speaking with alex howard

​Thanks for talking about this wonderful read.
 
Please tell your readers how you got the idea for your book—which is how I think all great stories are generated.
 
With The Ghost Cat there was a key moment: it was when we let our cat, Tabitha, out of her carry box the day we moved into our current flat. We live in an Edwardian tenement in central Edinburgh and Tabitha immediately took exception to one room – the back room that overlooks the garden. She hissed and looked around as if seeing something. Maybe there’s a ghost cat here! I said to my wife jokingly.
That simmered in the back of my mind for the next month or so: if there was a ghost cat in the flat, I thought to myself, what would it have seen? when did it die? How many residents would it have seen pass through? I have always adored old houses and often wondered how I could tell their stories, but never quite known the way ‘in’ that was digestible, popular and compelling. I remember, when I was around 10, trying to tell the story of the house we lived in through a film made on an early iteration of Windows Movie Maker! I suppose Tabitha hissing simply inspired the framing around a desire to write a house’s story which had been simmering decades…
 
I believe The Ghost Cat is very similar to Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy in that it can be categorized as an adult story tale—defined as full of creative embellishments. How would you categorize this novel?
              
Cue the next entry on my TPR pile! I’ve never read Sipsworth, but already I can see that it’s a book after my own heart.
I think, you’re right. I’m very exorcised by C. S. Lewis’s famous quote: “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” I’ve always felt that books meant for kids are incredibly engaging – they have to be written with a concision and vibrance that adult fiction can get away with not having on the grounds of ‘being literary; similarly, ‘grown up’ books can be brimming with childish playfulness (we never truly escape our childhoods, after all). Charles Dickens is famously credited for always writing ‘with the eyes of a child’ – and haven’t his characters stood the test of time.
Ultimately, I have always written true to myself, rather than for any given market trend. As a result, books like The Ghost Cat are just me having fun; they’re the meeting place of several themes I find interesting but which are perhaps not considered compatible: footnotes, magic, history, humour, tragedy… thinking cats. I’ve always loved YA fiction and feel that, often, the unabashed innocence of their narrators has a purity that’s much more compelling to read. They’re opinionated; naïve; puffed-up; accident prone; starry-eyed… and all those things make them fun to be around.
But at the same time, I have a serious side: I have completed three degrees in English literature, so have read a fair few monographs! I love the stuffy majesty of an old archive and the pristine geometry of a Shakespearean quatrain. Equally, I have an obsession with British comedy and love performing.
Put all those things in a blender and I suppose you come out with something approximating my writing style! It doesn’t fit neatly into a given category (and it spooks the hell out of some editors!); but then the people who get it really get it, and that’s enough for me!
 
The blend of literary devices used must have been challenging. Using footnotes and summaries could--but don’t—disturb the readers’ narrative flow. Using footnotes also reminds me of another novel The Confederacy of Dunes. While John Kennedy used footnotes for a different literary value, your use of them to bring in greater historical detail was very creative. How did you come to use them? What gave you this idea? And how did you plan so that the notes did not disturb the narrative?
 
               Another book to add to my TBR pile! Loving these recommendations!
On the one hand, I think the choice to include footnotes stemmed from my desire to poke fun at the stuffiness of academia and take it down a peg or two. Going to an ancient university like the University of Edinburgh, you can really lose yourself in the ‘boffin cloud.’ You work among people who have never existed outside academia and it fascinates me how unworldly, arrogant and drunk on ideas people can become. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact my family background isn’t remotely academic, both parents having come from very working-class homes.  
So I love the idea of footnotes poking fun of that and of offering verification to a ‘fact’ which is self-evidently absurd. Writing a cat’s great because you and swerve between inhabiting their apparent aloofness one minute, and their goofiness the next; they’re the perfect vehicle to take modern academia down a peg or two, and boy does it need it.  
Equally, I like how a footnote brings verisimilitude – after all, I am telling the story of an actual flat on an actual street, that intersects with actual points in history, whether big or small. In a funny way, you’re recruiting history to do some of the storytelling for you – everyone knows where they were when they heard of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. These moments of realism help induct the reader into the  story.
 
