A Drive-by from The 'Gong: Cat Sparks

Cat Sparks is an award-winning writer and editor, talented photographer and graphic designer, and owner of THREE cats – and author Robert Hood :-). She was one of the inaugural Clarion South grads in 2007, a Writers of the Future winner, and has a small but significant pyramid in her backyard built from her nine Ditmars and four Aurealis Awards.

1. I knew I was a writer when …
… glancing at my desk one day, not so very long ago, I saw that it was piled high with ruled, A4 note pads, each one dog eared, coffee ringed and filled with crappy handwriting. As well as these (and the inevitable laptop) were graphs and charts, plotting the peaks and troughs of my protagonist’s journey. Goodness! I thought. That’s all starting to look a bit serious.

2. The worst sentence I ever wrote was …
… most of them prior to 2001. Here’s a sample: ‘she said she saw mirrors in the sky but I saw only reflections’ Thankfully I grew out of my poetic phase. Today, most of my sentences contain explosions, car chases, knife fights or descriptions of people with really bad hair.

3. How many cats are essential to the production of an award-winning story? 
Well, as you know, you can never have too many. Unless you have too many in which case you’re probably a crazy cat lady. I tend to write at my best with three. Any more than that and the chair tips over.

4. If I wasn’t a writer I would …
… have time to read the whopping massive stack of books beside my reading chair. Also: renovate the house, weed the garden, visit my non-writing friends, travel to exotic countries, be wearing something a little more classy than daggy tracksuit pants, try my hand at hot air ballooning, parachuting, hang gliding and a bunch of other dangerous, aerodynamic addictions, and I would most definitely get a real job so as to earn enough money to finance all of the above.

5. Donuts or danishes?
I am appalled by the lard content of question five but I must confess to having a bit of a thing for those sugar coated donuts with the squishy red jam at the centre. Danishes would, of course, have been the more elegant response.

She can be found here.

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