Authors Electric

  Pablo Picasso Self Portrait 1965 It’s an absolute privilege to be invited to write a guest blog for Authors Electric. As a newly published author I find myself among very distinguished writer company here, and ever so slightly intimidated! My first novel was published in March of this year. It is historic fiction, set in medieval Wales in the time of Llewellyn the Great, but it is also a faith based story, set against the backdrop of Cistercian abbey life. I knew from the start that I was writing a book based on my own life experiences, but of course fictionalised to another time and place. Inevitably, my main protagonist bore more than a passing resemblance to myself - although he is a thirty -something world weary knight, and I am a fifty -something semi -retired grandmother. I did not set out to paint a self- portrait in my characterisation. That is referred to as ‘author surrogacy’ I believe, and a device used by manyan illustrious writer to tell their own story in the guise ...

  I have just read two fantastic books about the publishing world of the last thirty or forty years. The first is Book Wars – The Digital Revolution in Publishing by John B. Thompson and the second is Ahead of Her Time , an autobiography from legendary publisher, Judy Piatkus. These two, very different, authors have both managed to capture clearly the world that I have been living in for all of my working life. John Thompson is a Cambridge professor and also author of the brilliant, Merchants of Culture . His new book is an extremely authoritative account of the revolution which at one time looked like it was going to destroy the fusty old world of book publishing, but has actually ended up reinvigorating it in ways that no one predicted. When you are actually toiling at the coal face of writing, it is easy to forget just how much has changed since the arrival of Amazon and ebooks, the explosion of the self-publishing industry and the invention of new ways of publishing such a...

I miss Srishti! It's exactly 3 weeks that she has been away from me, staying with her dad & his parents. And it will be almost another 2 before she can return. A whole month (or more)! Reason? I tested covid positive 3 weeks back & got admitted in a nursing home the day after - thanks to my wonderful doctor-friend, Saurabh Basu. I returned after 12 days. But just 2 days later, my father tested positive. Thankfully, he is asymptomatic & quarantining at home. But he is very fragile, given his age. And his quarantining means I’ll have to wait for a longer time before Srishti can return. ***** This is our longest separation in all her 9 years. May it never exceed this span, I earnestly hope… till she flies the nest! Which is another 9 years away (only 9?!)… assuming she will leave after high school. My head has been full of these numbers & calculations – of weeks, months, years. But what I have missed most all this while is her touch. I had re-discovered touch after she...

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Song-World-Sequence/dp/099282043X/ I've been pinning.  Not dress-making. I'm using Pinterest to publicise my books. The brothers put me on to it. They're artists and they love Pinterest because it's an unending scroll of images, good, bad and indifferent. Some are merely shots of the work-tops, toasters and coffee machines someone is hoping to put into their new kitchen. But others are of beautiful original artwork or hand-made jewellery -- or architecture, herbs, churches, cars, sculpture. Whatever interests someone. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1530897262 Other pages are mood or research boards, where people have 'pinned' images with links to the sites they came from, so they have all their research handily gathered in one place. The Pinterest metaphor is of a large cork-board to which you pin notes and images that you find inspiring, or as a memory aide. The 'board' is much the same as a 'folder' on a c...