Authors Electric

  Most of us, when we were kids, have played some form of the gruesome verbal game of "Would you rather...?" Would you rather be eaten by a crocodile or swallowed by a whale? Would you rather be drowned in the sea or frozen in a deep freeze? Would you rather be locked up forever inside a chest, like the lost girl in the story, or would you prefer to be thrown from the top of the Empire State Building? For lucky children with kind and loving families, it feels like fun to flirt with terrible things, daring them to come on while knowing they are fantasies, and so we can push the improbable scenarios to impossible extremes. Nobody really believes in their own death, in spite of wills being drawn up (my daughter wrote an elaborate one when she was about nine) and funerals planned, often in great detail. These things feel like theatre, and the fact that we won't be there to watch a bit irrelevant, unless we believe in ghosts. I have, very recently, had a reality check in the...

  I have a habit of seeing stages of my life in terms of books or films that seemed to reflect everything I was experiencing or feeling at the time. Is this, I wonder, how we make sense of our lives, attempting to give the chaos and serendipities of reality a narrative arc where none really exists? My early years were pure Christopher Robin, an only child in the countryside, whose best friends were pets and toys, entirely unaware that I had arrived at the end of a long line of privilege; white, male, middle class and British. The idylls of “Hundred Acre Wood”, (and “Never-Never Land” for that matter), were then replaced with a mixture of “Jennings Goes to School” and “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” – culminating in the cathartic anarchy of Lindsay Anderson’s film, “If”, which was released just as I was reaching the end of my patience with educational institutions. “Down and Out in Paris and London”, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” and “Of Human Bondage” reflected the struggle to surviv...

Mythic and Magical by Katherine Roberts 'On my one-hundredth birthday my father made me a present of a mortal man…’   So we’re told by Kryssa, the heroine of ‘ Rubies’ , one of the stories collected in Katherine Roberts' Mythic and Magical. ‘Rubies ’ reminded me of Bradbury’s tales of supernatural families, not only in its subject, but in its sensuality: ‘Her hair, black as mine, glittered with diamonds that outshone the early stars…’   And later, as Kryssa, her hair threaded with rubies, looks at her reflection in a lake: ‘Yes, I could see myself. Or…I could see moon-pale flesh shimmering with gold, and the pinpricks of red stars surrounding me: Grandpa’s rubies blurred with the millions of worlds above…’             ‘Rubies’ is romantic, lush, Gothic, and its theme, like the other stories, is that of rebelling against the rules your society insists you live by. And, in these stories, at least, the rebels most...

 Jo Carroll cannot write her post this month. So here's a golden oldie from 2019.  ______________________________________________________________________________   I've begun another novel. I love the idea (I'm not sharing that yet). I love the research - I've wallowed in books, taken myself off to tramp up hills and down a coal mine. My notebook overflows with lovely characters (and some not so lovely). So why is it so hard to write? I have distractions - we all have distractions. I prevaricate - thousands of us prevaricate but still get words down. I make myself sit at the computer almost every day. For the first time I've given myself word count targets. When I wrote  The Planter's Daughter  I had no need of word count targets. My head was full and the words flowed. The first draft was messy of course, but that was fine. I had something to work with. And that's what keeps me going now. I dare not reread, not yet - in case the extent of the...

By the time many of you read this post, the second and final US presidential debate will have aired. It’s highly unlikely the debate will sway the outcome of the election on November 3rd. Still, I anticipate it to be a spectacle. Don’t worry, this is not a political post.  I’m only bringing it up in the context of the first debate, which occurred September 29th.  Earlier that evening, I had signed up for a virtual lecture series put on by the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. That night’s talk was entitled “Looking for Language in the Ruins.” Among the speakers was JJJJJerome Ellis, an Afro-Caribbean composer, performer, and writer.                                                                        ...

Sunday lunch — someone I know (in real as well as virtual form) posted a photo of her daughter under this heading (or hashtag) a few weeks back. Reminded me of when our daughter was that age and stage: long hair, beautiful smile… and preteen angst in spades! Yesterday, someone I (hardly and virtually) know, responded to my describing my novels as “contemporary”, and then proposing that maybe, since today’s kids (such as that daughter above, at Sunday lunch) are taught the 1980s and 1990s as “history”, I maybe qualify as writing “historical” fiction. This fellow writer even indicated that I would need to do plenty of research! Time flies (and as my great aunt, born in 1876, used to say with a smile, you can’t, they fly too fast! in true Victorian and Edwardian humour style). Sunday lunch — for an example of 1980s living: first, off to the (organic) butcher’s to buy the joint on Saturday. Then on Sunday morning, prepare the veg and the batter, put joint into hot oven, disappear t...

It's been a tough year for many people, and things were pretty tough in publishing even before the dreaded virus and its associated emergency rules locked down half the world. That was March and we're still panicking over here in the UK, which makes me wonder quite how long this current 'emergency' status will last? But this is not a post about people dying of, or even with  the virus (words are important, as authors and readers know only too well). It's merely something related to the situation that affects me as an author and possibly you as a reader. The latest casualty of this summer is the small but passionate UK publisher of historical fiction, Greystones Press, which has sadly now closed its doors taking my YA Genghis Khan novel Bone Music out of print, along with all the other books published by them. Readers might gain briefly from this, since you can still get these books from third party sellers at a reasonable price - but be quick if you want one, becaus...

  *When this goes out on 20 th , I should be in the Lake District, the latest covid restrictions permitting. Who knows? Of the group of old friends we meet there every year, two are shielding and two are effectively in lockdown in Northumberland. If we get there at all, we could well be rattling round in the converted barn on our own and eating at home if the pubs and restaurants are shut. Still, we’ll be in a place we love; a place full of memories. The cover of my book Passing Places was developed from a favourite photograph Niall took some years ago – a view across Ullswater at the Glenridding end.   We don’t go in for heroic driving these days; we’ll have an overnight stop in delightful Sandbach on the way, and then grit our teeth for the horrors of the motorway, until we are past Preston and at some point the traffic eases dramatically, the landscape changes, we spot the first drystone walls and then look out for the heart-lifting first sight of the Howgills. I grew...

I recently spent an afternoon rootling around for an old remote hard drive and finally found it in an old box file full of letters! I plugged it in and scrolled through the contents, and was soon muttering dark imprecations about wasted time and useless computers. The data stored there only went back to 2000 and there were no other back-up files available. The floppy discs that had contained them originally were long since lost! Being the old biddy that I am it took a few moment to realise that this really is twenty years ago, and not last week... The items I wanted to find all predated the millennium by some years (even decades), and were doubtless produced on my trusty Amstrad PCW 8256 or its replacement 8512. For the younglings among you I should explain that my files would have been printed on a chattering dot matrix printer, using continuous paper, which required you to tear of the punched guide tapes on either side of the pages and separate each sheet along the dotted line...