Author Interview – Sue Moorcroft

From the blog of Shelley Wilson:

Shelley Wilson Author

Today I am joined by award winning romance novelist Sue Moorcroft as we chat about Malta, frizzy hair and irresistible heroes.

The Fun Five

1.  What part of the world do you come from?

That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer!  I was born near Monchengladbach in a British Army Hospital so I’m British, not German.  I left Germany when I was six weeks old and went to Cyprus until I was one and a half years old.  Then followed two tours in Malta and two in the UK.  When we left the army I was nearly ten and we settled in Northamptonshire, where I still live.  So I’m a citizen of the world.

2.  What did you want to be when you grew up?

For a brief time it was a vet but I’m rubbish at science so I don’t think that would have worked.  By the time I was…

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What do I think about the Hobbit films? What are the messages?

I love the Hobbit films. I love all the Lord of the Rings films, too. They’re high in escapism, adventure, humour and effects. As the final part of the Hobbit came out in December I watched the first two again at home so that I was happily submerged in Middle Earth before I turned up at my local Odeon.

I wasn’t disappointed. I loved The Battle of the Five Armies just as much as I’d loved An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug. Casting Billy Connolly as Dain II Ironfoot was inspired, riding on a pig and sticking the nut on his enemies while roaring, ‘Oh c’mON!’ (I have to say that a lot exists in the films that Tolkien somehow left out of the books.)

Reflecting on what the films were telling me, I came to some conclusions.

The Hobbit according to Sue:

Good will triumph over evil. Small, ordinary folk, given sufficient motivation, will become heroes, especially when accompanied by stirring music and super slo mo.

Evil apparently exists for its own sake but good is always explored and justified.

Good lives are more important than bad lives. Every lost good life will be mourned as of massive importance. Lost bad lives will be tossed away by the dozen marked only with roars of pain or, for some reason, endearing squeaks.

Good folk can beat enormous odds if the motivation is sufficient.

Loyalty, friendship and love are strong motivators.

Good folk will constantly risk or sacrifice their own lives if for the common good.

Few can overcome the many but it helps if the few are elves.

Sadly, in real life, much of the above is not true. In real life murderers sometimes walk free and thieves prosper, good people suffer at the hands of bad people and good and bad are not black and white. Huge Eagles don’t often swoop in to save us and wizards don’t guide our quests. Our swords don’t even glow blue to warn us of approaching enemies.

Real life, unlike fiction, doesn’t need to make sense.

Maybe that’s why fantastical adventures grip us and transport us? We want to be reassured that good can triumph. We can escape.

And another thought came to me as I watched. All this came from the imagination of one man, J R R Tolkien. His books have been transformed, expanded, extrapolated, developed and interpreted by the imaginations of many into multi-million-dollar success.

It all begins with the writer.