Lighter Shades of Grey (17 page)

How many times have you read this book?

About twelve

Do you have the Kindle edition or the paperback?

Both. My paperback copy is now very scribbled on so I can’t even sell it on to someone else.

Did you enjoy it?

Well, it certainly amused me no end. Although possibly not in quite the way its author intended. But it made me laugh, a lot, and that’s never a bad thing

So what’s your favourite part?

Page 457.

What’s so great about p457?

It features seven items from my Fifty Shades Bingo Card:

• A hair reference
  

• A hair eroticisation
  

• A “Holy shit”
  

• An “oh my”
  

• A lip-nibble
  

• A blush
  

• An Inner Goddess
  

Will you be reading the sequels?

Oh, definitely. I always finish book sequences. Even when I hate them (and to be fair, I didn’t hate this one). You know how some people have to run marathons? I’m like that, only with books

Do you think EL James will mind you writing this book?

I doubt it. I imagine selling 10 million copies worldwide renders you immune to the snarkiness of others

Are you jealous of her success?

Well, what do you think?

Cassandra Parkin was born and raised in Hull, and has spent most of her life tiptoeing around the knowledge that she has always wanted to write for a living. She has been writing for as long as she can remember – often in the backs of schoolbooks and notebooks, generally as presents for family and friends, and mostly on the sly while she was supposed to be doing something else.

She attended York University, after which she somehow managed to parlay an MA in English Literature (specialist subject: eighteenth-century women writers) into a marketing career with a huge, giant company that made everything (applications for specialist knowledge of eighteenth-century women writers: limited). She then spent upwards of a decade adding to her day-job by taking on any writing assignment she could find. In the fronts of the notebooks she wrote presentations, copy for promotional leaflets, information for websites, scripts for conference videos (to briefs like, “Look, I don’t really know what I want, just – just make it funny, okay? And try and include the phrase
whale’s vagina
. Preferably in Alex’s bit”), a mad, rage-filled Beckett-esque playlet about the seething black emptiness at the heart of corporate life (which was performed at a motivational meeting) and mendacious personal statements for other people’s CVs. In the backs of the same notebooks, she wrote a weekly journal for her grandmother about the highs and lows of raising children, spurious replies to customer complaints, parodies of popular literature of the day, imagined correspondence between public figures, and novels and short stories for friends.

After about fifteen years of comprehensively not listening to people telling her she should try and find a publisher (sorry, guys. I can see how this must have been annoying), she has finally conceded that maybe she didn’t know better than everyone else put together after all. Her short story collection “New World Fairy Tales” was the winner of the 2011 Scott Prize for Short Stories, and her work has also been published in a number of magazines and anthologies.

She is a committed reader and reviewer of genre fiction (especially bad genre fiction) and is rarely happier than when deconstructing other people’s unusual writing choices for the “Adventures in Trash” strand on her blog at
www.cassandraparkin.wordpress.com
. She is married with two children, and has recently acquired two cats (taking her one step closer to fulfilling her clear genetic destiny of Mad Old Cat Lady). She lives in a small but perfectly-formed village in East Yorkshire.

Collca is an electronic publisher specialising in non-fiction bitesize ebooks for popular ereading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, Apple's iPad, Barnes & Noble's Nook and Kobo's eponymous ereader. We cover a wide range of subjects including biography, health, reference, sport and travel. Our titles are available from hundreds of popular ebook retailers all around the world.

We currently publish five series of ebooks:

• BiteSize Biography
  

• BiteSize History
  

• BiteSize Religion
  

• BiteSize Travel
  

• In the Footsteps of….
  

In addition we publish a number of titles that do not fit into any of the series.

We also publish a number of apps for Apple's iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch devices. These are mainly history titles in the following series:

• History In An Hour
  

• The Irish Story
  .
  

We're always keen to find additional authors to help us expand of our publishing programme.
 
If you would like to know more about writing for us, please visit 
www.collca.com/writeforus
.

To find out more about Collca including up-to-date details of all our titles, please visit our website at 
www.collca.com
.

You can also follow us on Twitter at 
www.twitter.com/collca
.

Collca
An imprint of Collca Limited
24 Comforts Farm Avenue
Oxted, Surrey, RH8 9PB, England
www.collca.com

First published in 2012 by Collca

This edition published in 2012 in Great Britain by Collca
Main text copyright © Cassandra Parkin 2012
Quotes from
50 Shades of Grey
© E L James
Rope cover image © Henry Bonn – Fotolia

All rights reserved

EPUB Edition ISBN: 978-1-908795-40-3
Kindle Edition ISBN: 978-1-908795-41-0

The moral right of the author is asserted

All rights reserved. This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent. No part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Collca Limited.