Authors Electric

Being a writer is at best for most of us, a part-time job. Really, it’s true. Let’s be honest. We’d love it to be full-time but the reality is that for all of us, life intervenes. It might be that the dogs need walking, a family member needs to be cared for, or we have doctor’s appointments, grocery shopping to be done, or maybe the lawns need mowing or the toilet needs cleaning! Or – we have to go to work. To the job that pays the bulk of the bills. At least that’s what happens in my life. I’m a writer to be sure. I’ve written six books and last year won a silver medal for fantasy in the USA. I currently have two books as finalists in another USA award and that’s affirming. The books, bless them, have had their share of success on Amazon globally, ranking in Top 100 Paid in various categories over the years. Last week, a new historical fiction was published  (Book Two of The Gisborne Saga – Gisborne: Book of Knights ). And in between life’s demands, I’m working on shorts fo...

I have a strange obsession. It's been with me from the age of around 11. My older brother rented some dodgy VCRs from our local video library (hands up anyone old enough to remember VCR?). I was only eleven so my parents (very sensibly) did not allow me to watch them. However, I sneaked out of bed in the middle of the night, slipped a black, chunky video cassette into the recorder and watched it with glee (with my face pressed up to the screen with the volume down low so no one would hear and wake up). Life has never been the same since! The video tape was entitled The Dawn of the Dead . My day job is a Vicar, I am in charge of two small churches in South London. I spend my time leading services, running various community projects and being 'professionally nice' to people. My congregation know I have 'another life' but generally they are too polite to mention it. Every day I get up three hours before Morning Prayer and write grisly horror novels.  My ...

This is a place called Capel Curig, in Wales. What's that got to do with 'Hiraeth' I hear you ask, and what does the word mean, anyway? Well, I'll get to that in a moment.  An on-line friend and I were talking about one day returning to the land where our roots are - hers in Virginia,  mine in rural Wales. It made me think of the old song I remember from my childhood: 'We'll keep a welcome in the hillside, we'll keep a welcome in the vales, we'll kiss away each hour of 'hiraeth' when you come home again to Wales.' We were both feeling a bit 'homesick'.  That's what Hiraeth is - it's Welsh for being homesick for Wales - but more than that - it's a deep longing, really homesickness doesn't come close to the intensity of feeling that 'hiraeth' invokes. For various reasons, shortage of affordable housing in the area where I grew up, and marriage, being two,  I now  live in a beautiful part of England, cl...

     Our regular blogger for the 28th, Enid Richemont, is indisposed , so we're grateful to Kathleen Jones for bringing us this interview with thriller writer, Rachel Abbott.. . (and to Lynne Garner for scheduling it!) The Back Road -  Rachel Abbott I've just been reading Rachel Abbott's new thriller The Back Road , and I'm very impressed by it.  I'm also curious to know what's behind an Indie best-seller.  Rachel works very hard and is very professional and I'm anxious to learn as much as possible. 1.      Rachel, I know that - like me - you spend quite a lot of your working life in Italy.  Do you find it disruptive going to and fro?  How do you find the atmosphere of Italy affects your ability to work?  What are the drawbacks, from a research point of view, of being in one place and writing about another? When we found our home in Italy we were really fortunate because from the day...

This month the body of James Martin was found floating off his private island in Bermuda . Although the press immediately rang in the hope of digging up some “suspicious circumstances”, it seems more likely that a man of eighty going for a vigorous swim in the sea died of natural causes. I knew him on and off for twenty years. Although many years would elapse between the times we would spend together, I am sad to think I won’t see him again. He was a true original. Last time I saw him was at a very splendid, private, “candle-lit”, dinner in one of the grandest Pall Mall Clubs, where he was talking about the future of the planet and of mankind. It was a talk I had heard him give many times, but it was none the less galvanising for that. In the opening lines of his best-selling thriller, "The Ghost", Robert Harris quotes me as saying: "Of all the advantages that ghosting offers, one of the greatest must be the opportunity that you get to meet people of interest...

As I strolled along the beach yesterday, paddling in rockpools and generally being the four-year-old I still am at heart, an idea 'happened' in my head. From nowhere, apparently, it burst upon me and grew into a plan for the sequel to Charity's Child. Not the sequel I've been planning for about two years, which has continually failed to materialise, but a wholly new 'take' on following up the lives of the characters I created in that earlier book. It may have been something to do with the appearance of the rocks at low tide (there is such a scene in Charity's Child , where a big decision is made), or perhaps it was just that I finally relaxed enough for my creative side to wriggle free of all its constraints and start to play again. Anyway, here's hoping. It's always dangerous to say too much too soon, and I'm certainly not going to tell you anything about the new book. But it's good to be reminded of the way these things work. Fiction...