Interview with Amanda Saint

Today, I'm welcoming Amanda Saint to my blog to talk about her new novel, Remember Tomorrow.  

Amanda's debut novel, As If I Were A River, was selected as a NetGalley Top 10 Book of the Month, longlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker Prize, and chosen as a Top 20 Book of 2016 by the Book Magnet Blog. 

Amanda is also an award-winning short story writer, and works as a freelance journalist writing features for international magazines about environmental sustainability. She has her own creative writing business, Retreat West, through which she runs writing retreats, courses and competitions; and an independent publishing house, Retreat West Books - which has just been shortlisted for the 2019 Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher.   You can vote here!


 REMEMBER TOMORROW:

 "A chilling descent into the chaos that lies in the hearts of men. A searing portrait of a dystopian future where civilisation's thin veneer has been ripped away, and it is women who suffer most as a result. Excellent." Paul Hardisty, author of Absolution

 

You can buy a copy here!

Hello, Amanda, and welcome to Troutie McFish Tales! When you’re not writing fiction you write features and news articles about renewable energy, climate change and sustainability. So presumably you already had a wealth of knowledge in a number of areas that would have helped with the research needed to write Remember Tomorrow. Did you still find you needed to do additional research, and if so did you find out anything new that surprised or shocked you?
 
I did have a wealth of knowledge to draw on for this novel, so I didn’t really do much research at all for the environmental side of the story. The future I have imagined is based on everything I’ve written about for the past 20 years or so. Sadly, there is not much that shocks me anymore after watching the steady decline of the natural world alongside the continued growth of consumerism. The fact that despite the climate agreements that countries keep making, greenhouse gas emissions are still on the rise, as is the global temperature. 

I suppose the thing that shocks me the most is that people still just carry on buying cheap clothes, cheap meat, and cheap homewares without ever stopping to think about what the manufacture of these items is doing to the planet, and the communities where they are produced. Climate change issues are not something that we are going to have to face when they come along in the future, they are happening now, and will only get worse, if we carry on the same path. 

The area where I had to do the most research for this novel was around herbalism and the beliefs of green witchcraft, and about the witch hunts of the past. Although, witch hunts never actually went away, they just morphed into something else. You only have to look at tabloid journalism and online trolling to see the modern day version in action. I also researched activism and read a lot about the psychology of people driven to take action, I spoke to activists, and thought a lot about the different ways in which people try to make a change. Some take to the streets, some are violent, others withdraw, while others teach. So I tried to bring all of those elements into Evie’s world.  

You are a staunch environmentalist yourself - how important is this novel to you on a personal level? Is it a story you’ve been waiting to tell for a long time, or an idea that appeared overnight?
 
The idea for the novel came to me several years ago, around 2012 when I was still writing my first novel. At that time, all I knew was that it was set in a future that was more like the past where medieval superstitions had resurfaced. That my main character, Evie, was a herbalist being accused of witchcraft.

I’d moved from London to Exmoor and when I came back to London for a book launch after being gone for several months, the contrasts were stark. The unsustainability of it all really hits you when you go to a city after spending most of your time in nature. That’s when I started to really develop the idea about how Evie had ended up in that world. But I was a long way from getting started then. It was after spending some time in Southeast Asia in early 2015 and witnessing some truly alarming environmental and social issues, that I came home and started planning the novel. 

Amanda Saint

 As you say, you started writing Remember Tomorrow in 2015, long before the Brexit referendum, yet there is a disturbing reflection of our current fears for the future in Evie’s world. The novel feels like a warning, filled with unsettling undercurrents that are far too close to the conceivable to make it comfortable reading. How scared are you that your novel is a prediction of England’s tomorrow?
 
Terrified! It has been a strange experience indeed to be writing this novel and seeing many of the things that I have predicted for our near future already coming true. I completed the first draft in early 2016 and then when Brexit happened that summer, I realised that my novel had inadvertently become a kind of prediction. Now, it’s publishing in early March 2019 just before we leave the EU in a spectacularly disastrous fashion, when the social issues I’d predicted, the segregation and removing vital support networks for people deemed of no economic value, have been escalating for years now. 

Floods, droughts, soaring temperatures, extreme weather patterns of all kinds, food shortages, all are now a part of our every day life. But it’s all been normalised by the media, TV and films, so people are just accepting of it. 


Remember Tomorrow is gripping and fast-paced, and I found myself staying up later than I should because I wanted to know what happened next. You’ve lived with Evie for three years or more now - is finishing the novel like losing an old friend?  

It isn’t, no, as the novel characters you write, never really leave you. I still think of the characters in my first novel quite often, and I believe that Evie is now in my head forever and will pop up now and then to let me know something. I often find myself imagining what has happened to her after that closing scene.  



If this was a Netflix series, there’d definitely be a Season Two! Is there going to be a sequel, or do you already have completely different ideas forming for your next novel?
 
I live in hope that the Netflix scout will come across the book! I have an agent that is managing international and audio rights for me but am yet to find a screen rights agent to work with. But I have long thought that Evie’s tale is the first in a trilogy. Writing novels is intense though, so I’m taking some time off of that for now to focus on my short fiction writing instead.   



As well as your freelance journalism, Retreat West and Retreat West Books are going from strength to strength.  What projects are you juggling right now? Has it become all-consuming, or are you still managing to find time to write fiction?

In 2018, I was on a steep learning curve as that was my first full year running a publishing press, and at the same time the number of people taking part in the courses and competitions I run were growing as well. So yes, it was pretty much all consuming. In the whole of 2018 I wrote just one new short story, for the A Thousand Word Photos charity project, and focused on finishing the edits of Remember Tomorrow. In total, I probably only spent a few weeks writing and editing my own fiction in the whole year.

But I learned a lot in 2018 that means I can now manage it all better so that I have time for my writing as well as other peoples. So maybe the next instalment in Evie’s story will come along sooner than I thought. Or maybe I’ll write another novel entirely – I have notes and ideas for several. 

Retreat West Books

 ABOUT REMEMBER TOMORROW

 "A dystopian future that echoes the present times. A reflection of society in a stark, unforgiving mirror. Unsettling, honest and unputdownable." Susmita Bhattacharya, author of The Normal State of Mind

"A chilling descent into the chaos that lies in the hearts of men. A searing portrait of a dystopian future where civilisation's thin veneer has been ripped away, and it is women who suffer most as a result. Excellent." Paul Hardisty, author of Absolution

England, 2073. The UK has been cut off from the rest of the world and ravaged by environmental disasters. Small pockets of survivors live in isolated communities with no electricity, communications or transportation, eating only what they can hunt and grow.

Evie is a herbalist, living in a future that’s more like the past, and she’s fighting for her life. The young people of this post-apocalyptic world have cobbled together a new religion, based on medieval superstitions, and they are convinced she’s a witch. Their leader? Evie’s own grandson.

Weaving between Evie’s current world and her activist past, her tumultuous relationships and the terrifying events that led to the demise of civilised life, Remember Tomorrow is a beautifully written, disturbing and deeply moving portrait of an all-too-possible dystopian world, with a chilling warning at its heart.

You can buy a copy here!