Authors Electric

Hello there and thank you to Debbie Bennett for the kind invitation to write a guest post for your lovely website. I've taken a while to read the various and interesting posts from many of the authors involved with the site. I came up with several ideas and then scrapped them after seeing similar. Dan Holloway's where you write and what does it say about you, Andrew Croft's computer crisis and vanishing files, Rosalie Warren's idea of allowing her characters to have their own twitter accounts and blogs. All similar ideas to the ones I had. So now I'm stumped. Or maybe not. I've got a few thoughts up my sleeve. One of my regular characters, Roy Cantello, is sitting on my shoulder right now, bending my ear and wanting in on the action. He's itching to get his guitar out of the case to start rocking again. I've foolishly promised him a fourth novel. He was only ever meant to be in a single book, not a series. But due to his attraction (that's...

I recently fired up an old PC to rescue a novel from a zip disk, and in doing so I discovered a lot of old web links from ten or eleven years ago, saved onto the disk along with my novel. Reading through these has given me a lot to think about.   I thought about the ten years since I downloaded those links - life events, changes online and in the real world, successes and failures and other experiences. I looked at my meagre achievements as a writer. And I began to think ten years ahead. Last year, I wrote twenty short stories, one novella, one-and-a-half novels. I built a new blog up to fifty pages and had an article and a book review published in a niche magazine. I work a full-time job. Last year I had an allotment garden and a hobby which took me away from home for a couple of weekends and occupied my spare time in the evenings and weekends for months beforehand. I didn't write nearly as much as I hoped. But I planned my writing around work, around the allotment, arou...

This post has been published in S parks, A Year In E-Publishing - An Authors Electric Anthology 2011-2012 . It has therefore been temporarily reverted to draft status to comply with amazon KDP Select's requirements.

TWICE TIMES DANGER Enid Richemont Here's my latest ebook, originally published by Walker Books. It's a thriller, involving two girls who are doubles, a crazy mongrel called Dracula, a fashion designer who's in deep trouble - and some very scary people. The book's set in West Cornwall , in the little coves and inlets around St Just. To celebrate Chinese New Year - the Year of the Dragon - here are the opening lines of DRAGONCAT, my as-yet unpublished junior novel about a kitten born with extra flaps of skin under its front paws which enable it to glide (a bit like a flying squirrel). The story takes place in and around a small Chinese supermarket in North London. The kittens were born in a cardboard box. Ma showed them to Wing-Yu after breakfast. Wing-Yu tried to pick one up, but Ma wouldn't let him. "They're much too new," said Ma. "You let me hold Mei-Ling," grumbled Wing-Yu. "Mei-Ling was your sister,' sai...

My computer, who I mistakenly believed was my friend, thought it would be funny the other night to hide all my documents, just so that it could watch my face when I came down in the morning and discovered them gone. When it realised that I was not going to see the funny side of this merry jape it took umbrage and flatly refused to tell me where they were. In the end I had no option but to take it to see a man who is better than me at disciplining recalcitrant machinery and he agreed to spend a couple of days persuading it to reveal where it had hidden my life’s work and to teach it the error of its ways. I handed it over and returned home alone. Once my fury at its thoughtless behaviour had abated I found myself missing my friend with an almost physical pain. It is, after all, my closest companion. I probably spend more time with it than I do with my wife, (which is food for thought in itself). As I sat, twiddling my thumbs and thinking of all the work I should be doing, all the messag...

Well, why not? I'm a writer - what I do is make things up and write them down. OK, I accept that an author in today's world can't get far without doing at least some of her own publicity. But for me, however much I may enjoy it, publicising and marketing my books will always be a sideline - one I think of as not quite worthy of my best creative energies. But what if I were to combine the two? That's the thought that struck me a few weeks ago, when I was working on the sequel to my first published novel, Charity's Child (Circaidy Gregory Press, 2008). The main character in the sequel is called Marie-Thérèse, or Marie T, and she is already taking up quite a lot space in my mind, vying for attention with family and friends, as my characters always do. So why not let her loose? Create an account for her on Twitter and encourage her to tweet (possibly lending her a helping hand to build up her followers by retweeting some of her tweets). Give her a Facebook page of her ...

          Blott - the writer's muse who manifests as an ink-blue cat - investigates e-readers ...            I'm cheating a bit here, as Blott is written and drawn by my brother, Adam Price, and not by me.  But I thought it might give people with old and brand new Christmas pressie e-readers a laugh.           More Blot cartoons can be found, most weeks, at my blog: http:// susanpricesblog.blogspot.com /           And at my website: susanpriceauthor.com           There may even be a Blott e-book one day....

