Special Guest Blogger: Victor Hugo

I was one of the most famous French writers of all time, having gifted the world with not just one, but two classics of literature, Les Miserable's and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but i have never really understood why the Les Miserable's novel was chosen to be turned into a musical in the first place, it isn't as if when i walked around the barricades during the June Rebellion, dodging gunfire and thought if i make this into a novel this bit would be ideal for someone to put to music.
Like many writers, i had to deal with procrastination and writer’s block. However, my solution was to strip naked, give my clothes to my servants, and tell them to lock me in a room. I would have to write my pages for the day before i was to be given my clothes back or let outside of the room.
It sort of worked but i did waffle on a bit in my books, it's one reason why The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserable's were so long and Les Miserable's took decades to wrote, i first began writing it in the 1830s, but the book wasn’t published until 1862.
The Hunchback took was written mostly to draw attention to the crumbling Notre-Dame building which it did and people said, 'Hey we should rebuild this place' but even that book took years to write and it took threats from my publisher to finish it. That got turned into an opera so i don't know what it is about my stories that make people want to sing them.
One of the reasons i was so distracted all the time was due to the Prussians who kept threatening us, one time they besieged the city of Paris and we had to resort to eating the animals from Paris’ zoo. No idea what animal i ate but it tasted like chicken which is strange because there was no chickens there.
There was a lot of sorrow in my life, i outlived four of my five children and the only child who outlived me was committed to a mental asylum and i decided there can be no God or heaven when there is so much despair in the world so when i was dying from pneumonia i refused to allow either a priest or even a crucifix at my last rites and demanded a pauper’s funeral rather than get any kind of religious blessing but they gave me an elaborate state funeral with my body laid under the Arc de Triomphe which was attended by more than two million people.
In a nice touch, in honour of the Prostitute Fantine in Les Miserable's, brothel workers wore black and the brothels themselves closed for the day.