This guest post was originally postedon Amy's Bookish Life on Tuesday, May 10 as part of the #LadLitBlogTourOn Sunday, before taking my daughter over to the park to enjoy the rare bit of the London sunshine, I was watching a bit of Sunday Brunch (don’t judge me – I’m 38. This is what I do with my life now!), and John Barrowman was talking about the series of YA books he writes with his sister, Carole. At one point he was telling a story of how his sister called him up late one night in tears, crying that she simply couldn’t kill off one of the characters they had created because she had simply grown too attached.
It got my thinking about the characters in my Sex, Love and Dating Disaster series. Who are the characters I simply couldn’t live without in the series?
So for this blog post, I wanted to share with you my top five favourite characters from The Drought and The Flood, and hopefully this will give you a bit of an insight to what lad lit is all about.
Kelly is probably the most challenging character I have to write about, because unlike the other female characters in the books, she is actually quite normal! But with that normality comes great responsibility. With more female readers of my books than male, Kelly is my one chance at proving that I had some knowledge of the female mind (although my wife would argue even that is pretty limited!). But Kelly is crucial to the book, because without her it would simply be Dan listening to a bunch of bad advice from his mates. She brings balance to the crazy world that Dan lives in, and creating a friendship between the two of them has been a lot of fun.
How could you not love a guy who thinks Kama Sutra was the name of a foreign exchange student he went to school with, or believes that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is historically accurate?! I think everyone has a friend like Ollie – the sort of guy who would do anything for you, but is as thick as two short planks! No matter what the situation the boys get themselves into, you can guarantee that Ollie will always say or do the wrong thing to make things even worse. I never get bored of trying to come up with an Ollie one-liner that is even more ridiculous than the last!
With no Dan Hilles, there would be no Sex, Love and Dating Disasters. Dan is the main man of books – the unlucky-in-love fool who can’t catch a break! Whether it’s experiencing a sexual drought in the The Drought or comically stumbling his way through having to date four girls at the same time in The Flood, you can always count on Dan to keep proving beyond doubt that men are definitely not hopeless romantics. We are, in fact, hopeless at romance. A lot of what happens to Dan has either come from personal experiences or those from friends, so he holds a very special place in my heart. For all the wrong reasons!
Denise is without doubt the most unpredictable of characters I have written so far. She was so much fun to write, because you could take her in so many directions depending on the situation. My favourite has to be the train scenes with Dan which has gotten so much positive response from readers because of how funny they are. Denise turns up in The Flood as one of the four women Dan ends up dating, and the fact she is known as a stalker tells you quite a lot already! Along with her ex-boyfriend, Ronnie (who by the way ends up stalking Dan too), I was never short of comical scenarios to stick her in. She was brilliant to write about, and secretly I think I’d like to date her too… just the once though!
Like marmite, you either love Jack, or you hate him, but I have nothing but love for the mouthy, little, cockney-wannabee who is always raring to take the mickey out of someone’s misfortune (normally Dan!). Jack’s relationship with Ollie is another highlight to write, because it pits the big, gormless, giant against the sharp-tongued mini assassin! The king of the chat-up lines with a small-man syndrome, Jack is the guy you probably warn your friends against dating, but can’t help but warm to once you get to know him. He is the little devil that lives inside each and every man, even though we might not show it quite as much as Jack.
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