I have known Sarah for around six years now, and in that time she has been a constant friendly face upon the convention scene and one of the hardest working young authors around in the North-East of England. Fresh from the Morpeth Book Festival 2022, she took some time to answer our questions.
Something Wicked Comes This Way - When did you know you wanted to be an author? Sarah Elliot - When I was in my mid twenties, prior to that I had always wanted to focus mainly on being a play write or a script writer for TV and movies. I wrote stories for fun, as a little distraction from the world with no real plans to do anything with them. Other than possibly turn them into a pilot episode or a radio drama. Plus when I did my writing course at university, I was always better with the script areas and got my highest marks in them, my novel and short stories got passing grades but were my lowest marks. Even my poetry beat them and quite frankly, I am absolutely horrendous at poetry.
Plus I did have plays performed down in Swansea which was one of the coolest things, but then real life hit and I lost a little of my confidence with scriptwriting due to rejections and not being able to really get into the theatre scene back home. It’s something that I plan to change within the next year, even downloaded a program to fully format the scripts as well so that’s good.
But the point where I decided to be an author really came about when I went to a convention in Sunderland who had an Guest Author speaking and she was talking about her process to become an author and it just clicked with me. I think at that point I decided that I had more than enough writing pieces at home that I could try to get sent off, ignoring my two friends who had badgered me for years to send something off, and after checking through a bunch of my finished works I opted to give it a go. The rest, as they say, is history.
SW - What has your life been like so far? SE - I’m a north east girl born and bread, though I have lived in Swansea for a year and then did four months out in the states in 2009. I’ve always been a bit of a wild explorer, quite happily going off to different places around the country and world by myself and with others. I didn’t quite have a plan for life for a while, as I was trying to find where I really wanted to be but now I’m firmly on the right path and enjoying life to the fullest.
SW - Where are you from and where are you now? SE - I was born in Gateshead and lived in the surrounding areas for a few years before moving up to Cramlington when I was about four and I’ve pretty much been there ever since. Excluding my offskies to Swansea and America of course.
Now I live between my parents house and my workplace in Hexham, where I live onsite which is an fun experience most of the time. I say most because there are times when working and living with the same people is enough to make you want to pull your hair out and I’m usually very happy to go home, play with the family dog – a rottweiler called Petal – and get a little escape. But this only happens when I know I’ve got a few days off together as it’s a bit of a hike to do too regularly.
SW - What other jobs have you had? SE - First ever job was working on a call centre when I was sixteen for Orange which was an eye opening experience but it got me through college and my first university degree quite nicely.
Then I did retail jobs in various clothes shops for a couple of years before going and doing the Camp America Program and working in Florida for six weeks in 09, during the summer, in the hottest possible weather and with tropical storms and black bears visiting the site. I had an absolute amazing time with it, even if it was exhausting at times and then I did six weeks travelling up the east coast before flying back home.
Once I was back, I ended up getting an temporary teaching job before moving on to being an Administrator in a Care Home for around ten years. I swapped homes and roles a couple of times.
Then in May 21, I said goodbye to all of that and started as an Apprentice Outdoor Activity Instructor up in Hexham and I absolutely love it. I jokingly say it’s my midlife crisis as I’m the oldest apprentice by far on the team, as well as one of the older members of the entire working staff bar a few. It is a lot of hard work, very physical and dealing with kids all day can be so draining but it’s really rewarding and for the first time I have long term career goals and aspirations and I just absolutely love it. I really should have realised back in 09 that this was the industry that I wanted to go into but I’m glad to have found it now.
I still write, but have to schedule it to my days off. Which can be a pain but it’s nice to come to the keyboard with fresh ideas and an good excuse to just take it easy and write.
SW - Tell us about your personal favourite novel of yours. Brag a little. SE - Oh don’t make me pick one. All my novels are my babies and I’m so proud of myself for having been able to actually get them done and published. It’s still somewhat of an odd thing to be actually saying that I’m a published author, especially when people turn and look as if to ask ‘what are you doing here then?’ but it’s also quite fun.
