Richard Harland

My latest book is Sassycat: The Night of the Dead.

It’s about the animals that guard us from ghosts! In Rebecca’s street, the animals form a team: Thaddeus the possum, Lorenzo the lizard, Darlene the cockatoo, the two dogs Bernie and Witzer, and of course Sassycat herself. As a cat, she has an instinct for the supernatural; and Rebecca’s street is close to an old cemetery, where the ghosts are stirring. Only Sassycat and the other animals can stop them emerging and taking over the world!

The best thing about being a writer is the fan mail. Better than glowing reviews or anything – just to hear that someone loved the book and couldn’t put it down!

If I wasn’t a writer I don’t know what I’d be, but I’d have loved to be a cartoonist. I used to draw cartoons all the time once, but somehow cartooning got squeezed out of my life.

My first published work was a pair of poems in a magazine called New Poetry. I called them ‘2nd September’ and ‘4th September’, because they described things that happened on those days. I never was very good with titles!

Morning person or night-owl? I’m mostly a morning person nowadays, because I start writing straight after breakfast. It’s the time of day when I feel most motivated. But I always used to be a night-owl, staying up to 2 or 3am, because that’s when I seemed to have most ideas. Even when I went to bed, I’d keep waking up with ideas I had to note down. Trouble was, I was too tired to turn the notes into actual writing in the morning!

My first job was delivering groceries in a van that went round all the outlying houses in the local area. First I had to pack the orders into big boxes, separated by sheets of newspaper; then re-pack them into smaller boxes; then re-pack them again into the trays we carried into the houses. I did all of that in the back of the van as we bounced up and down on bumpy roads.

On a quiz show, my special subject would be geography. I just love browsing over maps and atlases, so I know a lot about names and places. Not very useful, unless I ever get onto that quiz show!

My last holiday was a trip to India. Magical forts, beautiful temples, the noise and the bustle – I loved it. I like curry too, which helps!

My perfect Saturday is … Can I have a perfect Saturday that doesn’t include a good morning’s writing, because that’s what I do almost every Saturday. Last Saturday, though, I went hot-air ballooning–and that was perfect. Drifting over the countryside in the rays of early morning sunshine, skimming the treetops or shooting way up high …then a champagne breakfast to follow. I guess there are some things worth giving up a morning’s writing for.

The last CD I bought was Missy Higgins, The Sound of White.

I’m currently reading the story Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case, in Across the Wall by Garth Nix.

Big Brother or Australian Idol? I prefer Australian Idol any day. Probably because I used to be a muso, and played folk-rock songs around Sydney

Favourite film/tv show is South Park.

My favourite book is … hmm, at the moment, I guess I’d say the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud (The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem’s Eye, Ptolemy’s Gate). Ask me in a month’s time, and I’ll probably have a new favourite …

The book character I would most like to meet is Hagrid, from you-know-where.

The book character I would least like to meet is, well, a toss-up between the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and Lord Asriel in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. I’ve always had a thing about wolves, which started with a book of fairy tales long long ago. (I’m putting some sinister wolves into the book I’m writing right now.) Lord Asriel – well, what he did to Roger was the most monstrous, cold-blooded act in any book I’ve ever read.

The worst thing I’ve ever written were the words to one of my old folk-rock songs. I used to write my own lyrics and some of them were OK – no, better than OK, they were really good! But in this particular song, the words were so pretentious and pseudo-poetic, yurk! I’m embarrassed to even think about them. You wouldn’t want me to repeat them!

When I was growing up I wanted to be an inventor. I remember drawing up plans for a new kind of kerosene heater for warming up a house. I now realise that my heater wouldn’t just have warmed up the house, it would have exploded in a mass of flame and burned the house to the ground.

My heroes are
1) my grandfather, who won a medal for bravery in World War I, but would never say what he won it for, because he didn’t want us imagining that there was anything good about war
2) Andrew Johns of the Newcastle Knights. If anyone ever ought to have a big head, he ought – yet he hasn’t!
3) Ripley as played by Sigourney Weaver in Alien and the sequels. She’s my ideal of acting courageously because you have to.
4) Bruce Springsteen…always the Boss