Okay, I have to giggle here. You do the opposite of Blake Synder’s recommendation to “Save the Cat.” Our character, Grimalkin, dies at the very beginning. However, he is resurrected to continue with his remaining 8 lives. Any play on humor here with this idea?

Ah, now that is a book I HAVE heard of! And the save-the-cat technique is a fantastic one to live by.
If I did indeed subvert this notion, I can only claim to have done so subliminally! That said, I did enjoy the bite of having a lead character die at the outset. You get the emotional punch in there from the early pages – you’ve snared the reader with emotion. And telling a life both backwards (through our history), but forwards (through the cat’s history) was something that I felt was unusual and weirdly beguiling. 
I love Eilidh’s character. We would all wish to be owned by someone like her: “Her eyes permanently sparkled, as if she was always on the point of telling a joke, and their turquoise irises were so deep and kind one could tell, just by looking at them that their bearer could be trusted with your secrets.” 

You use Eilidh to point out a social perspective in the book. You also use other images to do this. Was this social comment one of the goals of the story?
 
Yes, definitely. I guess this goes back to my mum reading me loads of Dickens as a kid where there’s a social commentary lurking around every corner. We all love an underdog story, but with Eilidh I wanted this to have a twist; something that linked back to the main narrative. Having the charwoman reveal the realities of servile duty in contrast to the wealth of those around her was a nice way to kick things off with Eilidh. I also wanting this book to be touch; to describe the effect pets have on our lives without being cloying. I think keeping a foot in the social realism agenda helped this.
I also wanted to make clear that these social divisions have never really disappeared. Take the University of Edinburgh, for example; in my first-year halls, students from working class backgrounds were scraping by each week on ready meals, while their neighbours in the rooms opposite were children to blue-chip CEOs and Middle Eastern royalty. The social injustice war has never gone away, and in The Ghost Cat, Eilidh is its quiet custodian.
 
 
Cat lovers will love this book: “He was a thinking cat, and as such, enjoyed a life of quiet intellectual contemplation.” This line also serves as a great foreshadowing for the reader to accept Grimalkin's intellectual lessons. Why did you give your ghost cat more intellectual musings than antics?
 
I suppose focusing on musings rather than antics concertedly lifts the book out of the category of children’s literature. Also, it can be easy for the story to turn too farcical and pantomime-esque if it’s all about antics.
By and large, cats are creatures of subtlety and quiet decision-making. Just like in my former book The Library Cat, I have found this makes the perfect foundation on which to build a contemplative persona. The conflict in how Grimalkin sees the world, versus how it actually is, gives a potential for comedy and meaning which is almost endless. 
The antics have their place though; we always have to remember that Grimalkin is, first and foremost, a cat: he scratches, he sniffs, his tail goes fat with anger, he tests the laws of physics. This gives opportunities for more slap-stick type comedy which is important too; ironically, it keeps the main character real and believable.
 
Born in 1887, Grimalkin’s “life” periods extend through many historical periods. How did you choose which to use?
 
Very good question! In the early chapters, I was guided very much by local history. The theatre where I work, the King’s, was built in the early 1900s. I discovered it was built by the same guy who built our flat, the famous architect William Stewart Cruikshank, whose styles are contemporaneous with Charles Renee Mackintosh. This got me looking into the Rockefellers who spent time in Scotland at the beginning of the century and how this could feed into the social commentary. Basically I went down a bit of a wormhole!
I wanted to include big moments in history, but not so many that it felt contrived. In this sense, I wanted it to be like life itself: a mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary, with a slight bias towards the extraordinary, given Grimalkin was ultimately an upper-middle class Victorian. I was very influenced by David Nichols’s One Day in this sense – the idea of witnessing a character develop by visiting them for little snapshots across the time. Sometimes you drop in on them having a banal, dull day; other days you drop in on them in the midst of a huge life crisis like a death or marriage or birth. 
 