If I have to absolutely pick…..gah! I can’t. Each one has a different thing for me, it’s like trying to pick which one is your favourite child when you love them all.
SW - Does writing energize or exhaust you? SE - It varies for me.
Mainly due to my work schedules these days but I try not to write when I’m exhausted or not in the mood because it really just does not work that well for me. Plus, being dyslexic means that I can normally only focus for a brief amount of time on a project before I become distracted or want to do something else.
I usually try to manage myself so that I have a few projects on the go, as it helps me focus – don’t ask why but it does – or I’ll have something completely different for the points where I just want to stop writing. But I try to set myself word goals, currently saying ‘I’ll just write five hundred words’ to myself gets my really in the groove and if I’m not feeling it, I don’t write because I’ll just end up rewriting it cause it will not be good.
Plus with only getting limited time to write, I find that all my ideas are usually just waiting and ready to pounce at the page the first chance I get so that helps. On a long weekend break a weeks ago, I managed to write 11k words in two days but this was spread out over at least four different projects and I was doodling in my colouring books as well.
SW - What are common traps for aspiring writers? SE - Thinking that they have to get everything perfect on the first draft. No. Stop, the first draft is meant to be the thing that you edit all the plot holes out of, or dig through to find where that character decided to disappear to or to have the worst grammar and descriptions. The number of times I’ve heard people say, I write a chapter and then go back to edit it and make sure it’s fine.
Every time I correct them and say, the first draft never goes to publication (usually) and it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect because that’s what the editing stages are for. The first draft should purely be the roughest draft for the story but it’s got to be the story. I always say, write the first draft until it’s done. Don’t go back to the start or change anything drastically unless you’re not one hundred per cent certain that little Toby got eaten by Grandma hicks and need to check back or you’ve forgotten what the quest item the characters were supposed to be going to find.
Annoyingly however, for me, I have the ‘trap’ problem of not really setting out a definite plan for my stories as every time I try to follow the pre-planned plot, by the time I’m at bullet point three it’s a guarantee that my characters have lost the original thing that they were going for and have wandered off to find a baby dragon that they are going to adopt.
Which is very much the case of what happened with the fantasy epic that was supposed to be a short story….I’ll talk about that later.
SW - What is your writing Kryptonite? SE - Science fiction – I adore science fiction and have done since I was a kid, and I’ve always wanted to write it but every time I try I get stuck. I can never really decide on an style, how the robots work, where the tech comes from and how to explain it all without getting everyone bogged down in reems of details and descriptions. Which is annoying because I get really fascinated by science fiction and how it explains itself but I just can’t seem to find a way to express it myself with it.
That being said, I did take on the cyberpunk world with a friend for one of my newer projects but we had a very clear idea of what was going on with it and what we wanted stylistically as we’re both big geeks so that was easier.
It’s something I do intend to keep on trying with, or it may just be a case that I fit in more with the cyberpunk and steampunk styles better but who knows.
SW - Have you ever gotten reader’s block? SE - Yep.
It’s only been over the last year or so that I’ve been able to really get myself out of it. My main reason for a long while was when I was doing the editing for the Volf Trilogy and I could not switch off my inner editor in the slightest. Which was really annoying because there were a lot of books out there that appealed but I just couldn’t quite switch off.
Then I just fell out of the habit and didn’t even really read any of the books that I had because I was working and went through a spell of not being very happy with myself and it took a while to get back into things. Thankfully I did keep up with Audible, as audio books, radio plays, radio comedies and the likes are something that I adore and it can be great just listening to someone reading you a story, letting your imagination run wild whilst your sitting doing a cross stitch.
I’ve started buying books again and actually reading them, or listening via audible when I’m too tired to really focus on picking up a book, and I review them on my Instagram account because I’m like, I’m an author, I’m like reading and I think you should try this took.
