Funday Friday - Truth or Lie? - Cassandra Parkin - Month 3 Week 4

Welcome to the latest edition of Truth of Lie. My name is Rachel and I will be your host, for this exciting new game show. Each Friday, I will have one contestant, and they will be answering at least 14 questions. There is of course one small twist...

For three of the answers, they have to lie. It is your task as the viewer to guess which three answers are lies. You are allowed 3 guesses and I want them posted into the comments field. 

Every 4 weeks, I will close the guessing, count up how many correct answers each of you has, and create a leaderboard. Anyone who is top of the leaderboard, will go into a draw for a paperback of the winners choice (open internationally). 

Please do include a way for me to contact you (email or twitter or similar), so that I can let you know if you have won. 

The weekend after a 4 week period closes, not only will I produce a leaderboard, and announce a winner, I will also let you know into the true answers, and which were the lies.  

Closing date for the third month is 11pm on 4th August 2016. 

So without further ado, let's meet today's contestant. 

Good morning Cassandra Parkin, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I’m a Yorkshire-based writer with Cornish roots and a passion for fairy-tales. My most recent novel The Beach Hut is about a grown-up brother and sister who build an illegal beach-hut on a Cornish beach in the autumn, and the way their decision impacts on the lives of those around them.
Welcome back to Rachel's Random Reads, Cassandra. For those that are new to my blog Cassandra last year was talking to us about Perranporth, Cornwall as part of my Cornish Week, so its a pleasure to see her back again. 

Now onto the show, and remember everyone, Cassandra hasn't been entirely truthful with three of these answers, so it is up to you to guess which ones they are (only 3 guesses per person though). 

1) Who is your favourite author?

This is so hard! I can do a Top Five, but beyond that I honestly can’t choose…so I’m going to say: Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Tove Jansson, Charlotte Bronte and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

2) What book do you wish you had written?

I would love to have written any of Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, but most especially Moominvalley in November, which describes a little orphan boy called Toft who visits the Valley, only to find the family are all away. It’s the last Moomin book she wrote, and it came after the death of her mother. There’s a tendency to think of the Moomin books as cute, cheerful little stories, but I think Moominvalley in November is a beautiful, oblique commentary on the grieving process. Also, I would so love to be able to draw – that’s one talent that I really envy.

3) Tell me about any really memorable dream or nightmare you have had

I have a recurring dream about a house with lots and lots of bedrooms. The house feels like home, but it’s also unfamiliar. Each door that I open is a new and lovely discovery – another place I didn’t know was mine to enter, another space I can explore and inhabit before moving on. I think this must be inspired by the memories of my grandparents’ hotel down in Cornwall, where my whole family would spend every summer. 

4) What was your most memorable holiday ever?

I think probably the first time I went to Reykjavik. It was almost mid-winter, and we landed at the airport in the snow and drove straight to the Blue Lagoon. I remember running through the snow to jump into this huge outdoor hot spring. We floated around in the hot mineral water and watched the moon rise with snow falling on our shoulders.

5) If you could be an animal what would you be and why?

I’d be a cat. Specifically, I’d be one of my cats. They live very happy, luxurious lives and are disgracefully spoiled.

6) If you could be a fruit, what would you be and why?

I would be a Kiwi, just because they’re my favourite! They’re such a cool, weird-looking fruit.

7) What is the most annoying interview question you have ever been asked?

It’s not annoying exactly, more perplexing, but - I never really understand why people (other than editors) ask, “How long did it take you to write your book?” It seems like such a strange thing to want to know. What are they going to do with the answer? What difference does it make? I don’t mind telling them, I just don’t understand why they care!

8) If you could only read one author for the rest of your life (and I’m aware that’s a very scary world), who would you choose and why?

This doesn’t quite fit with my Favourite Authors answer, but I’d probably have to pick James Joyce – just for one single book, though, which is Ulysses. I read it on holiday when I was nineteen and it changed my life for ever. It’s the book I’ve gone back to most often throughout my adult life and I find something new each time.

9) Besides reading, which I am guessing is a given, what other hobbies do you have?