 
Is this paradise? Cat-Sỉth comes from Celtic Mythology. You use it for the ONE who comes down to judge Grimalkin while in his limbo: “…a giant black cat paraded up and down. It was easily triple the size of any feline Grimalkin had ever beheld…a great white spot that shone out from its chest like a moon was almost too bright to look at directly.”  Black generally symbolically represents the devil or a bad omen, as in a black cat crossing one’s path. Why did you choose this opposite representation?
 
I wanted to pay homage to a broadly unknown feline mythology. Originally, I’d had Cat-Sìth as the Egyptian cat-god “Bastet”, but that didn’t feel right somehow. Why Egypt? Scotland is such a wonderful repository or various mythologies and legends it felt fitting to call upon the myth kitty here. I was really struck by the ‘campness’ in visual depictions of the Celtic god, Cat-Sìth’s – I thought that’d be fun to write. It made me think of the perniciousness of the Greek gods and how they’d make huge decisions based on flights of fancy or stroppy grievances. I thought these behaviours fitted Cat-Sìth’s image as the black cat with the swirling white heart on his chest, as did the rejection of the Christian binary of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’. He was just the sort of god that would send Grimalkin on a helter-skelter whistlestop tour through time because he wasn’t paying attention at his point of death!
 
What is nice about your structure is that you lay out this story for the reader. “All cats have nine lives on planet Earth—three when they stay, three when they stray and three when they play.”  Did you need to outline, or did you write drafts of this story to bring it to completion?

The first chapters took a fair bit of rewriting. I like to spend quality time with my main character, building up a kind of ‘muscle memory’ as to who they are. The structure, funnily enough, came to me as I was walking past Scotmid in Marchmont, Edinburgh (Scotland’s equivalent of England’s ‘Co-Op’ – a convenience store). It came in the form of the subtitle used on the original UK hardback: 12 decades, 9 lives, 1 cat. It sounds cheesy, but a subtitle can really help distill a plot idea.
Landing on a good structure was tricky, though; perhaps the hardest thing, in fact. Having a solid structure gets you through your darkest moments. I feel that writing a book is very much like building a suspension bridge; you can always tweak the carriageway and the cables but the location and strength of the piles that bore through the seabed are fundamental. You need to depend on them absolutely. It took a while to get those piles situated in sure enough ground to support the story.
 
For some reason, as Shirley Jackson stated with her story The Lottery, the story came to her all at once; from your wonderful descriptions, use of color, and ease of narrative, it felt like this story came to you all at once. Can you speak to this?
              
 In one sense, yes – Tabitha hissing in the back room was a kind of “Harry Potter Moment” akin to when JK Rowling looked out a train window and the entire seven book Harry Potter series ‘came to her.’ In reality, as I’m sure many authors would agree, these moments do more for journalistic click-bait and marketing than they do honour the reality of the process. I always remember Sue Townsend, the author of the Adrian Mole series saying on her death bed in a documentary just how agonizingly hard the whole process of writing was… even right down to the final books in the Mole saga. I remember being amazed… her hero, Adrian, feels so real: he just LEAPS off the page. And surely, by the time you get your character to book 8 in the sage, the books just write themselves? It turns out not!
 
 
I could go on and on asking questions. Your book is full of insights, life-lessons, thoughts to consider and muse upon. I loved it. So, I need to ask, what are you working on now?
               Thank you so much, and thank you for these wonderful questions!
Yes I am indeed writing a new book! And I’m just free of the foundation building mentioned in the above bridge analogy. I feel like I’ve just cleared a hold up on a motorway and the cars are all speeding ahead which is a great feeling. This book – The Ship’s Cat – features a very different type of cat who turns up unexpectedly on foreign shores. I don’t want to give too much away but gentle magic features again, as does Homer’s The Odyssey as a narrative touchstone, together with my own experiences working as a deckhand as a teenager in my summer holidays…
Thanks for discussing The Ghost Cat. This book will be a great success.
               My pleasure, DJ! 

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