![]() ![]() How have you found the editing process? Enjoyable, stressful or satisfying? We see such varying opinions from authors when it comes to the time of editing their books. ![]() The characters I’ve written since are far less comic-infernal, more subdued. I don’t often get to take someone so far towards the edge of town. I am drawn to introverts and superfluous men, and characters with vivid inner lives, mad obsessions, delusions of grandeur and a tendency to create their own language. The characters in Gigantic fall into the categories of comic characters in a straight world, Kevin and Derek, and straight characters in a mad world that Kevin and Derek drag them into: Maxine and Bohoslava (Kevin’s estranged wife). A bit later I found out that The Sun and The Daily Telegraph were reporting a Bigfoot sighting in Tunbridge Wells and realised I might be onto something.Ĭan you tell us a bit more about your characters? Do you have a favourite type of character you enjoy writing? However, I initially thought the idea too weird and abandoned it. The character outlines and the lore came really easily. Then I thought, Why does this only happen in backwoods America? What if it happened in my home town? The next morning I made some sketches and notes. The way they argued and their overall earnestness appealed to me. The origin of Gigantic is that I was watching a documentary about Bigfoot hunters in America. It’s where I grew up and I often think of it as quite a dark place full of dark stories and creepy secrets. For Kevin, though, it’s the centre of the world and everything that happens there is of world-historical importance. As such, it’s either a vast unexplored terrain (a strange thought when most of us live in under-fictionalised places like Sutton), or it’s an offputtingly dull locale to write about. It’s an anti-Venice that never appears in stories. Sutton is a suburb straddling north Surrey and outer London that feels like it belongs in neither. Tell us about Kevin’s London – what inspired the world he lives in? There will be blood, and much shouting and arguing the toss as well. When film of a new sighting turns up, Kevin, Derek and their arch-sceptic team leader Maxine go all out to get to the truth, settle the matter once and for all. No one believes that for centuries the London Borough of Sutton has been the home of the North Surrey Gigantopithecus, a Bigfoot-Yeti-style cryptid, apart from Kevin Stubbs and his unsettling friend, Derek Funnel. Let’s start with the basics: tell us a little about Gigantic! He lives in the East of England where he’s a ghostwriter and ghost. Other stories have appeared in Bare Fiction, The Lonely Crowd, the Warwick Review and more. His recent short fiction includes Subtemple in Black Static Hardrada in Tales from the Shadow Booth, Vol 4, edited by Dan Coxon Evergreen in BFS Horizons 11 Two Drifters in Unsung Stories Online, and Black Lab in Storgy. Ashley Stokes is the author of Gigantic (Unsung Stories, 2021), The Syllabus of Errors ( Unthank Books, 2013) and Voice (TLC Press, 2019), and editor of the Unthology series and The End: Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings (Unthank Books, 2016). ![]()
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