Authors Electric

          'Lucifer' in the garden. Love Lies Bleeding Loosestrife... Lose Strife? Susan Price's website

photo by WanderingMogwai (wikipedia, CC) It's butterfly season in the UK. Yes, I know... torrential rain as usual! But on sunny days they will be back on the butterfly bushes in search of food. I've always preferred to call them flutterbys, which makes more sense when you watch one flutter past - or should that be flutterbies? Never mind. It is apparently a myth that 'flutterby' was the original name for a butterfly! But why 'butterfly' as a common name? One explanation could be that when Dutch scientists were studying butterflies in the early days they thought the yellow droppings looked like butter, so they named the insects 'butterfly'. In old Dutch, that's apparently what it means... boterschijte ... butter-pooer. Another explanation knocking around the internet is that they were named after the colour of their wings, which in some species is buttery-yellow, although I think that's unlikely since there are plenty of other colours more commonl

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos Opening lines must hook a reader so they read the rest of your story or article. I aim to write  something which intrigues me, draft the rest, and as I do that, ideas occur to strength that first line. So I go back and do so. The act of writing something down in and of itself seems to trigger creativity to come up with more and better ideas. It’s a pity you can’t bottle that effect and bring it out when you need it! As I write a lot of flash fiction, where my maximum word count is 1000 words, the opening line carries even more weight. I see it as doing a lot of heavy lifting. Sometimes I will write circle stories where the closing line is a repetition of the opening one or is similar to it with, say, one minor change. That change has come about due to what happened in the story itself. I find, whatever I write, as long as I have something down to start me off, away I go happily. It can be finding the way into a piece whic

Poetry forms such as the villanelle and the sonnet are extremely useful, as they provide a framework within which to write. When I was doing my MA in Creative Writing, a course almost lost in the mists of time, I did the poetry module because it was the form with which I was least comfortable and I wanted to learn, rather than parade the things I knew I could do. (I’d had five radio plays broadcast by that point). I can’t remember exactly what the homework was, but I decided to parody Ted Hughes’ poem Pike. I can’t quote the whole poem here for copyright reasons, but I am allowed to give you the first verse. If you know the poem you’ll see what I did, but if not you can easily find it on the web.  Pike, three inches long, perfect,  Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.  Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin  They dance on the surface among the flies.  I took the subject matter, which I subverted to make a point about the tourism industry in Kenya, and I also copied the f

Write what you know, they all tell us..so that's exactly what I'll do in narrating the supreme adventure of an adventuresome life: my battle with a devil I had to call my friend. With your kind permission--thanks--I propose to jump right into this. Speed forward from the Seattle injury that left me with a wounded knee no surgeon or therapist could help. Onward past the walking sticks, then canes I'd come to rely on as a, gasp, disabled senior. Ah, here we are in Tucson, Arizona, where I moved impulsively in August 2022. Cheaper rent, better weather (except for the blistering summers), a fine forever home in almost every way except--I could not see myself as a stooped geezer hobbling with his walker for a cup of morning tea. Nor could I accept not being able to travel with my unbending knee. Worst of all, however, I loathed my terror of trying one more time and the screaming pains of kneehab.  Jump cut--sorry, one last time--to the office of the one surgeon willing to consid

  I’ve just read about a piece of research that has come to the conclusion that Owls, those of us who function better at night, are more creative than Larks. Being a Lark myself I found that an interesting conclusion to come to. It’s true that, unlike my owl friends, I work better in the morning, but that doesn’t mean that I produce less work than they do. In fact if I can make sure of a couple of undisturbed hours after breakfast I can get a lot done and I think that I have recently completed the last book in the Adventures of Letty Parker series speaks for itself. Six books in five years, plus three “Awesome Adventures of Poppy and Amelia” and the soon to be published “Friday Nights at Rosa’s” isn’t a bad record. Does this disprove the theory? I doubt it. I’m sure there are a lot of owls out there who have written more and in any event the number of books or short stories are no real indicator of creativity. There are other factors to take into account. Life style for one. Writ

