Authors Electric

  Waiting for the Rain. April 2025 was apparently the driest month on record in the UK. Or so the ever smiling, always cheerful weather presenters keep telling us. Day after day they stand in front of picture of an idyllic scene and forecast more of the same in the expectation that viewers will share their joy.   Well this one won’t for a start. Much as I love a warm sunny day, there comes a point when I long for rain. The garden is parched. It’s May and I have to water the pots and containers every evening as well as the herbaceous border I am in the process of planting. Plants put out to harden droop by late afternoon and the sweet peas, which are water hungry, are refusing to climb up their supports. Luckily here at Bridge Leap, we have a hose so watering is not the chore it was in our old house where I had to lug watering cans up to the top of the garden and then gradually work my way down to the outside tap for a refill. It was the relentlessness of the task that I ...

  In her newest book, A WITCH AWAKENS , poet and author Ellis Elliott writes a cozy mystery with unusual characters in it, namely "granny women." So I sat down with Ellis to ask her to tell me exactly what granny women are. Dianne: Ellis, it's so nice to talk again. I so enjoyed your latest book, A WITCH AWAKENS . I was really drawn to the occult and spells and such when I was a young adult, which, apparently, was a while ago now. Your book took me back to that, and made me enjoy it all over again. So, on your book, let’s start with the origin—what first drew you to the idea of the Granny Woman, and how did they find their way into A WITCH AWAKENS ? Ellis: The sparks of an idea for my first cozy mystery novel flew from the unlikely source of the Civil War memoir of my great-great-grandfather. The novel, appropriately titled THE THRILLING ADVENTURES OF DANIEL ELLIS, was published in 1867. Ellis served as a “pilot” guiding Union soldiers, runaway slaves, deserting Confedera...

The Audio Version The first choice was only partly mine. Publisher Adlard Coles was planning an audio version of Stars to Steer By . Who would read it? They suggested three professional narrators which I put to the family vote. One, whose voice was rather light (and pleasant, I thought) was rejected by all except for myself and my oldest granddaughter. The other two -- stronger, more assured, more (or less?) flexible -- split the voters entirely: Francis, who listens to a lot of audio books and who spent a generous amount of time researching samples beyond  the clips we had been sent, headed one faction but the Adlard Coles editorial office AND an equal number of family voters, preferred the other. I began to feel both protective and shy. Stars to Steer By is non-fiction, it’s historical, it’s researched but it’s also, occasionally, personal. My thoughts, my history, my words. I discovered that I wanted to speak them, some of them anyway… the opening for instance: ‘One early eve...

  It’s been a bit of a grumpy month for me. I’ve had the dubious pleasures of AI foisted on me at work, and spent far too long looking for an off switch for it. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never really bought into the hype about AI. I’ve always thought it’s a bit like 3D TV – quite niche, and ultimately not that useful. Because, fundamentally, it’s not really intelligence – it’s just a cleverly programmed algorithm with a vast trove of data to fall back on for pattern matching. I tried to be fair when evaluating it, but gave up after a day when it confidently informed me that the word ‘strawberry’ contained the letter ‘R’ four times, and showed me a picture of a raspberry. It also insisted there were twenty-five years in half a century. Sigh. Despite this, I’ve had a stream of people gushing over it. The most ironic comment was that it would ‘write my emails for me’ – all I had to do was proof read them and correct them… Suggesting it would be as quick to just writ...

 I had the pleasure of two speaking engagements in April. The first was at Sunbury Book Club where I gave a talk titled - From Juliet Bravo to Cagney and Lacey to Happy Valley: Why I write female detectives. I gave an overview of how women were allowed to join the police force in the UK before exploring fictional female detectives on the page and the screen. I then had the chance to talk about my own female detective - DI Bernadette 'Bernie' Noel, before finishing with a little quiz. Then, at Books in the Park Festival in Beckenham, I had the fabulous opportunity to interview Janice Hallett. We talked a lot about her different experiences of writing (journalist, government speech writer, screenwriter and author), as well as look at her latest novel - The Examiner . It was such a lovely festival in a beautiful setting and well worth my while sitting on a tram for 55 minutes to get there! Unfortunately, none of my family could come with me so no photos of the actual event for me....

Here's Aunty Debbie trying out her mother-of-the-bride headwear! What’s new on the internet Problem Pages? Aunty Debbie’s been seeing a lot of posts recently about the great God Amazon blocking or pulling books and terminating accounts. It seems the bots are on the rise and the use of AI isn’t helping.  So why would Amazon want to terminate your account? After all, when you sell books, you make money. And when you make money, Amazon makes money. Not much on each transaction – a commission on the sale, maybe a delivery charge for the ebook, a profit on the cost of printing and shipping physical books – but if you multiple that for every one of your sales and then every account on KDP, and it all adds up to a significant amount of money in Amazon’s coffers.  So there is no reason for Amazon to rain on your parade, is there?  Is there?  Well yes. You see when you set up your Amazon account, there are pages and pages of those pesky little terms & conditions . You kno...