I love crafting - especially making patchwork quilts. I started with simple square patches in random patterns, and I’m gradually expanding my skill-set to take on more complex and challenging patterns. My bucket-list project is the double-wedding-ring pattern, which is apparently terrifyingly hard. It’s a hobby that requires a certain amount of patience (not to say bloody-mindedness), so in my head this sort of goes with novel-writing.

10) What is your best childhood memory?

My brother being born, when I was five. His birthday is a week before mine, and he and my mum came home from hospital on my birthday. He was the best present ever.

11) Did you have an invisible friend as a child? If so please tell me about them. 

For years and years, I had an invisible tiger-cub called Archie. He was quite fierce and wild and dangerous to everyone else, but we had a very special bond, so obviously he never did anything to hurt me. (Obviously.) He went with me everywhere, slept on my pillow, understood me and took my side when no-one else did, and crept out in the night to bite the toes of people who had upset me during the day. He finally vanished round about the time I went up into Junior school. I like to think he’s living in a lovely forest somewhere, hunting down all the other Imaginary Friends who are unwary enough to cross his path.

12) What would your ideal pet be?

It’s a cliché that writers are supposed to love cats, but I genuinely do. They’re the perfect writing companions because they just lounge around all day watching you work, occasionally coming to walk on your keyboard or sit on your knee. They’re very comforting. My littlest cat Skyler regularly helps out by sitting on the keyboard and adding strings of spurious 111111111112222ssssddddddddss to my work.

13) What is your guilty pleasure when it comes to music? 

ABBA. Anything by ABBA. I love the cheerful nonsense that is “Mamma Mia” – especially the part where everyone pretends Pierce Brosnan can sing, and that his performance is brilliant and delightful, and not in any way awkward.

14) If you could only look at one view for the rest of eternity, what or where would you like to be to see this view?

That’s easy - Gyllyngvase Beach in Falmouth, where I spent every summer. My grandparents had a hotel that was three minutes’ walk from the beach, and we used to spend every Easter and Summer holiday there. They sold the hotel when I was five, but my memories of our summers there have been a major inspiration for all three of my novels. My second favourite view would be Perranporth Beach, also in Cornwall but on the much wilder North Coast – where my second novel, The Beach Hut, is set.

Thank you Cassandra for agreeing to take part, I also love ABBA especially if they come on in a night club, always good up beat tracks to dance to, and Archie sounds adorable. I suppose if you do have an invisible friend, then a tiger cub is the way to do it. 

I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Truth or Lie? I will be back next week with another episode, and in the mean time...

Don't forget to guess the lies, to be in with a chance of a prize! 

For more about Cassandra Parkin:
Links:
My blog: www.cassandraparkin.wordpress.com
My Twitter handle: @cassandrajaneuk
My Amazon author page:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cassandra-Parkin/e/B007NCIS2U/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1461154303&sr=8-1

Guest Post - Cassandra Parkin on Perranporth, Cornwall - Cornish Week

Some places are so beautiful you forgive them for occasionally trying to kill you. For me, that place is Perranporth Beach in Cornwall. Two miles of tawny sand. A saltwater lido built into the rocks. The kind of surf that even Australians admit is worth a trip. Mysterious caves that bleed into the old mine workings. A cross-current that will have you halfway across the bay in a couple of minutes. Towering black cliffs with the occasional sign saying things like “DO NOT CLIMB THESE CLIFFS”, “NO, REALLY. DO NOT CLIMB THESE CLIFFS” and “IF YOU CLIMB THESE CLIFFS YOU WILL DEFINITELY DIE, YO”. A tide that, with the wind and the full moon behind it, pours up the beach in a great foaming rush, faster than you can run. 

My dad’s a Cornishman, and my whole family spent every summer of my childhood with our grandparents in Falmouth. Every day my brother and I were five minutes from the beach and six minutes from the ocean, throwing ourselves in and out of the waves, digging terrifyingly deep holes, going to chapel on Sunday mornings with our grandparents - immersed in these glorious Other Lives we’d somehow been lucky enough to be given. And - because we were kids and contractually obliged to be ungrateful - we spent really quite a lot of time nagging our parents to take us to the North Coast, so we could go to Perranporth and look at the caves and go body-boarding and get lost in the beauty and occasionally almost die. 

