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When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer?
Well, as a child I always wrote, especially poetry. And when I fell in love, I fell in love with everything. I was very affectionate ... And then I quit, but the moment I started working, I worked in a town hall, because I started writing again. And my friends and colleagues said that I was good. And from then on, I wanted to write a novel and I got published. From then I have not stopped writing, and that was back in 2005. But, since 2003, I was writing tales and so on.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
From everything. I get it from things that have happened to me, from friends, from situations, from television and especially from my imagination.
What’s your timetable like when you write?
At the moment, I work at a regular timetable, usually in the afternoon. But I mostly like writing at night. However, when I sometimes ask for a vacation, I write in the morning. My morning routine consists of organising myself, so I prepare a plan of what I have to do, but I am much more relaxed when I write at night.
What’s the hardest part about your writing process?
Doing the corrections. It’s torture and it’s a difficult process. Getting the idea is easy, making an outline of what you want is what I enjoy a lot because I can imagine what will happen or what the characters are going to be like. The actual writing feels liberating. It’s like you’re done, you’ve taken it out, just like when you’ve made a meal, and you can sit back and enjoy it. But the doing the correction is torture. Because you lack certain things and it isn’t well done. You’ll see that there are certain parts of the character you haven’t developed or the contrary… A screenplay of a movie is 90 pages, which is easier, but a novel can be 400-500 pages long, and reading it 10 or 15 times can be torture. It’s hours and hours of work, then you leave it to the readers to give you their opinion.
What was your last novel called?
Small Anonymous Stories (Pequeñas Historias Anónimas)
What kind of research do you do and how long do you spend researching before you start writing a book?
Well, it depends on the book ... The first novel I wrote, which was based on the Spanish Civil War, I spent 9 months listening to civil war music, watching documentaries, reading books, interviewing people... The flamenco book was 2 or 3 months, however, after the corrections it took longer because there were friends who knew flamenco who made the corrections for me. In the book that I am going to publish next year, I have written 200 pages, people liked it a lot, they asked me to add more things, and now it is about 400 pages long. And the one I hope to publish in a few years I think it takes less than 2 or 3 years to do so. That one is more complicated because they are 3 characters from different countries and in this case the protagonist is a woman, normally the heroes are usually men, but in this case it is a woman…
How long does it take you to write a book?
Once I have everything developed, maybe a few months. I don’t know ... I could tell you... but it depends on the book ... on one it took me 3 months and in this for example it will be a little more than that.