Authors Electric

Here’s a tip for new writers.  When, in a creative writing workshop or author talk, a bright-eyed, successfully published author assures you -‘There are no rules in writing! Write whatever you want, how you want. No one can tell you what to do!’ - don’t believe her. She’s trying to be positive and encouraging but actually this is a pretty unhelpful thing to say.  Of course writing has rules. And of course you can break them if you want. It just means you haven’t a snowball's chance in hell of being published if you do.  So what are these rules?  Well, if I list some of them, chances are you’ll throw me a puzzled look and say well of course, doing X/not doing Y is a given. As one of these cheery speakers said to me, years ago, when I picked her up on her blithe statement.  The Pursuit of Love by (rule breaker) Nancy Mitford OK, so here are a few of these Not Rules That Are Rules Really: 1. You need a strong main character. If telling the story, she/he can’t be ju...

I can always remember when I bought my first 'word-processor', a clunky Amstrad, because I was then  working on the final rewrites of Ghost Drum. The book had already been accepted for publication by Faber. These edits were something like the twelfth or thirteenth rewrite. Before I'd even sent it to my agent, I'd rewritten all of it from beginning to end, several times, and different parts of it, many times more. As my brother once said, "Writers don't write. They rewrite." The latest Ghost Drum cover Oddly, the opening paragraphs, often one of the most difficult to get right, were almost unchanged from the start. I'd 'written' them in my head during long walks and bus-rides, learning them by heart, before I ever began writing the book on paper. Through all the rest of the rewriting, they hardly changed. In a place far distant from where you are now, grows an oak-tree by a lake.  R ound the oak's trunks is a chain of golden links. Tethere...

About 20 years ago, I wrote a rather long novel about Alexander the Great from the point of view of his famous warhorse Bucephalus. At the time, I had a brilliant children's publisher (Chicken House) keen to publish my book in hardcover for the 10+ market who already enjoyed my fantasy novels. Unfortunately, bookshops did not share quite the same view, so publication was delayed while a more suitable format was found for the book that would please everyone - which, as we all know, is impossible. In the end, "I am the Great Horse" (edited down from its original 200,000 words to a modest 150,000) enjoyed its hardcover publication in America with Chicken House's partner Scholastic, and hit the UK shelves a year later in paperback. It sold averagely, that is to say it more or less killed my career. Happily however, now that the book has been republished in digital form, it continues to find new readers of all ages, maybe because Bucephalas is no longer restricted to a sin...

January, named for Janus the two-faced god: the traditional time to look back and look forward. For me, he can close his eyes on 2023, which wasn’t the best year by a long chalk. We had bereavements of a particularly painful kind – the sudden and unexpected deaths of very dear friends we had shared most of our lives with, who died within days of each other. Then there were various ‘bits dropping off’ – old age galloping on apace!  Sonnet: Old Age I saw you from a distance in those days The days of carefree, self-regarding youth The days when ‘how I want it’ stood for truth Your world unfocussed in my shortened gaze   What were false teeth, what walking sticks, grey hair? What was a ‘span’ of three-score years and ten? Beyond a fleeting frisson now and then Your presence was ignored: not my affair.   But since I have long passed the given span My vision is corrected, no short sight Can help me to avoid your company You’re here now. First you crawl...

Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Many thanks to Gill James for taking the image of me reading from From Light to Dark and Back Again at the Bridge House Publishing Celebration event in December 2023. All good fun! What are you hoping for in this new writing/reading year? Writing wise, I would like more things in print. Reading wise, I would like to discover authors new to me. The big eye opener for me in recent years has been discovering the wonderful world of non-fiction, especially history. The start of a year is when I miss most favourite authors no longer with us. I always looked forward to the new Terry Pratchett book for example. Nearly always ended up having that as a Christmas present.  Having said that I was given A Life In Footnotes which is his biography (written by Rob Wilkins) and am loving that. (Wouldn’t surprise me now if I go on to discover more on the wonderful world of biographies!).     I look forward to book ...

  Hedgehogs  are the UK's favourite mammal with more Google searches and Instagram hashtags than any other animal. They are now listed as vulnerable on the UK's red list of mammals – however, this only holds true for the countryside. In suburban gardens they are doing very well indeed. I attribute this to the plummeting cost of trail cameras. I have had one for several years, when it was a very expensive piece of kit. These days, you can get perfectly good ones on Amazon for £50. I put mine out one night in March to see what was digging in one of our vegetable beds. The culprit, unsurprisingly, was a fox. But scuttling away a bit later on was a hedgehog. I couldn’t believe it. I’d lived in the house for twelve years, a stone’s throw from the M25, and never seen one – because they’re nocturnal. But more and more people are discovering them, thanks to their cameras, and doing exactly what I did – putting out food. And now they’re thriving; there’s a Facebook group called Hedgeho...

 I could give you a dozen excuses for my plunge to the bowels of the pits in filing organization. And a few of those alibis might seem understandable. In the move from Seattle to Tucson, I'd left behind my filing cabinets and hadn't been careful enough in boxing personal papers. In Tucson, with a bad knee and limited public transportation, shopping for office replacements had proved to be beyond me. My work schedule and medical appointments got the best of my time management. Etc,  But screw excuses. I ended up with papers stuffed pell-mell in bags and boxes. And I couldn't find a thing. Furthermore, my new WIP demanded extreme organizational skills-- and I was starting to feel like an imposter.  I recalled an old strategy that I called Transfer of Funds-- depositing confidence and power from past accomplishments to areas if weakness. Could it work again for me with the mess that I found myself in?  To start, I bought a dozen cardboard bankers boxes, two dozen hangin...

  Husband and I are downsizing. We’re moving from a four bedroom semi to a three bedroom annexe built on to daughter and son-law’s house. More on three-generational living in another blog but for the time being we are embroiled in the process of winnowing out unnecessary stuff. Whether or not books can be seen as stuff category is debateable. We’ve always lived with a house full and would say that any room without books, bar the shower, is lacking something vital. However we are not going to be able to take them all with us. So, the question is, which ones stay and which go. For me the easiest way to decide is to put them into categories: ones that are staying come what may, ones that are going and ones that might or might not make the final cut. The staying ones are easy. These are books that I have an emotional attachment to. They are mostly ones from my childhood which I do re-read occasionally, or ones that have been given to me by friends for a particular reason or speci...

  Picture is an overhead shot of many swimmers swimming in blue water with the word "PRACTICE" floating among them Practice is to do something in a low-stakes environment that we will later do in a higher-stakes environment. Or so said the eighth-grade choir director when I was in eighth-grade choir. He encouraged us to keep singing, at home, in the shower, walking to school, to continue to turn each song into a well-oiled machine before we stood on stage in our long robes. I took him very seriously, and by the time the concert came I was very well-oiled.  This morning, for my first post of 2024, I got up before 6 am. I made coffee, fed the cats and the Guinea pigs, closed the bedroom door very firmly and quietly on the dog and my sleeping spouse, and sat down with my laptop in my lap, coffee by my side. I'm not thirteen anymore.  This means that there are pets to feed, and soon a child to wake and feed and layer with coats and bags and scarves and books and load into a c...