Authors Electric

This month I'm reading some non-fiction aimed at adult readers: The Spell of the Horse and its sequel The Spirit of the Horse . The author Pam Billinge offers Equine Assisted Therapy with her small herd of horses and ponies, which together with the associated Equine Assisted Learning are becoming more popular in the UK as beneficial therapies. Simply being around horses, it seems, works wonders for people, and with the guidance of a trained facilitator time spent with the herd can be as powerful as any conventional medicine. These two books combine Pam's personal equine journey with selected case studies (names and details changed to protect clients) to make an interesting and digestible read.  The Spell of the Horse The Spell of the Horse  begins with Pam bonding with a mare called Carabella on a riding holiday in Spain, and noticing how her own horse reacted when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As the book progresses, we meet the various equines that have acc...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. It is ironic the longest month ever, January, is followed by the shortest, February. Writing wise, it gives me the shortest time to prepare my next author newsletter, due in March, but I discovered long ago the joys of drafting in advance so I add to my draft as the month goes on. I do likewise for my blogs and articles. It takes the pressure off.   I enter a number of reputable flash fiction and short story competitions in the year. It’s fun to do and a great challenge (and I always look for those where it is free or the fee is reasonable).    I’ve found it useful to take a week off any official deadline and make that the day I submit my entry. I pencil into my diary when I need to have my first draft done by, my first edit, my second one, and the final one to check for those pesky typos which have escaped the previous edits. I wish I could say there weren’t any but I’ve found it pays to assume there ...

My great-aunt Dorothy, and her mother I used to get a lot of fanmail, in the days when the Divide trilogy had just been published, a fantasy aimed primarily at the 10 – 13 age-group, although there was a lot of subtext intended to appeal to the parents... Apart from all the requests to be sent free books, some of them led to real friendships, even transatlantic ones. I am still in touch with the one that said: I bet you don’t get many emails from 26-year old men.           But I can go back a lot further than 2003. The first stories I ever had published were in the Evening News, a newspaper that is now sadly no more. This one was published in June, 1978. I’ll put what I remember of the letter I received after the story. The other amusing this about it is a photograph I discovered after my mother’s death, of my great-aunt Dorothy. She was the nearest I ever had to a grandmother, and she was huge fun.   The old ton-up fossil There wa...

  AI brings us all to Plan A or Plan B, each of which has its gradations. Plan A, at its extreme, allows the use of AI as an equal or even main partner in the creative process. Hardline Plan A-ers may yield to all of their AI's stylistic suggestions as commands. Along with most of the writers I know,  I find this repulsive. If I want an incomplete sentence or a dangling participle or some dated slang, it's my book and the decision is mine.  Even so, I found myself in a quandary with a completed novel I'd worked on for six years and had had professionally edited. You see, after four traditionally published horror novels, I'd turned to my first love, crime thrillers, and worked in a shorter form--40K words--for more than decade. The short length was a deal breaker for any agent I approached. But I loved working in tight spaces with no padding. So, no tears. My refusal to compromise cost me a traditional career, bringing me to the company of other indie-minded authors. ...

  On a dismal February afternoon, I got to thinking how food plays an important part in all my books. It’s never centre stage, but it often underlines how my characters are feeling, or is symbolic of what is going on in their lives. In “House of Shadows” my time slip novel Jo Docherty has an issue with food. When anxious or stressed, she cannot eat and at the beginning of the book she is struggling with the aftermath of yet another miscarriage and what feels like a failing marriage. Moving away to her studio in the grounds of Kingsfield House she is haunted by a girl in a blue dress, the girl who she played with as a child, but who lived two centuries before Jo was born. As the past encroaches and the sense of menace grows, Jo looks for help. Helene and Cecile have an insight into the occult and the danger that lurks in Kingsfield House, giving Jo hope that somehow she will be able to deal with what she must face. It is at this point that Jo bakes her Florentines. “In the bri...

  Have you been to a poetry reading where some of the poets read in the same way? The stretched pauses. The careful pacing. The slightly mystical cadence. The voice that quietly announces, “This is a poem.” If you have, you'll know that the prior   sentence, in “poetry voice,” would probably sound like this: The voice  that quietly  announces,  “This is a poem.” And it would be read with rising inflection at the end of every line, like everything was a question, or a revelation, or both. A recent  New York Times  piece looks at this, often called the “poet voice,” and asks why so many poets end up reading their work in nearly identical ways.  Poetry lives in two spaces at once. On the page, it’s quiet, interior, personal. Out loud, it becomes physical and shared. Breath matters. Silence matters. Tone matters. Pace matters. The same poem can feel like a different piece of writing depending on how it’s voiced. But sometimes readings by different po...