SW – On the convention scene you are known to have a little mascot on your table who gets in lots of photographs. Tell us about him. SE - Ah, you’re asking about Mini Ace.
When I first started trading at conventions, I was already aware that there was long downtime periods for traders and that things could get a little bit on the tedious side as I had attended a few events prior and knew the basics. Plus I had talked to a couple of traders and they had given me some advice. So on a whim, I decided that I’d be my little crazy self and take a plushi along with me, initially just to get photographs of the people who bought my books to document it because I thought that I would only do a couple of events and then stop.
Which quickly spiralled into more and I started spotting cosplays that I wanted to get photographs of but I couldn’t keep on leaving my table all the time so I opted instead to ask people to take photographs with Mini Ace and then started uploading them after the events to my Facebook accounts with tags for the event and letting people tag themselves in it. When I was putting up the photos after the second or third event when I started doing this, I decided that I was going to give Mini Ace a little personality and make it so it was more like it was him getting the photos taken and commenting on the cosplayers. It also gave me an excuse to write a comment which didn’t really identify the cosplay if I happened to have no idea what it was from but still liked it, because it was Mini Ace, an alpaca plushi talking to cosplayers and it quickly became a fun known thing around a lot of cons.
I still have Mini Ace and he still loves getting photos taken, I’ve just gotten in the bad habit of not having enough time to do all the little comments on the photos but my events have been limited over the last couple of years. However I will get them back up and running as now, Mini Ace has a little brother called Wolf Chan – who is a Skzoo Wolf Plush for all you Kpop fans out there – who comes along to events with me and his big brother, he also has an Instagram account which Mini Ace pops up on occasionally. I did fully intend to get Mini Ace an Instagram but did not really know what to do with him outside of conventions, however now that I’ve discovered that there’s a plushi life tag and a bunch of other crazy plushi toys out there, I will be setting something up later in the year properly for him.
SW - Did you ever consider writing under a pseudonym? SE - Yes, I did actually. But it was for a more science fiction theme of writing, which I have yet to properly take up. It was going to be S.E.Tyne which my Dad came up with because obviously it covers my actual initials and then the river from where I came from which is mega cool but when I published my books it just didn’t feel right so I kept my normal everyday name.
I’ve had comments saying that my name sounds like an author name, which is strange but it’s working so I can’t really complain too much.
SW - What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? SE - There are so many that I could name right now and many more that I will probably forget – kick me next time if I do miss you off the list – but here are a few that spring to mind.
A.S. Chambers – an really fun chap who has always had a way of making me buy dragons and the weird little ornaments on his stall and always is a good laugh at conventions, especially when we’re trading close by.
Jae Malone – a children’s writer who runs workshops and has more plushi’s on her stall than me but they’re all characters from her books and it’s just the cutest thing ever.
Kelvin – a great trading friend and the infamous yelling of ‘She’s thirty!” at a Sci-Fair will never be forgotten in the slightest as the entire room learnt how old I was at the time. The good fun of looking ten years younger.
Jessica Cale – one of my university American friends who I keep in sporadic contact with over the strangest gothic things and who one day will come over and visit all the castles that I live close to because she’s an absolute history nerd.
KC Cloesener – my Instagram author friend who I met randomly and love having chats with. We don’t get to chat that often these days but I still like seeing her stuff and posting replies. She also checked in with me at one point when I was going through a low point and that cheered me up no end.
Nick James Stead – we met at a convention and had a great wolf banter back and forth because we both write about werewolves in different contexts and literally kept on bouncing people back and forth between us if they were interested in the genre.
Dacre Stoker – yes the great-grand-nephew of the father of gothic horror, I met Dacre at an Scottish Horror Event with five other guests for which two people turned up for. However we made the most of it and did the event as if we had an audience of two hundred and it was great fun.
Mark Iveson – met at an convention in Gateshead where we were placing bets on how long it would take for the chips to be served, as we were right next to them and it was boiling hot. He writes none fiction about hammer horror stars which got us talking and we’ve kept regular contact since.
