Evil Goods #author Marcus Bone

A MAGICAL WORLD. 

A RELUCTANT HERO. 

A RAGTAG TEAM.

It’s already been a bad day for Richard Parry, and that’s before he’s shot. After that it just gets worse.

Thrown into a surreal world, he is seen by some as the manifestation of a prophecy and bringer of doom who might need to be soundly terminated. On the positive side, the Ministry of Insecurity think he will be useful on a suicide mission.

Richard and an ill-matched team now venture into the stranger, and more than a bit weirder, parts of this alternate world to discover a traitor intent on derailing the mission and that the ultimate villain is a figure from his own past...

To connect with Marcus ....
https://marcusbone.com/ 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey Marcus Bowen, welcome to Yellow Shelf.

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Well, it's very, very nice to be here. It's a nice sunny day here in England.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

I know, right? We're in different hemispheres. It's evening time for me, morning for you. I'm excited to talk to you today about your book, Evil Goods. Tell us all about it.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Okay, well, I mean the fundamental thing I think was to enjoy reading. I've read a lot of books and haven't been over my life. And the thing you want to get out of the book is a sense of enjoyment or wonder or maybe insightfulness or something. And not just okay, that's a good doorstop, or it's you know, even if it's worthy, you know, you want to have some fun. There are enough books out there that do have fun as a major core. Hopefully, um, yeah, Marcus Bone has done that. Hopefully, we have a book which uh combines uh something that's a good narrative that's thrilling, um, a few twists, a few insightful things, and a little bit of satire, and of course, the a few puzzles along the way, which um you don't need to solve. I mean, uh, for those who don't know, within the book there are sort of um uh ciphers, um riddles to be solved all the time, and you can easily skip these if you just want to keep on going with the narrative, and more than a few references. In fact, I've completely forgotten um how many references I put in there, and I doubt if I can get more than myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Yeah, and Marcus, you know, I was reading uh about a review on your book, it's described as a wildly adventurous, imaginative fantasy. Is that correct? Like, is and it's quirky. So you tell us about you know those themes in the book.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Okay, well, I mean, the thing is to give you a very basic plot outline. So you have your everyman hero um who finds himself for for reasons we won't go into now in an alternative version of London um and the world, which is ever so slightly different to ours, and we haven't really discovered electricity yet. Um and that is in itself one of the things that allows you to really turn the mirror back onto current society and make a few um hopefully pointed references about how the modern world is working or perhaps not working. But anyway, after that, he gets um basically kind of volunteered into a suicide squad, but he doesn't really have much choice over there because if he doesn't, he's going to be executed. So you might as well take the odds. Um, and off they go into a terrible uh new land with weird and wonderful things they have to confront in order to defeat, well, what does it say, uh an evil villain who is really majoring on evil. I mean, he just he just loves the evilness. He's just come to evil university, has a degree in evilness, and possibly a postgraduate doctorate in it.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

And that's summarizes it, but it also summarizes the humour that goes with it. Now, I'm not um, you know, I will openly admit that I'm a bit of a fan of people like uh Douglas Adams um Saint Shoker's Guide to the Galaxy, yeah, and you know, um, and Lewis Carroll um as Wonderland. Strangely enough, uh, it's been compared by some people to Terry Pratchett, which is actually not that mad at Terry Pratchett. Um uh but oddly, I did go to the same school as he did. Okay, there you go. Same sound, I went to the same school, uh, admittedly several years apart. Um, so I don't know, maybe there's something in the water in um Highwicking and Buckinghamshire that does this. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Marcus, tell us a bit about you and tell us a bit about what inspired you to start writing and like share anything we need to know about you as an author.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Okay, well, I've probably been writing since the age of four, one way or another. Um and I took a long time off doing fiction writing. I mean, a lot of fiction writing I did for myself, it was literally for myself. You know, nobody else ever saw it. Um, I took a long time off because I thought, well, I don't really have anything to say. Uh and then I read a well, I would say a brilliant book on writing. In fact, it's called On Writing by Stephen King. And he's not everybody's cup of tea as uh a writer, perhaps, but he makes some very good points. Uh the first of which I say is about language. He says nobody ever asks him about the language he says and how important language is. Uh and I I agree completely with this. There's a there, I'm sorry to take a small tangent here. There's uh a proof of Douglas Adams um for Hitchhikes Guy of the Galaxy, where it was going to be printed in America. And they the American editor had put in the word unused lavatory, and he had scribbled it out saying dis, yeah, sort of disused. Disused is the right word. Unused makes it sound new and fresh. And you think, yeah, there's a very minor distinction in those two words, but they really make the joke land much better, and landing the joke is important. Um, the other thing he said is the thing about writing is to be entertaining. And that's the important thing. If you can't entertain yourself, you're not going to entertain the reader, and that's all that really matters. It doesn't matter trying to create the next to kill a mocking bird or the next um war and peace. Writing can be fun in its own right as long as it is entertaining. And that's not even the like old moment. Like, yeah, I can actually hopefully, hopefully, I can make people laugh. I can give them a few ideas. Hopefully, this this can create a world in which people can immerse themselves and lose themselves for a while when they're on the hum the rum train journey to work or whatever. Uh so yeah, there you go. Blame Stephen.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Or be inspired by Stephen. Um Yeah, yeah. Um, and tell us, uh, is there plans to write more? Like I I know you're enjoying the the process of doing interviews and book launching and you know, this this wonderful time, exciting time, but what's the reality? Do you love it enough? Will you keep writing?

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Uh well, I'm a little bit ahead of the curve there, maybe. Um, the sequel is already being okay. Um, and then there is there is a third part which will close the trilogy off, which is sort of halfway through, I reckon, at the moment. I mean, the problem is with these things you have to keep going bigger. So in the first one, you've got to solve you know save a world. In the next one, you've got to save a couple of worlds, and then in the last one, you really really have to go for the big one, you have to save the entire universe.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Yeah. And these the go anywhere. Yeah, yeah. The future books, have they are they coming out this year, next year? Like, what's the plan?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Uh the plan is that the sequence come out about this time next year, um, before things are ready. Um, you know what publishers are like for them. Um the year after, so one a year. Um, and then I don't know. I mean, then we'll we'll we'll see what we we do because I think that's gone through its course, and you don't want to do the the terrible Netflix thing of milking us to 27 seasons where you've completely run out of ideas. I think it might be time to try and do something fresh.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Yeah. Well, look, that's exciting times ahead. If if people are watching anywhere in the world and they're curious about you and they're curious about evil goods, where do we go to? If you point us in the direction, whether you've got a website, you're on socials, like point us in a direction, and I'll put it in the show notes.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Very easy. Marcusbone.com. Okay. It's a website, and if you're interested, it's a little bit of an interactive game there as well. Okay. We have the whole idea of the hustles and everything.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

Great, great. Well, I'm gonna put that in the show notes, Marcus, and I think we've got people curious enough to go and check it out. Congratulations. Uh, will you come back next year with the second book? We can talk about the second book and hey, let's lock you in the year after. That'd be great.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

I don't stop you. Maybe I'll fly over.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Maybe I'll fly over to you. Marcus, thanks so much for joining us. All the best.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

It's been an absolute pleasure.