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November challenge for aspiring authors10/31/2023 Have you been mentored or particularly encouraged by anyone? It was a fantastic leap of faith on Sharmaine’s part to say “I believe in you, you can write – go away and do it.” I needed someone to do that. What do you need to work? I need boringness – for nothing to be happening. What do you think about the world of books and publishing in 2020? I think it’s our great hope! Dialogue Books, Merky Books, Jacaranda Books – all of these imprints are now around, looking for people with different and very valid voices. They may give up on me after this book comes out – who knows?” I’ve tried to give up on them, but I really can’t. They’re still Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they think I’m stupid: I was taught the “truth” and decided to go against that. They’re wonderful people – just very different. My family isn’t at all literary and when I told them I had a novel coming out, one uncle asked if I’d had a ghost writer. I quit an engineering degree in 2002 to write. When did you start writing? I was always encouraged by my English teacher to write, but Witnesses don’t encourage any kind of creative application, so it was a real conflict. Books have just always been the thing I’ve never been able to escape words. What made you want to be a writer? I was raised studying the Bible with adults – and it’s the greatest book ever, right? So my literacy accelerated at a very young age. Mendez lives in Hampstead and is studying for an MA in black British writing at Goldsmiths. Mendez had met her at a party in 2012, but it wasn’t until he read about Dialogue that he followed up: “I sent her a sprawling 300-page manuscript on her first day,” he laughs. Rainbow Milk will be published by Dialogue Books, a Hachette imprint founded in 2017 to publish under-represented voices, headed up by Sharmaine Lovegrove. “There are things that happened to me in it, but the details are far different.” He spent several years transforming his experiences into fiction: “There were times when to write something directly autobiographical would have simply been to bleed my heart out on to the page,” he says. Like Jesse, Mendez moved to London and became a male escort and sex worker, part of a journey of self-discovery that forms the core of his beautifully assured book. Like his protagonist, Jesse, Mendez was raised in the Black Country as a Jehovah’s Witness, and “disfellowshipped” by the group at 17. They say write what you know – and 37-year-old Paul Mendez had plenty of material to draw on for his first novel, Rainbow Milk.
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