Authors Electric

Deep mid-winter... That was last month, January. And ( above ), the footprints of our resident wood-pigeons mingle with mine. They'd come down to trample the snow right outside the kitchen door because they were tired of waiting for us to put out seed. Now it's February and, like gardeners the ledth and breangth, I'm starting to think about seeds. Tomato seeds and sweet-pea seeds especially, in trays, on the kitchen windowsill. Seed potatoes in old compost bags. Leaf mould. Mulch. I think gardening takes up more of my time and energy these days than writing does. My garden is the usual grey, dreary, untidy, depressing winter mess -- but here and there are snowdrops and cyclamen. And big, fat green buds on the narcissus. A slightly nibbled Christmas rose. But then, being nibbled a bit is what this garden is about...  A wood mouse, who lives under the bonsai apple tree. Some of the nibblers come and impatiently knock at the kitchen door.  Look at the grump on that face. ...

Research... books ‘De-cluttering’ - as throwing out once-loved possessions is now called - is not really, as they say, my bag . That is, our home is set about with all kinds of delightful objects, all   much loved: books (in bookcases, more than ten, now I stop to count), and ornaments, cushions (great fun to throw around if you’re a visiting grandchild), paintings, pot plants, and of course, not forgetting, The Cat. None of these is ‘clutter’ except, perhaps,The Cat when he insists on sharing the screen and ‘helping’ with   a Zoom call. However, the delight when something precious suddenly moves from one category - necessary research - to another - old information never again needed! Having just spent an hour or so browsing through super-stuffed lever-arch files, casting a last look over wonderfully informative scientific articles and sociological comment pieces on lifestyle today, it’s possible to say of nearly all these that they’ll not be needed again!   Once much lov...

My magical cover quest for  Spellfall began back in 2000. In those days, publishers took care of everything except the writing. They took my manuscript (this book was originally written on a typewriter!), edited it, proofread, formatted, typeset, commissioned the artwork for the cover and sent the resulting book to the printer. They also did most of the publicity, secured reviews and started my book on its journey from warehouse to bookshop, where it could make its way into the hands of my eager readers... provided they liked the cover. Because, no matter how brilliant your story or your editor or your publicist, most of your wonderful words remain hidden inside that cover, and somehow you have to persuade a potential reader to pick your book (from among the hundreds on offer) and open it to see what lies within. I loved my publisher's first cover for Spellfall, and thankfully so did my readers because the hardcover sold out and the paperback went on to sell well, too. SPELLFALL (...

  When would no blog have been better than a cobbled-together effort? You may be about to find out… Spring is about to be sprung, so here’s a hare prose poem:    Hare THE FIELD SPARKLES WITH LATE FROST. In the shadow of the hedge, the leveret crouches low, as brown as the earth that cradles her. Sharp eyes watch for her, sharp ears listen for her, sharp noses twitch to sniff her out. She knows nothing of teeth and talons, nothing of snares and guns and cutting blades. She knows only to be still in her shallow scoop. AS THE FIRST STARS RISE, there is a low thrumming on the air; her mother’s call. She is washed to rid her of the scent that could betray her, filled with warm sweet milk, left alone to the night and stillness once again.   MAY BLOSSOM PERFUMES THE HEDGEROW. Her mother’s call does not come. When the moon rises, hunger nips her. She cleans her fur, creeps from the shadow of the hedge into the field.   She crops the soft, low grass shoots. ...

2022 ended on a very sad note for my family. On September 13th my 87 year old dad fell over in his kitchen and broke his hip.  Despite clearly being made of very strong stuff, ultimately he never recovered fully and passed away on December 15th. This blog is dedicated to the man who taught me to be a feminist and a writer, without even realising what he was doing. My dad was born in 1935, four years before the start of WW2, into real poverty and hardship. He was the eldest boy of six children, and my Nan was, in his words, heavy handed with the copper stick. He told me once that there was only one pair of shoes which he and his brothers had to share, so they took it in turns to go to school. Apparently being poor was no excuse for not being shod and you weren’t allowed in if you were barefoot! Elitism strikes again. To supplement their meagre food supplies he learned to hunt. Rabbits and pigeons were poached from wherever he could catch them. I suspect the odd pheasant and deer wer...

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love reading books of letters and diaries. I was a fan of Adrian Mole and the letters of P.G. Wodehouse are an interesting and often humorous read (as you’d expect). One of my favourite quotes comes from a Wodehouse letter.   “God may have forgiven Herbert Jenkins Limited for the jacket of Meet Mr Mulliner but I never shall!” Dodgy book covers are nothing new then! I also have a fascinating collection of letters between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Reading this is like peeping in on a private world, which is a great reason to read books of letters and diaries! Have you written in letter and/or diary format? I’ve done both though for flash fiction I have needed to use close to the upper limit of 1000 words for these. They are an interesting challenge and I find they make a nice change from “straight prose”.  Having said that, I wouldn’t want to always use these formats. It can look gimmicky. Besides the...

