#js&mn

[JS&MN Tarot] Moon and Star

JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL

So, I attended this event last Friday as part of York Literature Festival and what a privilege it was to listen to Susanna talk in the city that inspired so much of JSAMN. It's the second time I've seen her in person, but there was definitely something extra special about seeing her in York.

I'm sure I've forgotten loads of fascinating nuggets of details she shared, but here are just a few personal favourites:

She read snippets from both JSAMN (she aptly chose 'The Stones of York', given the venue was just down the road from the Minster) and Piranesi, which was a real treat.

Someone in the audience asked how Mr Norrell and Childermass met and whether there were any lost footnotes about their origin story and Susanna replied, "I think there's some fan fiction on that" 👀

She's currently working on two books: one about Bradford, as she grew up there. And the other is set in the JSAMN universe, but she wouldn't say anything else about it.

Surprisingly, she had only visited York once with an old boyfriend prior to writing JSAMN. She based the majority of her knowledge of the layout of the city etc. on paper maps.

Even as a hobbyist fic writer, I heavily related to a lot of her thoughts on the writing process, particularly about only being able to do a lot of writing or reading at any given time (i.e. if she's writing, she can't do much reading and vice versa). Someone also asked about how she goes about researching and she alluded to getting lost down rabbit holes and wondering why she'd need half of what she'd read. She joked that if she needed to include a fork in her writing, she'd end up reading up about the history of forks and I've never felt more seen 🤣

Although she said she doesn't do much reading nowadays, someone in the audience asked about contemporary books she'd enjoyed and she named The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

She said Childermass was always very easy to write and that he would just ride in, say "I've got this" and take over (which sounds so very Childermass ❤️).

She loved the BBC TV adaptation and went to watch some of it being filmed. She said both Bertie Carvel and Eddie Marsan were the inverse of their characters: Bertie was very meticulous, well-researched and wanted to rehearse a lot, whereas Eddie was happy to just turn up and wing it lol.

She talked about some of the film deals that never panned out, including one studio who had just dealt with a situation in relation to another author/adaptation where they were accused of ripping off someone else's book and the whole project had to be scrapped. As a result, they wanted to know which books had inspired JSAMN. Susanna’s people sent back a list of over 200 books and the studio didn't believe her and expected her to name just one other title as inspiration?!

The footnotes in JSAMN were originally only meant for Susanna's enjoyment, but the publishers (thankfully) left them in.