Muse: Who are your favorite authors?
Nash: It used to be Hubert Selby Junior and William Burroughs, but then I discovered Don Dellilo who is a master of language and character. I like Jeanette Winterson’s lyricism. I remain a big Franz Kafka fan, both for the alienation he conveys, but also something about his writing projects you effortlessly into his strange world and then transports you rather beautifully within its unsettling borders.

Muse: Why do you write?
Nash: I’m simply going to quote author Steve Tesich here: “The ongoing need to narrate my existence”. Even writers who project themselves through fantasy or chicklit have the same impulse to be heard.

Muse: What is your writing regiment? How often do you work on a novel? Do you set daily time or word goals? What keeps you meeting your deadlines?
Nash: I’m a spree writer! Very much go with momentum. I have to build up the momentum for each project, eg once I start the 1st draft (after about 6 months of note-making and letting it bounce around my head), I will write it straight through without pause, however long that takes. Equally, I’ve been at this game long enough not to beat myself up if I don’t get down to any writing. I write when the kids are in bed.

Muse: Marc, you have a very distinctive outlook on life and writing. I often think of you as the Word Wizard, as you have an extremely unique approach to communicating your thoughts, characters and plot. How did you develop this writing style? 
Nash: Style, yes hmm… I don’t reflect much on my style, I just riff off words. Any book for me starts when a central metaphor and a voice coalesce and then I just run with it, see where it takes me. But I am always led by the nose to drink at the spring of language. I like words that mean one thing on the surface, but they have secondary implications that cut across their primary meaning in the context of how I use it. Words for me are imprecise, meaning slips away between the cracks. That’s why I like to throttle them into submission, to grab ‘em by the throat and make them do their damn duty to communicate.

Muse: What are the creative jumping off points for you? Are you inspired by dreams? Music? Nature? What triggers your imagination?   
Nash: Everything is a potential touchstone. I am a real magpie. Snatches of conversation overheard on a bus. Books I read are especially provocative in this regard. Music is very important, I need to establish what music I am writing to that fits the book and then play it endlessly on a loop. I just have a lot of interests and a lot of stored up memories of things and it’s like a perpetual repository I can draw on. And then I just make a metaphor out of it. I’m not so interested in the ‘realism’ aspect. I like bringing things together that maybe ordinarily you wouldn’t associate; eg a BJ described in terms of David Beckham and Jackson Pollock … I am an insomniac, so dreams aren’t so big for me. Plus I tend to dream in words far more than pictures – my dreams are narrations. That must mean I’m a writer right ? On it 24-7. Damn I need me more sleep …

Muse: Tell us about the novel you have chosen for your Sneak Peek. 
Nash: Scheherazade meets a Bukowski (female) barfly. A gangster’s moll on the run from her murderous husband who she betrayed between the sheets, has lost everything and has to sing for her supper. She does this by holding court in bars at a holiday resort by day and capturing prey to take her into a hotel room by night. She is like a mythical hydra, with several heads and each time you think you’ve got a grip on her and lop off one of those heads, two more facets of her spring up in its place and she eludes your grasp once again. She is so strong and yet in such a position of weakness, watch the sparks fly.

Muse: What was your inspiration for this particular novel? 
Nash: Watching TV documentaries about how badly behaved British youth are when they go on foreign holidays and descend on each resort like a plague of locusts, completely destroying everything indigenous to the place and turn it into a little Britain like the old Empire builders. This represents the contemporary British soul to me and I wanted to interrogate it and see where it extruded from. I have a love-hate relationship with my country, my people, my culture.

Muse: Which of your characters do you most identify with?
Nash: They are all different parts of me. I like to project out to a character who on the surface is at a very different place in life (job, gender, age, personal habits etc) and this forces me to travel out to discover them and in doing so that part of myself that I might not be so aware of. This is the journey that keeps things interesting for me as I write.

Muse: What is your favorite scene in the book and why? 
Nash: She is on the beach and dissing women’s piercings and tattoos in a very scurrilous way as being unfeminine. I like it simply because these are not my views, yet she holds them with such conviction. Same way as I have written a character beholden to the demon drink, yet I’m teetotal. The Beckham BJ is very rude, mixing highbrow and lowbrow, so that quite tickled me as well.

Muse: Have you written other books? 
Nash: A Brazilian rainforest of them … This is why the planet is in such dire straits. I hold my hand up to acknowledge my part in it …

Muse: How do you feel about the current publishing marketplace? Nash: I am chagrined that literature is marketed by genre which I think belittles both the writers and the readers. I think there is a dearth of writers who are willing to continue the work of the great modernists like Joyce, Faulkner etc and examine language, to deal in big ideas in their books. I think this comes from a self-censorship believing there is no publisher and no readers out there for this type of stuff. But I am convinced they are wrong and do their readers a disservice. But then I would say that wouldn’t I ?