William Kostakis, author of the novel Loathing Lola, is interviewed by Angela Meyer on the "LiteraryMinded" weblog.
How long all up have you worked on Loathing Lola, and what compelled you to begin it?I remember sitting in the back seat of my car, with my worn copy of Worry Warts on my lap, the back cover facing up. I'd imagine my face there instead of Morris Gleitzman's. The caption would read "11-year-old author William Kostakis", that was my dream... and then I turned 12, so that daydream became "12-year-old author William Kostakis'...That's when I realised I should probably start writing something.
I finished a novel featuring Courtney and Co. by the end of Year 7, and my computer congratulated me with a terminal virus. It was the age of the floppy disk, and I hadn't learned the importance of backing up the file, so, from memory, I restarted it in Year 8. I must've remembered more than was there, because the word count doubled (think: just falling shy of Harry Potter 5's grand total). I left it for a few years, came back to it in Year 10, and after one more rewrite, I was content with it, so I started thinking about a sequel. What if they had a camera crew following them around? How would that change the way they acted, what they said, who they were nice to, who they weren't? What would they hide? What parts of their characters would they accentuate? It didn't take me long to realise that this would be a far more compelling read than the original novel I'd written, so, after my bajillionth rejection letter, I decided to restart from scratch. By the end of Year 12, I had Pan Macmillan on board. And now, in my second year of uni, I have a book out.
So, to answer your question in a non-round-about way, it took seven-eight years to write, and I started it because I wanted to be Morris Gleitzman. Only 11.