The sea off Perranporth’s had quite a few things off my family over the years. Once we slightly misjudged the speed that the tide was coming in, and had to run all the way up the beach to escape the surge, and the sea took my best bucket as tribute. (For the record, it was an excellent bucket. Bright yellow with a green handle, in the shape of an actual castle, with windows and a door and crenulations and everything. I hope the mermaids were grateful.) Once it took my bodyboard – just ripped the tie right off my wrist, I’ll have that thank you, and then it rushed off towards the horizon and my board was gone for ever. The biggest thing it ever tried to take was my mother, when she was climbing round the rocks on the headland and a giant wave nearly washed her off the rock. She was saved by my brother, who grabbed her as the water went over her head - so we compromised on her shoe, which the wave slurped off her foot as it retreated. It also stole a decent chunk of my heart, which – along with my bucket, my bodyboard and my mother’s shoe – now lies somewhere in the North Atlantic, just off the Cornish coast. 

Experiences like this leave their mark on a person. For quite a long time, my life-plan looked like this:
- Grow up
- Become a writer
- Build a house on Perranporth beach
- Live in house on Perranporth beach for ever

Obviously, houses being expensive, this house wasn’t going to be big. (I wasn’t completely clueless.) But since there was only going to be me living in it, that wouldn’t be a problem. Then one day I saw a beach hut, and thought, Yeah. That looks about right. I’ll live in a beach hut. Excellent.

In the years after the deaths of my grandparents, I felt as if my roots had been cut. Cornwall, and the ocean off Perranporth, became hard to visit. I was just a tourist. I felt bereft. Then my parents retired and moved back home to Falmouth, and suddenly I was connected again. My parents moved in September, by October I writing The Beach Hut and by November I was back on Perranporth beach, going for an out-of-season swim in the North Atlantic.

There are no lifeguards outside of the season and the waves get noticeably bigger and if you’re not acclimatised (which I wasn’t) the shock of the cold water can literally stop your heart; but I’m an idiot, so I didn’t worry about any of that. I just wanted to be in the ocean. And once I got past the first panicky minute of oh-my-God-this-is-it-this-is-how-I-die, it was magical. The water felt warmer than the air. I wanted to hide beneath the surface so the wind wouldn’t blow on me. As long as I stayed in the water, I thought I was invincible. My husband had to force me to come out. For hours afterwards I knew I was cold, but I was so high from the endorphin rush I couldn’t feel it. I could only deduce it by noticing that I was bluey-white all over and I couldn’t move my fingers or toes properly. 

Experiencing that urge to do something that could literally be the death of you, because it’s also glorious and you can’t bear not to, was how “The Beach Hut” began. It’s about a brother and sister, Finn and Ava, who build an illegal beach hut on a Cornish beach in the autumn, and the journey that led them there, and it was inspired by a moment that combined danger with a deep sense of coming home.

Thank you very much Cassandra, for your interesting account of Perranporth. It has been a pleasure to host you on Rachel's Random Reads for Cornish Week.

About Cassandra Parkin:

Cassandra Parkin grew up in Hull, and now lives in East Yorkshire. Her short story collection, New World Fairy Tales (Salt Publishing, 2011), won the 2011 Scott Prize for Short Stories. The Summer We All Ran Away (Legend Press, 2013) was Cassandra's debut novel and nominated for the Amazon Rising Stars 2014. Her work has also been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. 

The Beach Hut (Legend Press, 2015) is her second novel.

The Beach Hut by Cassandra Parkin

Amazon UK

It is autumn time and on a peaceful Cornish beach, Finn  and his sister Ava defy planning regulations and achieve  a childhood dream when they build themselves an illegal beach hut. This tiny haven will be their home until Ava departs at Midwinter for a round-the-world adventure. In the town, local publican Donald is determined to get rid of them. Still mourning the death of his wife, all he wants is a quiet place where he can forget the past and raise his daughter Alicia in safety. But Alicia is wrestling with demons of her own.

As the sunshine fades and winter approaches, the beach hut stirs old memories for everyone. Their lives become entwined in surprising ways and the secrets of past and present are finally exposed.