Darren Hobson’s Poetry Tails were published in September. Our next feature author is very interesting person as you will see during the interview. He;s got very strong personal opinion, which heavy influenced his writings.

– What is your book Poetry tails about?
– My book is what it says on the label, a book of poetry, a collection of poetry to be correct, obviously it is spelt incorrectly because I play with words, I write a lot of poetry about cats who have tails, and that is why on the cover there is a tail!

– How did you decide to write the story?
– Basically I have been writing at almost full steam since the summer of 2013, a lot of my poems were normal poems about love and cats and the rest but some of the poems ending up being special, sort of short stories in poetry form, so I decided to have a dedicated book to my short stories.
– What was the biggest challenge during the write up process?
– My biggest challenge is just finding the time to write everything down, I think daily about writing and a lot of poems get lost in my head, if I can get my idea down quickly then I have no problem, more than half of my ideas are lost because I forget them!
– Tell us something more about your main character? Is it close to someone from your real life?
– There is no main character, just a collection of poetry, some of my poems could be about me, or a part of me, it is hard to explain how much of me is in my poetry, that is for the read to figure out.

– How much time did you need to finish the story and to publish it?
– Like I wrote above, I have been writing a lot since summer 2013 so it basically took me twelve months to write, the idea for the name of the book was known since spring 2014, and at that time was half ready, it was just a case of finding enough material to get to one hundred pages, maybe I wrote a couple of classical poems and every so often an epic poem was born, I even wrote a couple of poems in the dentist waiting room, the muse from Calabria was having a few things done over ninety minutes, I just sat in the corner and wrote, one of these poems ended up in the book Poetry Tails, how many authors do you know that have written in the dentists waiting room?
– Which is you most popular book?
– With this current market my “best seller” is actually not for sale but is free, when I decided to split my collection of poetry I had the idea to publish the eBook “Just the beginning” which sold just 2 copies, mainly because I am an unknown poet and my original artwork was not good enough to sell to the distributor , so with a standard cover I tried to sell a book and obviously failed, to help sales I issued a mini eBook for free, and that was called “Just For Free” and at the last count was at 200 downloads, which is good but did not help sales of the main poetry eBook, I used another small eBook “Pushing my luck” no sales, then another small eBook “Summer and other horrors” , I was trying all ways to make a selling but nothing sold. That is when I decided to use a different self-publisher and sell a book with an option of its little sister eBook, So in September I finally launched my first proper book Poetry Tails, currently not selling in the states, only three sales in England and the other twenty I bought personally and those I am selling to work colleagues and friends. Unhappy with the length of waiting for a reply from my previous self-publisher I decided to stop sales of most of my eBooks on sale, I then took all the material, added a couple of new poems and issued my second paperback with createspace Just.

– Who are you?
– Me? I am just an angry young man lost somewhere in his life trying to understand what this thing is called life and why we should all suffer as we do, was we really born to work forty hours a week, being slave driven by some idiot who is power made and who does not sleep at night because he is constantly thinking of ways to improve the working environment? An angry young man who cannot believe the amount of corruption and bad spending of tax payers’ money, the world is a fragile place and I cannot believe that people still treat the world as they do, I am a man in love and a man struggling with keeping himself happy whilst all around him is destruction.
– What are your writing habits?
– I basically think of something, a topic, a word an idea, and that becomes a long epic poem, I do not build poems like some egocentric Lego enthusiast, I start a poem and I finish it, most of the time in ten minutes, most of the time with pen and paper, and when I write it down on the computer, only then does it become edited. I am not one of those people who takes a thousand days to plan a short poem, no, I write until I run out of words, I run out of paper, I run out of time because it was time to eat or drink or something.
– Are you satisfied by the sales of the book and do you plan another one?
– I am not a person that is satisfied very easy, I started writing poetry in 1990 with poems published here and there, I have never been satisfied with my poetry, I have never thought my poetry was good enough for the wider market, I thought it was funny when people wanted to use my work in poetry anthologies, my other half, the muse from Calabria insisted I should write more and put my work “out there”, now after seeing what “out there” is like I have the constant itching to take every social site down and cancel everything I have ever written, why? There is too much self-publishing out there, I checked on Amazon the other day with the query, how many poetry books was published in the last thirty days, try it, for me it was not a positive answer, it makes it impossible for someone to get noticed.
– What are you doing to promote your book by the best possible way?
– Banging my head against the wall is what I am doing, it has more effect than selling a self-published paperback book, I am on twitter, facebook, pinterest, google+, goodreads, blogs on wordpress, basically publishing adverts over my social media, another avenue is trying to get some free advertising in England where I was born, hopefully for Halloween a local blog in Preston will publish one of my poems in the hope I can generate some interest.
– You are living currently in Rome. What are your most favorite places in the legendary city?
– Rome is not just the coliseum, it is a whole lot more, every inch of Rome is a museum and like most other things in Rome and Italy is treated badly, monuments are falling down, ruined by bad weather and pollution, and when they do decided to invest in restoring a monument half the money is stolen in corruption, my poems reflect all of this, I live one hour from Rome but it is difficult to get to, local transport is run down, unreliable and a pain in the ass, to drive to Rome is an option but with all that traffic it is also difficult, if you are a tourist wanting to go to Rome you have to be very careful, everybody wants to steal from you, the government, taxis, hotels and restaurants and the change in your pocket will be stolen on the crowded buses, I love Rome but it has become infested in bad management, which is really bad for business.
– When you decide to become a self-publishing author and was it tough for you to learn through all the processes?
– Of course it was, I am still learning, you just have to keep plodding on, try different things, every word and every photo is a tool and can be used to your advantage, use it wrong and like a knife you will cut yourself raw.
– How did you find the themes of your poetry?
– I get inspired by many things worldwide events or things in my backyard, just watching the cats would make anyone laugh, I just write about them because it is part of my life, I get inspired by the music I love too, everything I love in the media is related to horror, films books and music, so I get inspired by this also.
Some people cannot believe we have this idea, where our ideas are constantly grim, Halloween for some begins and ends that night, but we live our lives every day, we join the dots between the real and surreal, the natural and the supernatural, everything we see today was once just magic, a plane flying? Witchcraft? No reality, we try to put out there more questions than answers, we try to open doors to new worlds, we underline and we redefine.
– If you may ask yourself one question in the interview what it will be? (Don’t forget to answer)
– I am not a person who asks himself a question, mainly because all the answers I have already replied, but I never reply directly, that would be too easy, like my poetry themes, I never hit a subject head on, I generally enter by the back door and surprise the theme when it was having a brew, I always try to look at things in a different way, a different angle, love poems are all the same, poems of mine are never going to be normal, I am never going to write a poem with the fear that my verses are out of order, I write in poetry form, I write long poems, some people do not like poems longer than sixteen lines, for me sixteen lines is a pop song that lasts two minutes, a pop song that says the same two words one hundred times, my poems are pure rock n roll, I have a story to tell, a grim tale to tell, and if it takes me one thousand words to tell you, than so be it, I am not a person who speaks a lot, the muse from Calabria gets angry with me for the lack of conversation, but give me a pen and wad of paper and I will write you an epic piece to rival Dante and the Greek poet Homer.

Check out more about Darren Hobson at his Blog
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Take a look at his books:

Poetry Tails
Just: A Big Brilliant Basic Poetry Book