I’ve met most of my author friends at conventions, they’re a really good scene to get meeting people and I’ve missed a load off the list I am very much aware but there’s so many that I keep forgetting.
SW - What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? SE - This one is really hard because I’m not usually picky about reading other authors work. I normally go for characters and stories over style, though naturally I do have preferences but if I don’t feel the connection to anything I won’t read.
Like Sir Terry Pratchett, I love the Witches series in the Discworld and will happily reread them but I couldn’t stand the initial stories of the Guards series because Carrot annoyed me to high hell but I enjoyed the later stories.
SW - What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? SE - Another though one to answer actually, I can’t actually think of an moment where I really learnt it. I always kind of grew up knowing that it did, but can’t exactly pinpoint where I picked it up from. I learnt early on that my words had power, because even though I was dyslexic I could explain things to my classmates that they weren’t getting or understanding which saved me from getting a lot of hassle as a kid because whilst I was the odd ball one, who was friends with someone who was very different from what the popular people wanted, I wouldn’t give my help to those who were mean and nasty to me.
SW - What’s your favourite under-appreciated novel? SE - Probably Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale
It’s harrowing, harsh and brutal as hell and does not let up from the first page till the last and whilst most dismiss is as just being ‘a new version of Lord of the Flies’, I find that it’s a story which contains multiple different layers that you pick up at different points in your life. I saw the Takeshi Kitano movie first when I was about eighteen and fell in love with it, but then got a copy of the book and was even more blown away. It took me a lot of read it at first, as I was essentially the same age as most of the characters and that freaked me out something rotten but when I was a little older and reread it, I was amazed by the impact that it had on me.
It is not one for the faint hearted and the opening chapters is pretty vile in every sense of the word and literally throws the reader straight into the actual horror of what they’re being forced to do but also deals with the emotional and psychological manipulation that comes with it. Because the characters are literally thrown into a situation where they’re told ‘you have to kill everyone else and be the last survivor or else everyone dies’. It struck a cord with me, as did the amazing 1984 by George Orwell when I read that and whilst it’s been an long while since I’ve read it, Battle Royale remains a staple on my bookshelf and will be reread.
My only advice is make sure that you get a good translation of it, as I got one of the better ones, as the author has a habit of putting little odd funny asides in that if you’re into anime/manga you’ll understand but is sometimes lost with those who don’t know. I’d recommend the red cover with the silhouettes of two students on the front, that was the translation I got and it’s a pretty good damn on. Though like I said, it’s not an easy read and deals with a lot of taboo stuff so be careful going in.
SW - As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? SE - Wolf.
I’ve always connected with dogs since an very early age and I have always been fascinated by wolves, because they are such majestic and beautiful creatures.
Alternatively I would probably go with a dragon because I absolutely adore dragons and have done since I was a kid. There’s something so fascinating about the mythical creatures that turn up in every culture spanning the whole of human existence that is really amazing and I just love the whole concept of them. Sometimes I’m picky about the designs of dragons but that’s just a personal preference and I would love to have more stories where the dragon isn’t just some huge beast that needs to be killed but maybe one day I’ll write something more with them.
SW - How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? SE - Erm…for what I know I’m going to actually publish, there’s a fifteen book mini series which I’m trying my best to get sorted at the moment and the fantasy epic as well, but that I’ve promised myself I was doing nothing with until I had book six started as I planned it out and – currently – the main story has a planned ten volumes, then there’s two side stories off which could be a single novel or more and sequels planned as well. Thankfully I’m only onto book five of that, and keep hitting little road blocks but I think it’s cause my brain is just a bit distracted for now.
Then there’s the wolf project, which I’m still partially world building for whilst writing a bunch of shorter stories for each pack that has at least six books sort of done but I need to sort them out into the correct lore and put them all together so that project doesn’t yet count but sort of does.
