Interview II: Sherri Browning Erwin

Sherri Browning Erwin

We love reading and thinking beyond the book, and behind the book. So it is always a great pleasure when we can ask an author some of our own burning questions. Sherri Browning Erwin has been good enough to allow us to interview her for a second time! She always has such fun answers. Don’t forget to enter for a chance to win an autographed copy of Grave Expectations.

 

Do you develop New Year’s resolutions as a writer? What might they be if you do?

I set goals. I try to write ten pages a day, unless I’m editing. I usually give myself weekends off, but that probably won’t happen until after July due to tight deadlines on a three book series. It’s going to be a busy 2013.

Having written a previous mashup with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre what differences or challenges did you encounter mashingup with Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations?

More than half of writing a great mash-up is probably being a great editor, and it’s hard to edit Charles Dickens– but necessary, because most people dreaded having to read Dickens in school and a mashup needs to be more fun than the original. I’m probably in the minority, but I find Charles Dickens to be laugh-out-loud funny at times. The biggest challenge for me was in trying to bring out some of Dickens’s wit and match it with my own. 

Which was your favorite character to develop?

I felt there was so much to explore in Estella. Dickens presents her as a bit cruel and insensitive. I wanted to explore what made Pip so in love with her and maybe try to bring out a few of her better qualities. She is a survivor in a world that devours women, as far as she has been taught by Miss Havisham. I wanted to give her a chance to be a fighter and not a victim.  

What do you think Pip’s New Year’s resolutions might be as he’s written in your story? 

Pip would resolve to be better to the people who have loved him unconditionally. 

Are there any other mashups on the horizon?  

No mashups in the plan for now, but I’m always thinking of things I would like to try, like Game of Thrones with Jane Austen characters (the Bennets would be the Starks, with their own motto “spinster is coming”) and I don’t rule out more mashups in the future. 

 

What would you have liked us to ask Erwin? What do you think about the idea of an Austenesque Game of Thrones

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