Authors Electric

 At the moment I have a novel project well under way, so naturally I am prey to various other distractions, such as watching a tv series I like to think of as 'Climbing Amazingly Colossal Buildings', writing up the minutes for a meeting from a couple of weeks ago in time for the next meeting which has arrived more quickly than I expected, and setting up a new youth page on my local community centre website. So of course I've also volunteered to take part in a local event for International Women's Day. I didn't really intend to do this, but I talked myself into it because my suffragette great-aunt has been on my mind lately, which in turn is because her name has somehow got on to the shortlist to have a new school named after her. I had better not mention where the school is or what the exact circumstances have been, as her shortlisting has turned out to be somewhat contentious for various reasons.  When I volunteered, I suppose I had imagined giving a presentation...

As the new Bridget Jones film is currently showing in cinemas I thought I'd share an old blog post I wrote when the book first came out. Amazingly it has taken 11 years for this book to make it to the screen, but this is a much more grown up Bridget dealing with something a young woman shouldn't have to deal with - the death of a spouse when you have young children to raise. This is something I know much about and to my mind both the book and film are very good and have a lot to say about relationships and grieving. Diary15th January 2014 v. late night finishing off Bridget Jones’ latest diary. I laughed loud and cried buckets, even had to put on reading glasses for last few pages to make blurry words big and bold enough to read properly - v.g. book! I remember reading the first two books and watching the films but I’ve always had mixed views about Miss Jones. I’m not sure if we’d ever have been friends back then although I love her easy to read chatty style her shenanigans oft...

Read Any Good Books Lately?   Well, yes, is the answer. I’ve been working through the books I got for Xmas. There was good, there was disappointing and there was in between; and there was one which was not a present, but which was retrieved from a second-hand shop and was considerably enhanced by an excellent reading on audiobooks given by the actor, Juliet Stevenson.   I’ll start with the first one,  Small Bomb at Dimperley , by Lissa Evans. I did enjoy this book, possibly because I had a slight connection with the author: a couple of years ago I had taken a small part in a Radio 4, Bookclub broadcast on her excellent novel,  Old Baggage . For this I had to send some questions to the producer, Dymphna Flynn and was able to put one to Lissa on live radio.   Anyway, before I get carried away with my five-minute radio stardom, let’s get back to the book that I got for Xmas:  Small Bomb at Dimperley  is set in 1945 after a Labour landslide victory at the ...

Julia Jones’s moving post of 9th January  about discovering long lost letters between her mother and grandmother came into my mind recently as I, too, sat down to look through some family memorabilia.  Wonderfully silly visual joke from Kate Corner's scrapbook. Opening an enormous, scruffy, leather-bound scrapbook dating from 1855, I was stunned. I can’t even remember what I expected: some dull, holy verses extolling faith and humility, a few cut-outs depicting blowsy roses, nature walks described in spidery handwriting, that sort of thing… Caricature from Kate Corner's scrapbook. Instead, a wealth of well-drawn caricatures greeted my eyes, some wonderfully silly visual jokes... ... and two beautifully and comically illustrated invitations, framed as the planned outings of an exclusive club called the Fraternitye of Noviomagians.  Noviomagus Anniversary Meeting 1st July 1856. By George Godwin. Soberer items appeared in between: many carefully scrawled poems I haven’...

The Sterkarm Handshake - Susan Price Last month I promised to tell you about the hardest, most strenuous piece of research I've ever undertaken for a book. It came about because, while writing The Sterkarm Handshake, I realised that the horses in the book might as well have been bikes. I spent most of my childhood around dogs, so I know how they behave and the dogs in the book were convincing enough. But not the horses. Yet The Sterkarm Handshake was partly set in the 16th Century, on the Scottish Borders, and the Sterkarms were supposed to be people whose lives were built around horses. They would have been riding, grooming, feeding, training horses every day. I needed to be more familiar with the beasts. So when I saw an advert for a residential riding school on the Scottish Borders, which promised to teach you to ride in a week, I booked up. On the first day I was introduced to my mount. He was a Northumberland cob, so quite close to the kind of horse that  rei...

Yes, I know I promised to find my monthly reading in a real shop, but this one has been out of print for a while so I ordered it online from a secondhand bookseller that turned out to be a library, so it's possibly an ex-library copy and hopefully not cheating too much!  Airs Above The Ground by Mary Stewart was first published in 1965. I was just three years old at the time and hadn't yet learnt to read, which might explain why it wasn't on my bookshelf back then. I've come across Mary Stewart before. I can remember our school librarian putting the first book of her Arthurian trilogy,  The Crystal Cave, into my hands and assuring me I would enjoy it. I was beginning to despair because most of the other books in our girls' grammar school library were fluffy teenage romances, which bored me at the time. The Crystal Cave and its sequels The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment were my first taste of fantasy fiction, which I absolutely loved. I never looked back, ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. No kidding, Sherlock, I know but I suspect there have been a few love stories doing the rounds this month. Wonder why…  That said the thought of Valentine’s Day and associated tales led me to wonder about popular themes and whether anything new can be said to still make the best of them. Naturally some themes will turn up time and again for competitions and markets because they will always appeal to us. The world isn’t going to run out of love stories. It doesn’t mean authors should stop writing them, far from it. Themes reflect the human condition, which is why we always identify with popular themes.   The ideal then is to bring something new to the mix. My way into that is via the character(s). There has to be something about them which would make them stand out to me first, then potential readers. If the character doesn’t grab my attention, I can hardly expect them to grab the attention of anyone else....

I have just re-read Wild Swans , by Jung Chang, for my book group. It wasn’t my choice, as I read it several decades ago, and I thought I remembered it. But once I opened it I realised there was so much I didn’t remember at all. Even though I had a Polish father, and was well aware of the paranoia associated with a totalitarian government due in part to a trip to Poland in the middle of the Cold War in 1966, I still hadn’t grasped the full implications of mind control. Mao was a ruthless and heartless dictator, and the hero worship he encouraged looks far more familiar today than it did then. The England in which I grew up was a safe and relatively honest country, and I simply couldn’t believe it could be so dangerous to say the wrong thing. The China of Wild Swans bears a strong resemblance to the North Korea and Russia of today, and strong rulers are in vogue with populations who believe what they read on Tiktok, Instagram and Telegram. This time, I saw things very differently from ...

   I saw no way out at the end of Part 1. I was kidding myself to pretend that I sat on the fence with a glimmer of hope that I wasn't toast as a writer. I'd run low on time and still lower on luck. And there I was with a gimp knee and an unfinished new novel I'd abandoned for too long. For half a year I'd tried in vain to find the stuff to get back to it. But I couldn't imagine a way out from under the weight of the odds stacked against me near the end of my Seventies Show. For two weeks I plotted my goodbye. By the day I grew more mindful of foolish decisions and choices--professional and personal--that sidelined a writing career that began with so much promise in 1988 (four books with two major publishers, an international award). Stubbornly, and against all advice, I persisted in writing short novels (don't call them novellas!) because I loved the challenge of mastering the short form, though no agent would even look at these works. By the time I felt ready ...