As for stuff I’m never going to publish, there’s at least three NaNoWriMo’s that I know I managed to get some headway with and another project that is actually written in full but I keep on faffing with because I don’t know if it would work or not so I just keep trying to rewrite but then get stuck and just ugh, it’s a bit of a nightmare.
Yeah, I need to get some of this sorted at some point.
SW - What does literary success look like to you? SE - Having people coming back to my stall to ask if I have something new coming out or when the next one is going to be published. There’s no better feeling than that moment when someone comes up and looks at you with those imploring eyes or you’re trying to sell your work to someone new and a fan comes up and says’ read them, they’re so good. It fills me with such warmth and joy that I can barely react other than to smile so brightly.
Yes, it would be nice to be able to live off my writing, but I don’t think I’ll ever quite beat the feeling of someone wanting more of my work. Makes me so happy.
SW - What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book? SE - I tend to do more passive research, rather than active these days because between balancing work, a social life and not being knackered on my days off, it’s a lot to manage. Thankfully because I’m writing about fantastical creatures, mostly, I get to spend time researching by reading/listening to fantasy books, watching fantasy films and very occasionally playing a good old game of Dungeon’s and Dragons which helps me to find out the current trends and come up with some ideas for what I’m going to do.
Also, fanfiction helps a lot with finding out cannon, fanon and other interpretations of myths and legends. I find that fanfiction is a great way to explore different ideas and play around with new ideas in a receptive community. At least that’s been my experience.
I have started investing properly in some of my more recent research, getting books on vampires, werewolves and fray folk to get my head back into some classic eras and understandings because it all helps to shape the lore of a world that I am currently building.
SW - What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex? SE - Hmmm, probably trying to not make them too idealised or perfect. Cause I like my characters to have flaws and be unique from each other because I don’t want them to be all copy/paste. I have a personal bugbear when people just slightly alter the character a little and claim it’s different even though they’re the exact same and I’d rather have a diverse cast.
Even if one of my male characters needs to get punched more often than not because whilst I adore him, he’s a total douche bag at times.
SW - How do you select the names of your characters? SE - Sometimes they come with their own name and I just go with that.
If I can’t think of one or need something a little more meaningful, I use a baby name book which I’ve had for years – though it’s not the original one because I chucked it out when I went through a deep clean sort out and couldn’t remember why I had it – as it’s got a wide selection from a number of different languages and it has fun variations which can be great to look through.
Occasionally I’ll use an online name generator, mainly when I’m at work and I don’t have the book next to me, and my go to resource is Behindthename.com which has a whole bunch of names and a really great generator that lets you mix up and customise names really easily.
SW - Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones? SE - Yes I do read comments and I like seeing what people think about my work.
The bad ones, which are only a couple, annoyed me at first but I learnt to take them as they were because most of the time they were complaining about the grammar I was using. Which, yes I’ll admit isn’t the greatest at times but when I looked further into the ‘reviewer’ turned out they were some American with no real writing academic background and most of her other reviews were dismissive in some way about something other than the stories. Now I read over any reviews I get and just apricate them for what they are, as it’s impossible to please everyone and as long as they’re offering me some constructive criticism then I’ll take it on board.
It's easy to get bogged down on negative reviews but I learnt to take them for what they are and try not to let them get to me so much.
For the good and positive reviews, I always feel mega happy when I get them and I try to thank everyone who does give me those reviews because it is such a good feeling. But one piece of advice that I got given even before I was really focusing on my writing as a profession was, always be a fan. Remember what it was like to meet your heroes or your inspirations and pass that on. It’s a mantra I’ve stuck too and it helps to keep my happy and grounded.
SW - Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find? SE - Not usually, I sometimes have odd little references or nods to the things that inspired the story – in my first book A Simple Wish there is a TV show named in the book which was where the story originated from in the form of an fanfiction and other than occasional quirks or sayings there’s nothing really too obvious in the Volf trilogy either.