My Room in France Several years ago I spent two months living and writing in France. I came away with the first draft of a novel - 80,000 words - and I have to admit that since then I’ve become something of an expert in escaping. Don’t misunderstand me I love my home, my house that’s full of light and looks out over trees and fields to the edge of the Wear Valley. I’m pretty happy with my writing room too – bijoux it may be but it has everything I need as a writer : its full of books, its cosy, warm in winter and has a window with a view (a necessity for me having spent many years working inside prison in rooms with barely any windows to speak of). Yet still I find that writing at home is often difficult; too many other concerns, mainly domestic, intrude and I never feel entirely at ease writing if there’s shopping or cleaning to be done – and I do try to ignore them, believe me. So for me the most inspirational and productive times as a writer are when I can get away. On a day to ...

My ebook of sample chapters  Attention all parents! It struck me the other day that there's a simple answer to the constant parental dilemma What Books To Buy To Get The Kids Reading. Sure, you could stick with what's in Sainsbury's, or Waterstones, or the review sections of the Sunday papers, but don't forget that these are all required by law to feature only children's books which have a name you've already heard of on the cover. There's a far better alternative: yes, the good ol' Kindle! Give your kid a Kindle, or download the Kindle app for their iPod or smartphone, and let them loose in the wonderful world of SAMPLES. They can try the first chapters of dozens, hundreds, thousands of books, and all for free. Even the pickiest of readers is certain to find something they like! Since I've had a Kindle, I've definitely widened the range of stuff I read, all because I can download a couple of chapters at the press of a button. N...

As a children’s author, I’m used to my print books having illustrations so it seemed natural to include pictures when we created my first children’s ebook, Perfectly Pony . But before we could do that, we had to find out how. Behind the scenes, ebooks have more in common with websites than with printed books. Both the mobi and the epub formats use cut-down versions of HTML - the language used to create all websites. Although, as publisher, you have some control over the layout, readers can change the font, the text size and the line spacing so the way a book looks on one person’s Kindle may differ from how it looks on someone else's. That affects the way pictures  display. You can decide where you want them in the flow of text, and you can put a page break just before them to make sure they  appear near the top of the screen. But you can’t control how much text shows on the same page. After experimenting a bit, we decided to use pictures in the book in three ways: 1....

To write is one thing. To cast spells another. How to do it? Aged three years old, I used to tell stories to the children next door, weaving fantasies by means of my imagination. Those children were big ones who went to school and could read and write - but they’d line up on their side of the wall to ask what happened next. They were desperate to know but couldn’t for reasons I didn’t understand figure it out themselves. It fell to me - the little squirt peering over her garden wall - to tell them. There’s a knack to casting spells over the imagination. I didn’t know that then, but I do now. Not everyone can do it. But there are a greater number of people who can than do , and it’s not just the hard work, time and effort required that puts people off. It takes a supreme act of self-confidence to believe that the stories going on inside your head are of interest to anybody else. At three I never questioned that they were, but at nine - when I started my first few secret stories -...

If t wo writers move house, by far the worst job is transferring the books. When we did we hired two guys who cheerfully manoeuvred unwieldy items while we took the small stuff. Finally it came to our books. Hundreds of boxes of books, 20 years' worth of greedy collecting. It was like one of those biblical epics where slaves build the Great Pyramid, block by block, all day. For the first hour we joked with the cheerful chaps about how boring it was. For the rest of the hours after that, we wore lobotomised stares. Publishers are well aware that moving books takes time and money. That - and hundreds of other factors including the size of book that looks good in a shop - means there are certain book lengths that aren’t profitable. As I found when I wrote Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books an d How to Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence . Why I wrote a writing book For years I've critiqued novels, helping new writers to polish their books to publishable stan...

Like a lot of writers I sometimes suffer from an overload of ideas. My notebooks are full of characters and storylines that I never get time to write about and I am always working on at least two projects at the same time. And as I write for children of different ages and adults too this means the ideas can be completely different genres, ages and topics. Take my two ebooks for example, one is a children's fantasy novel and the other is a contemporary romance. And my traditionally published work includes picture books, children’s detective novels, plays, writing courses and romance stories.                                                        Like now, for instance. I’m working on a fanta...