I am thrilled to have interviewed author Lucy Ann Unwin, who shared with us details of her writing life, her book ‘The Octopus, Dadu and Me‘, which was released on 5th January 2023, and answered a few fun questions. This post contains affiliate links.

Lucy Ann Unwin’s professional background is in journalism. She was a music journalist at BBC 6 Music for 10 years, where she was privileged enough to interview the likes of Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and Adele, report live from the side of the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury, and absorb hundreds of hours of wonderful live music.

Brought up in Birmingham, Lucy has lived all around the UK, from Newcastle to Brixton, Worcester to Chesterfield. She also lived for a year in the Chilean city of Valparaiso and for three years in San Francisco, but has now settled on the Sussex clifftops with her husband, two daughters and tortoise.

It was actually a very specific moment. I was visiting our local aquarium with my daughters and we were a bit transfixed by the octopus they had there, so we sat down to watch her. My littlest was about four at the time and drew a picture of the octopus surrounded by little octopus babies. That imaginative leap in a child’s mind — from a single octopus, to an octopus family — was the spark of a story. What if a child became convinced she could communicate with an octopus, and it was telling her it wanted to get back to its family?

There was a second rush of inspiration, too. Not long after I’d finished the first draft COVID and the lockdown hit, and children everywhere were being separated from grandparents. The delicate relationship I’d built between my main character, Sashi, and her Dadu, who had dementia, suddenly felt like it needed to be developed more. So that was the inspiration for adding flashbacks to explore and celebrate their beautiful bond.

My love of planning is only matched by my love of spreadsheets! I always plan in detail, working out from the main plot beats until I have a row for every single scene and a plan for what I want the goal and conflict to be for each one, as well as more textural details and sub plots etc. By the time I actually start writing, my spreadsheet is huge and the book is virtually written already!

For all my early drafts of the book it is simple called IAN! — which is the name Sashi gives the octopus. When it came time to find a
publisher, I must have realised that wasn’t going to quite cut it! I can’t quite remember when I came up with The Octopus, Dadu and Me, but I’ve always liked that structure and the name stuck.

I’m really terrible with names, and if I trust my subconscious I worry I’m going to end up naming unlikeable characters after whoever is
annoying me at that particular moment! I tend to use character name generators online to come up with a shortlist and then look at name meanings etc to narrow it down. Sashi’s name means “moon” in Sanskrit, and I felt the moon and tides and the ocean all tied together really beautifully. In the book, her Dadu chooses her name which I liked.

My books all tend to draw a lot on my personal experience so don’t really need a lot of research — not that I’ve ever tried to set an
Octopus free from an aquarium! I did learn a LOT about octopuses writing the book, and watched so many octopus videos! Sashi’s dadu’s dementia was informed a lot by my own memories of my nan from when I was a child, but I tried to watch as many first hand accounts as I could online, of children and teenagers talking about how their loved ones’ dementia impacted on them.

I love writing children’s books because they feel so free, and less constrained by genre or expectations — I feel like children are much
braver readers! I seem to have unintentionally slipped into my own personal genre though, which I call “sad-girl-with-animal adventures.”

In How To Be A Revolutionary, which is out in November, rats get to take centre stage, and my sad girl, Natalie, wants to change the world but is reluctant to accept change at home as her parents separate. She’s actually not that sad though, you can’t keep Nat down for long!

After the initial aquarium inspiration, I would say I was turning the idea over in the back of my mind for a a couple of months, actively planning for about two months, drafting for a just month (I’m addicted to getting the actual words down every November for NaNoWriMo) and then editing in waves over the course of a year or so. Then of course the publishing process is sloooow… it was about a year and a half from UCLan offering for the book and publication in January 2023, which is actually relatively quick, but still feels like a long time!

Tear-jerking octopus heist!

The emotional and mental health toll. I’ve been a little amazed by how much I’m affected by both the highs and lows of publication and I’m not quite sure why. I think there’s something about how personal writing is…you inevitably put a lot of yourself into your work, so it’s really hard to separate yourself from it.

Talking to other writers, and realising how universal it is, helps! Also, you have to treat writing like a job if you have any chance of being published I think — it’s a huge time commitment — but unless you’re one of the vanishingly few lucky ones it doesn’t actually pay like a job (I think the average annual income for a published writer is around £7k). It means you have to be in a very privileged position to make it work. This is sad for readers, especially child readers, as it hugely limits the diversity of stories they have access to.

If you like a story that pulls the heart-strings a lot of reader reviews say they’ve been moved to tears! (Good tears, I hope.) Also, if you’re buying for children, I really hope it gives kids some ideas about what it means to be a good friend when your friends are going through challenging times.

I’m always jealous of all those laptop kitten pictures, but I’m allergic to anything furry. Our pet tortoise Frida keeps me awake during those post-lunch lulls by noisily stomping around, though. She also likes to pose with proofs!

I used to think I needed a clear span of quiet hours ahead of me to write, and so I did barely any writing! Now any time is writing time…I just draw the line at using my phone!

More often than not I just sit at the dinner table to write. It’s probably a terrible place to write in terms of posture, but it’s a great base for family/writing multi-tasking and our table does have an exceptionally lovely view!

I’d be renegotiating for a writing credit! Or maybe I could play a fish…

‘Hurry up with How To Be A Revolutionary — I’d take rat over octopus any day! (YUM)’

A big thank you to Lucy Ann Unwin for sharing her writing life with us and for a wonderful interview.