In the project I’m trying to get published at the moment, there is a whole lot of references and easter eggs to the inspiration behind it and it’s all there completely self aware as it was a deliberate pretext by myself and my co-creator. There’s also a fair few characters who are based off real people that I know and features my first self insert, though not the main character as many will think and my co-creator is also in there as well but I won’t reveal until people read it because it’ll be fun to see if anyone works it out.
SW - What was your hardest scene to write? SE - I really can’t think of any from recent times, as usually once I’m in the zone that’s pretty much it and I’ll write even when I’m crying or shivering with disgust at myself.
A few times, I’ve finished a passage and then got up, grabbed a cup of tea and then taken the dog for a long walk after writing some of my nastier sequences in either the horror genre or just generally my antagonists doing something completely terrible to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Actually, one of the wolf projects features a reverse of that scenario where I had the good characters getting to exact revenge on a bad character who completely deserved it…and yeah, I wrote all three point five thousand words of it in one go before heading out for an extra long dog walk.
From my published works, I remember getting stuck on the last choice I had for Cresta for a long while because she was a bad guy who deserved to be punished but also had a story that made sense so that took me a long time to figure out.
SW - Do you Google yourself? SE - Occasionally, but more just to see where people can find my books if they want to not use the big major ones and to check that they’re not on any download sites that they shouldn’t be. I don’t do it too often, though if I’m being featured in an event or a newspaper or something then I will try to find the document in order to save it.
SW - What is your favourite childhood book? SE - Anything by Roald Dahl, I loved his bizarre yet wholesome worlds and fantastical stories that always had a grounding in reality that just spoke to me. I adored the strangeness, the harrowing realism that he put in and as I got older and learnt more about him, the more I respect his stories and what he gave the world. Also, I always have fun when people are like the movie adaptions are so dark and I’m like, have you actually read the books because the films are not a patch on how dark those tails get.
I blame him for preferring my fantasy a bit more dark and twisted.
SW - What is the most difficult part of your artistic process? SE - Balancing my time and keeping myself going with the stories.
Whilst I’m pretty good at organising myself, I tend to go through spots where I procrastinate or loose interest in things and it takes a bit to get my back into them. Especially with some of the events over the last few years, I really lost a lot of my self confidence and it took a while to get back into the swing of things. But now I’m getting better and keeping on going which is good.
Still procrastinate a lot, need to get that poster which says ‘Like, mate, stop procrastinating’
SW - Does your family support your career as a writer? SE - Yup, my parents have always pushed me to do what I want to do and to take any chance that comes my way with open arms.
My Mam carried around her copies of my books with her everywhere for a while, though she has never read any of them. Though I am solely to blame for that because for years she was my beta-reader for my homework and university stuff, so she knows my writing style very well and says that if she found so much as a single mistake it would destroy her. I understand, as the last time I tried to do a reading from one of my books, I immediately wanted to start editing it but it’s only a testament to time and how I’ve changed as a writer in the time since writing that piece.
SW - How long on average does it take you to write a book? SE - I’d say eighteen months to two years, when it’s all condensed down and actually sorted into the initial idea, writing it up and then editing it. But it can vary massively.
SW - Do you believe in writer’s block? SE - Yes, I’ve had it where for about a year I did not write anything and it’s one of the reasons I like having different projects on the go at the same time because if I’m getting stuck on one of them, I can hop onto another and focus on that for a while to allow my brain to come up with some new ideas for the first project.
SW - What are you planning next? SE - My main focus is trying to get the cyberpunk mini series published at some point, but I’m working on other projects as well, most of which I’ve already talked about. My hope is to have at least something new published by the end of the year but we shall see how it goes.
As for conventions, my next one is in June in South Shields and then I’m booked in for Whitby Goth Weekend and Scarborough Unleashed in October and November respectively. I do have a couple others which I’m waiting to get confirmation for so keep an eye out on my social media.
SW - Thank you again for chatting with us.