 Ever been writing something, and suddenly realised you have no idea how to get from A to B? In fact, you have very little idea of what A and B actually look like apart from a few important details such as the pub, the flooded quarry and the cave in which the escaped tiger is hiding. Which direction you would choose? What you would have to pass through/over/under? How long would it take? What method of transport would you use? Or do you suddenly realise that C couldn’t possibly be related to D without some very unlikely incest, or that E and F would never speak the same language or be old enough to have met Stalin? We tend to think we understand the worlds we create so well that we don’t need any help to remember the details, but you can get it so wrong. Even a well-respected author such as C.S.Lewis can create anachronisms, especially when you have two worlds where time moves differently. What really upset me as a child was the time discrepancy between The Voyage of the Dawn Tread...

  As a writer I have several trips planned this year, to all points of the globe. Well, actually, I might be exaggerating just a bit there but I will be going to Israel, London, Gloucestershire and the USA, so not bad really. Also, a few trips within Scotland. So, I and my trusty laptop will be on the road a lot. Thank heavens for laptops is all I can say. I have a PC which has sat, unused and looking magnificent, in my office. Yes, I do use that but I am on my laptop most of the time. Why are you telling me this, I hear you ask? Good question and worthy of an answer. Firstly, I would like to assure you that going on a trip - a couple of mine are writing retreats - can get the old grey cells nicely fired up. Seeing new places and experiencing new ways of doing things is superb for boosting creativity. Different food, different time zones, different temperatures (I'm a hot house flower planted in a cold climate), different landscapes and even different colours gives us a fresh persp...

  I don’t know about you, but walking is not my thing. I like the idea of long hikes, but ten minutes after setting off, I’m bored. With a long walk back. Taking the kids for a walk is even worse. There will always be two that grumble. Their legs are falling off, their head’s too heavy, and their coat too big. Until we get home, then they declare this walk the best one ever and when can we do it again?! So we got ourselves a puppy. Which is great, as puppies are limited in how far they can walk, meaning we grow with the puppy. The kids still moan a little, but more for the form, as they love seeing Goldie running around and they run with her. If only they all had a two-hour nap afterwards, just like Goldie... As the puppy needs to go out in the morning, I have noticed the seasons a lot more. I refuse to be cold, so my eleven-year-old said I looked ready for the Arctic when I went out the other day. It’s been amazing, as I notice the colours at sunrise, the noise birds make and ...

i Meet Tweedledum and Tweedledee--aka The MeMe's--two egomaniacal blowhards joined at the lip on Facebook. I have in mind a particular pair, so extreme and so relentless, that I've had to Mute one and completely Block the other. For the daily ego swaggering and endless self-promotion wore me down and bored me. As a writer, I'm appalled, for the authors I admire have lives apart from their work or the natural hunger for fame. As a reader, I doubt that anyone who sees FB Friends only as cash cows or tickets to one more award can write a word worth reading.  But on and on and on they go, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, without pausing to think even once about the question of all questions: Was that good for you too? For your consideration, I submit four modest proposals for keeping the bombast and bullshit in check. i 1) Writers' groups such as MWA and HWA should put a cap on the number of awards any author can receive. Three would seem reasonable; after that, let them work tow...

I don’t know about you, but life has been pretty serious and worthy of late. Since Christmas, with more month than money, the news full of grim stories and the weather not great, I have been in a cycle of work, a bit more work, sleeping, work, firefighting, work, conflict resolution, work …. you get my drift. With some of my Christmas money, I treated myself to a pair of ear pods. I had to take instruction from the children, who told me what to do with these new toys in loud, clear voices.   “Keep them in the case when you’re not using them, Mum. No, don’t press that. Yes, the blue light is good. That means they’re fully charged. Yes, they are a great invention, aren’t they?”   Before the ear pods came into my life, my way of consuming podcasts and similar was to access BBC Sounds on my mobile, prop it up on the windowsill and listen to it that way while doing the washing up. Now, however, I can pop in the ear pods and enjoy whatever I like in private without requests to t...

wikimedia: Anton Lefterov In the last days of my pregnancy, a fog descended over my brain and working on my novel became impossible. 17 days before my son was born, I wrote in my diary: Extensive editing is going to have to wait. I think I can give it one hour a day during maternity leave, once I’ve figured out the whole motherhood deal. Reading these words ten months later, I want to throw back my head and laugh, then punch Past-Me in the face. The cliché is that nothing can prepare you for the reality of having a baby. Guess what? Clichés exist for a reason. There is no way to get ready for the sheer overwhelm of love that physically hurts, a body that has changed beyond all recognition, the euphoria and responsibility of making new life, and exploding nappies. And for me, someone who has always turned to words in times of chaos, what I was not prepared for was the fact that, suddenly, I was unable to write.  My days were now filled with caring for my son. Together, we figured o...