Q1. Hello, can you please introduce yourself? Readers would love to know more about you.
A1. My name is Eoin Leydon O’Connor, I’m a fiction writer from Sligo, Ireland. I have always wanted to be a novelist ever since I was a kid. Both my parents are big book readers, so I got my love of literature from them. The idea of being able to create an entire world with characters just by using a pen and paper was like magic to me. The fact that you could do it anywhere at any time was brilliant. When I was sixteen, my short story Bullets (one of the short stories in Rural Tales) won 1st place in the under-19s category at the Allingham Short Story competition in 2014. This was the very first time I’d ever received validation for my work, really. I went to college to study a Bachelor of Arts in Writing & Literature in 2017, where I studied writing, both fictional and academically. I studied screenwriting, playwriting, poetry, modernism and postmodernism to name a few. Over the years on the course, I’d compiled several short stories that I wanted to publish. After graduating from college, I studied a Masters of Arts in Creative Practice. In 2023, I decided to try and self-publish my own work on Amazon and hence ‘’Rural Tales’’ was born.
Q2. What were the key challenges you faced while writing your book “Rural Tales”?
A2. The biggest challenge was more so publishing the book. Writing each of the stories was enjoyable and I’ve always liked to edit my own work as well as other people’s. Since this was my first time self-publishing, a friend of mine named Lyndsey Gallagher, who writes contemporary romance novels and self-published on Amazon as well, was able to give me some pointers and guide me in the right direction. I had to figure out the formatting and buying an ISBN as well as trying to price the book and organise the marketing all myself. All of this can be tough if it’s your first time, but it was all worth it.
Q3. What books or authors have most influenced your own writing?
A3. I’m a big fan of Stephen King, so I think he has influenced my writing over the years. I’ve also read Cecelia Ahern and love her sense of humour in her books. As a child I read R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and The Nightmare Room book Don’t Forget Me, which really freaked me out. All of these have definitely affected how I write.
Q4. What’s your favourite spot to visit in your own country? And what makes it so special to you?
A4. I love visiting The Burren in Co Clare, because of how its landscape inspired Tolkein to create Middle Earth in Lord of The Rings and C.S. Lewis to create Narnia. I visited it during a misty, rainy day and it looked like something straight out of LoTR, even inspiring me to write one of my own horror shorts.
Q5. What inspired you to write the book ‘Rural Tales’?
A5. I had been having something of a creative blockage – writer’s block if you will – during my second year of college. I was working with author Eoin McNamee as he was mentoring us students on writing fiction. He showed me a page from the UK missing persons website where the body of a man had been found in the woods, hanging from a tree with yellow cable. All the brand names on the man’s clothing had been cut off, which made me wonder if he had done it himself. I asked Eoin McNamee if he thought someone had strung the man up there to make it look like a suicide, to which Eoin smiled and said; ‘That’s how your imagination works, Eoin.’ He told me that the image of that man’s body was vivid in my mind’s eye and to try and draw from that for inspiration. His advice was to think about my own upbringing in Sligo and to try and use that in my writing. Not long after our conversation, 4 different ideas for short stories popped into my head. These ended up being the first 4 short stories in Rural Tales. I wrote them all back to back before the 5th came along and before I knew it, I had 8 stories that I could publish.
Q6. How long did it take you to write your book ‘Rural Tales’?
A6. I started writing the first 5 short stories in October 2018, with the 6th and 7th having already been written from when I was a teenager of about sixteen. The eighth and final one came about a year later, around the summer of 2019. So overall it was about a year in the making.
Q7. On what platforms can readers buy your books?
A7. Readers can get ahold of Rural Tales on Amazon, both in paperback and Ebook for their Kindle. It’s also available on Google Books.
Q8. Tell us about the process of coming up with the book cover and the title ‘Rural Tales’?
A8. I had figured out the title ‘Rural Tales’ I think during Covid, when I was at home during lockdown. The cover of the book was something I spied while scrolling through a website called Canva, where you can create your own book cover, editing the photographs and altering them to suit you. Most of the stories I had written took place in rural Ireland, hence the name and the cover of the countryside.
Q9. When writing a book how do you keep things fresh, for both your readers and also yourself?
A9. As I come up with ideas and try to flesh them out, I always try to be experimental and push myself to put a unique spin on whatever I’m writing. I don’t want to write something that seems cliche and tired, because I think readers pick up on that very quickly. Especially in the Horror genre where people are very familiar with all the tropes and cliches that get passed around. I would say I’m quite picky about what I choose to read and watch, so when I try to write, I want to come up with an idea that will interest people and make them want to read on, because they haven’t quite seen something like it before. That way, it’s more fun to write and hopefully will be to read as well.
Q10. What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing?
A10. People have told me and others that you need to let yourself write a first draft that is terrible and then rewrite it to make it better. I used to fret about making the first draft perfect, but now I think I’m better at just writing it all down, knowing I can come back and fix it up in the next draft. Working with that in mind definitely helps assuage your fears that you’re no good.
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