Authors Electric

This month, we saddle up for some racy teenage fiction set in the glamorous world of equine polo. Unbridled by K L McKain " Three couples. Two rival stables. One unforgettable season ." claims the hot pink cover, and this book delivers on all three. Social media princess Bex keeps her string of four polo ponies at Lord Langdon's stables, where they enjoy the best of everything - including, if Bex gets her own way (and she usually does), the handsome Langdon heir Freddie. Her friend Luella is a faithful cheerleader to Bex's enviable lifestyle, until Luella begins a secret romance of her own with a talented groom at the rival Balfour estate. Into this den of equestrian rivalry comes horse-crazy Carrie, who lands her dream job at the Langdon stables and quickly draws the attentions of Freddie. Their romance blossoms, however snogging the boss's son means jeopardising her position and making an enemy of jealous Bex. With a big match for the Guillards Cup approaching, ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. AI images avoided.   Fiction reflects life in all its shades of grey (I believe someone once thought there were fifty of those and then considered there were another fifty after that). At either end of the spectrum, fiction has its light and dark sides.  I’ve written both kinds in my flash and short story work. Indeed when I was putting my debut flash fiction collection together, the moods of the stories inspired the title, From Light to Dark and Back Again . This was also useful as the moods of the stories helped me with my ordering for this collection.  I always prefer writing and reading the lighter side of fiction but know that for some of my characters at least, the darker side of the spectrum is where they “fit”. This is due to their being of a darker nature or their situation is such the likely outcome will be on the darker side. The important thing here is it will ring true and that truth matte...

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 first 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 da...

  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...