Author Interview with Lindsay J. Sedgwick
Today I am super excited as I get to share my interview with Lindsay J. Sedgwick, author of the Wulfie series! Book 1, Wulfie: Stage Fright, was released last September and book 2, Wulfie: Beast in Show, is released on 4th March. These are two very fun looking books, plus there are more to come in the series!
Libby lives with her mean step-brother, Rex, who tells her scary stories so she can’t sleep. At school she is a loner. All Libby wants is a best friend – and to get revenge on Rex.
Libby’s life changes forever when she finds, in an old trunk in her bedroom, a little purple wolf-like creature named Wulfie.
Wulfie can talk. He can grow as big as a bear or shrink down as small as a snail. He’s sweet and kind, but he loves to get into trouble.
1. Where do you get your character's names? Are any inspired by real people you've met?
I created the character of Wulfie and the stories for my daughter Libby as bedtime stories from when she was around four, and since they were all ad-libbed, she had to be the main character and so she still is. As she grew up, she yearned for a best friend, but she was also bullied in school and that became an integral part of the story. The fictional Libby would be resilient, she would not only have a best friend in Wulfie but, because of him, she’d make another best friend at school called Nazim; she would get stronger and more confident as the series progressed. Alongside my own daughter!
As for Wulfie, my purple friend, his full name is Wolfgang Amadeus Rachmaninoff the Third... It just sounded fun! I discovered the composer Rachmaninoff on a work exchange as a journalist to Sverdlovsk in Russia in 1990 – although had to leave my records behind because the family I’d stayed with presented me with a huge samovar. (Which also features in the Wulfie books, in Dad’s Inventing Room.) Wolfgang Amadeus, well I use the film Amadeus when I teach screenwriting and the fact it has ‘wolf’ in it helps. But the nickname Libby gives him, Wulfie is spelt as it is because he’s a wulfen, from the planet Lupuslandia. The only purple one born in 300 years.
Jack, for the dad, I have to be careful about. It’s just such a friendly name that I tend to overuse it as a fall back ‘dad-name’ while Nazim is the name of a good friend; the illustrations Josephine Wolff did of him are based on a photo he sent me of himself aged ten! Aunt Ilda, I made up – her real name is Hildegarde and I have no idea why! It sounded like a very disciplined sort of name.
2. I think it would be so much fun to have my own magical creature helping me get out of trouble. Did you ever wish you had one? What kind of animal would you want if you could have your own?
Oh I think we’d all like to have one! Growing up, I loved the scene in the book The Once & Future King by TE White where Merlin teaches the young Arthur life skills and knowledge by transforming him into a fish, in a bird... now that would be awesome! And what a way to homeschool!!
I’m not sure what sort of magical creature I’d have chosen as a child, but now that Wulfie exists, I’d like him. The fact that he can grow big enough to take you on a gallop over rooftops and yet could smuggle himself to school hidden in your ear – Libby only discovers he’s there when he snores in maths class! – feels adorable. He is incredibly loyal and lovely, would he could be frustrating because he’s incapable of sitting still but then he’d eat all our dirty clothes, which could be handy! (Our laundry basket is still called Wulfie!)
But then again, having a crow that could talk would be awesome, or a small dragon that could take you flying.
3. Is Libby anything like you as a child?
I was bookworm at the tail end of a large family (8) and most of my siblings had left home by the time I was six so. My parents were in their 50s by then so I did spend a lot of time alone, as Libby does at the start of the series. I was always reading and writing – and Libby seems to do a lot of creative projects for school! - I did get bullied in school, and didn’t seem to fit in, so I guess she has aspects of me. But I didn’t have anything like her home-life and I am utterly useless at housework!
Also, I never did find a Wulfie. The trunk I opened when I was nine held treasures from my parent’s wartime past, from when they were in the RAF and WAAF during the Second World War. – gas masks, the kit pilots have in case they have to parachute over enemy territory and diaries which – I still grieve this! – they burned after reading them to each other.
4. I've seen the book described as a Cinderella-type story, did you think of this at all as you were writing the books?
I was aware of it – as writers we know that myths and fairy tales can provide structure – and I am a step mother myself to two young people and a grandchild. I was wary of going the ‘evil step mum’ route, but it felt better than for Libby to have a mum who disliked her.
But the similarity is only in the set up. It’s a contemporary story and Libby has agency, so it diverges pretty quickly and there’s no magical ‘rescue’ from her family situation. She simply becomes stronger and braver and more equipped to deal with (and improve) her life in every story. While having fun!
Veronika, her step mum is narcissistic, slightly dim and ambitious but – as we learn in the second book – there is a reason for the way she is. Also, because she’s so nasty to Libby, she will always be the author of her own downfall!
5. Was it hard to think up new things for Wulfie to do in your second book, Beast in Show?
No! I was working on an idea for the second book when I met Little Island the first time about book 1 and I think that’s why they commissioned two at the time, and then I was prewriting that book when they commissioned another two. Wulfie has been part of my life and my daughter’s life in one form or another for the past 15 years so I have boxes of springboards and ideas, waiting to spring to life!
The third book is at polishing stage now – it’ll be out in Sept – and the first draft of the fourth book is due April, to be published March 2022. It is such a gift to be able to bring the whole world to life, to build it up tale by tale! (Books five and six are germinating somewhere at the back of my imagination, just in case!)
Lindsay J. Sedgwick is an award-winning screenwriter who has written for film, TV, games and apps. She is the creator of the ground-breaking series Punky, the first mainstream animation series worldwide in which the central character has special needs (Down’s Syndrome). Two series later, it has won multiple awards and is available in over 100 countries with circa 5 million hits on YouTube.
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