  Ellis Elliott: Founder of Bewilderness Writing I'm not sure how Ellis found me, out there on the great big web, but she did. In late 2021 Ellis wrote to me via Devil's Party Press, and asked for book coaching. I said, "Sure." The first time we met, via Zoom, I had (what we used to call) a girl-crush right away. IMHO Ellis is warm, kind, helpful, and very interesting. I still can't figure out why she came to me for help. She's incredibly capable, and talented. About that same time, I was badgering my husband, and partner in publishing, David. "Isn't there something we can do to help publish poetry so it wouldn't break the bank?" (As indie/small publishers, everything breaks the bank!) Ellis was working on a novel, but she was also a poet, and I had gotten to know a lot of poets (from publishing anthologies and INSTANT NOODLES ) whose poetry I was really crazy about. Finally Dave and I decided that if we could put together a co-op of sorts, a

Barbara Hughes in the Sportswoman's Library (BL permission) The title of my book has been changed: That Spirit of Independence has become Stars to  Steer By . It’s still a book of celebration, mentioning more than one hundred wonderful sea-women. And yes, they are all included because of their variously independent spirits. No change there. The title I chose myself was given me by a rebellious Solent racer called Barbara Hughes. She was racing slim, fast keelboats from the age of about 13 in 1885 and loved it: ‘It is the most delightful education in the world, the most interesting and healthful. It becomes so engrossing that you will not rest until you understand the whole thing and know the why and wherefore of all the different moves.’ Barbara was the 5th of 6 children so was usually subordinate to her father, brothers or older sisters. She wanted to be in charge of her own boat, competing on equal terms: ‘you should have it all in your own hands, with no one to say you “nay”, o

I’ve been out and about the last couple of days, and with more to come. The reason? Twofold, really. One is to spend some time with my family – my wife and I have next week off, and it’s the school holidays here in Scotland so what better opportunity. The other reason is more selfish – I’m looking around for inspiration and ideas of locations that may fit into current or future stories. Although I generally write contemporary crime for adults, I try to place it in a setting I’m familiar with, which usually means Edinburgh and its surroundings. As I usually have a few ideas of certain key scenes when working out the details of a book or story, I find it helpful if I can ground them in real places. My most recent book for adults, The Missing, had certain elements of the plot altered when I wrote the first draft as I worked in real places. (Of course, I usually change the names of places, although a person familiar with the area will almost certainly know what I’m really referring to.)

 Since last year, I've been telling you about my self-publishing journey. I can honestly say that writing the book was the easiest part! These last few weeks have been about getting the formatting correct and that's where we've hit problems. As I write this, we now have the paperback ready on Amazon. Hopefully by the time you read this, the Kindle e-book and IngramSpark paperback will be ready too! Despite the saying - never judge a book by its cover - we all know that we do! And that's one thing that has gone right. So, here's the blurb, followed by the cover. The Blurb When DI Bernie Noel goes back to work after maternity leave, she doesn’t expect to find a crashed car with a dead driver on her journey in. But a gruesome discovery in the boot of the car turns a road traffic accident into something more sinister and personal for the detective. It isn’t long before Bernie is forced to rewind six years and confront her failed covert operation in London. But as she re

I have a friend who’s currently an ESL teacher living in Turkey. He’s also a retired professional photographer who used to supplement his business by selling photos of his lunch – but that’s a whole different story! Steve messaged me the other day and asked if I had any stories he could use on his YouTube channel .  I’ve never come across this kind of thing before and it struck me as such a good idea – for those learning English as a second language, for reluctant readers or those wanting to increase their vocabulary or just want simple, engaging and easy to understand stories in audio format. Steve reads short stories aloud and the accompanying words appear on the screen. Didn’t Jackanory or other such children’s tv programme do this many years ago? I’m sure I remember watching television in the 1970s or 80s – after Play School and before the ‘infant’ offering (what were these? I can’t recall), John Craven's Newsround and then the ‘junior’ offering (a children’s drama or Blue Pete

I have the urge to write about adaptations today, because some of the various meanings of this word have been on my mind lately. The fact that football, general elections and Glastonbury have been taking up a lot of airtime has caused me to abandon live tv for now and to watch too much Netflix in the evenings instead, and that in turn has caused me to announce to my son, the only one who would listen, that in the extremely unlikely event that Netflix offered me a million pounds for the screen rights for my novels, I would turn them down. My son didn't think I'd be able to resist an offer like that, but I hope I would stand firm. There have been cases where I've been pleasantly surprised by adaptations, particularly the classier BBC ones which stick fairly closely to the original material - the iconic 1995 Pride and Prejudice, for instance, or the Joan Hickson Miss Marple series. I also very much enjoyed a new version of Agatha Christie's Murder Is Easy. On the other han