Authors Electric

Advert in the tiny airport at Canaima, Venezuela, complete with glorious spelling mistake. With the world in turmoil, and shortly about to embark on a holiday to Cyprus we booked last year, it struck me as a subject worth discussing. We all write dramatic scenes from time to time, and as England isn’t the riskiest place in the world we frequently use faraway destinations. As always, I prefer to write from personal experience, as online research can only go so far. It’s the smells and tastes that often enliven writing. Although we may not recall them as well as we do the visual and the auditory, that’s why they are important and they can be very powerful memories. Woodsmoke always takes me back to my fist visit to Zakopane, in Poland, with my father in, 1965. The smell was everywhere, and not unpleasant. No central heating then, just tall wood-burning stoves that heated a room to perfection. The same stoves they had in Ukraine, where I’ve been three times, and is now one of the most dan...

  May is only the beginning of a ride I believed I had taken before and urgently need to take now. In my 15 years of publishing on Kindle I'd always loved the writing part but had always moved on to the next book as an award-winning writer between publishers and agents without bothering to market or hustle my work. But something remarkable happened as I approached two milestones. My first Kindle book, Nobility, had never been available in paperback. Something about rights management had condemned it to only digital status. But this book had always been special to me and had had a curious history, sitting for years on the desks of publishers and agents. Too short. Too dark as a Christmas thriller with a hard-won happy ending (written long before the wave of dark and violent Yule movies). I'd drawn up a long list of other short books sold as novels instead of novellas. No market for a story of a broken man who'd betrayed his country and an angel who's no angel against a b...

  As winter comes to a close and the sun gathers in strength it seeks out every nook and cranny to illuminate the drifts of dust that have accumulated there over the darker months. Windows that on a grey January or February morning were perfectly translucent are now covered with an almost invisible film, unnoticed until a ray of sunshine sneaks into the room, sending the dust motes dancing and igniting a small flare of guilt about my lack of housekeeping. It’s not that I don’t clean, I do, but I am probably not as thorough as I might be. A friend gave me a mug which says “Housework never killed anyone but why take the risk.” I use it most mornings for the first cup of tea of the day and it never fails to make me smile. I don’t believe that housework is deadly, but it is deadening in its relentlessness, for no sooner has the dust been removed from one surface that it floats down again and a recently hoovered carpet is a magnet appeal for stray bits of fluff and other detritus....

T here are novels that tell a story, and then there are novels that carry the weight of history, identity, and moral urgency.   When All the Girls Stopped Singing   is firmly the latter. Spanning continents and generations, it follows Zora Monro as she is pulled from a carefully constructed life into a truth that is as dangerous as it is necessary. I spoke with Susan Burgess-Lent about voice, responsibility, and what it means to write toward the realities many would rather not face. Dianne Pearce: Without giving too much away, what is   When All the Girls Stopped Singing   about? Susan Burgess-Lent:   When All the Girls Stopped Singing   follows Zora Monro, a Washington, DC human rights advocate whose carefully constructed life unravels after her mother’s sudden death. What begins as grief soon becomes a revelation. Hidden files and cryptic notes expose a long-buried secret about Zora’s origins, one that stretches from America’s fraught racial history to a...

Tomorrow we meet in a pub, with no alcohol, to say goodbye to a friend. We first met Heidi when our children were at primary school together. It was a very small village school where I can remember being on first name terms with all the other parents. Some of us ran an after school club together. Heidi was part of this. She was musical, artistic, imaginative, affectionate, alternative. Sometimes her suggestions were a bit fey. Sometimes she didn’t turn up when we expected her. Heidi was a single mother with a single child, Oliver, who she loved dearly. He too was musical, artistic, affectionate, full of enthusiasms, never quite in the mainstream. Sometimes they were very late for school. Occasionally Heidi wasn’t there when it was time for the children to go home. Once or twice I went to Heidi’s house and couldn’t make her hear me. There was a day when she started to tell me how unhappy she was. People occasionally made remarks. I began to worry about her. I was also the school governo...

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post, or even dedicate much time to writing. IT issues, both parents ending up in hospital at different times and needing help, coupled with increased work pressures mean I’ve barely written anything for the last six months. Things are settling, though, finally. Parents on the mend, work settled, and have a new laptop all configured with backups restored at last; I got the last few pieces sorted out over the Easter weekend and can now return to scratching that itch I get when I don’t write for a while. On the plus side, I’ve got a notebook full of random jottings I’ve managed to get on paper, and feel sure there’ll be something in there I can use in future work. I’ve not been completely dormant, though. I’m around 10k words from revising the third draft of my Young Adult adventure set in the Middle East. (As a wee side note, my wife has pointed out that my timing is impeccable – I was gearing up to launch a dystopian YA adventure set a few ...