broken — and in writing her, I simply tried to put her back together again and pick out the very best traits in all the women I have ever known and give them all to her.
Beth has super human spirit and remarkable strength in her hidden ‘spiritual’ muscles and I can associate with this trait of hers. I personally have always believed in God’s divine spark, now scattered, was implanted in each one of us and has to be reunited with its source. So, I gave the main island the name, the Island of Christ and placed the island close to the Island of Insanity and the Island of Sanity and thought Which island you would row toward?
Wow. It definitely sounds like a lot of thought (and personal experience) went into the writing of The Far Out Cafe.
So, when you’re taking a break from your writing use, I’m presuming you enjoy reading — what would you say is your favorite book?
The Revenant because it’s such an incredible salute to the power of man and such an incredibly powerful story of revenge. (I hastily add I read it years after I wrote The Far Out Cafe…)
Fair enough! *chuckle*
Last question, is there a particular writing place you like best?
No, ideas come to me all over the place; in the oddest situations and in a multitude of settings. However, when I am most immersed in my thinking, or my writing, I can be literally anywhere: on a long train journey, on a boat, doing something manual like chopping logs or writing for myself (when I should be working), or I may simply lay in a boiling-hot bath for hours on end with a bottle of bourbon and relax heavily and think things through in a more warped / random way and then I write long into the night and almost always in the dark — and edit in the morning!
Stuart, thank you again for being featured today. I wish you the very best in all of your current, and future, endeavors. 🙂
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About the Author:
Black sheep, individual, rebel with a cause, Yorkshire man, award winning producer, director, writer, believer; human.
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