Authors Electric

To mark the halfway stage of my reading year and Derby month, I'm reviewing not one but TWO titles by Clare Balding. Both are for young readers and inspired by horses, which fits perfectly with the author's background as the daughter of a racehorse trainer. First up is fiction, and it's a fun read for ages 7+. T he Racehorse Who Wouldn't Gallop by Clare Balding illustrated by Tony Ross 10-year-old Charlie Bass lives on the family farm with her annoying brothers Harry and Larry, a dog called Boris, and a herd of milking cows named after celebrities. When their farm is in financial trouble, the whole family is invited to think of ways to raise some cash. So Charlie buys a racehorse entered for the Derby... bear with me, this is fiction! The only problem is, Noble Warrior ('Noddy' for short) won't go anywhere without his pony friend Percy, and the Bass family can only afford to buy him because several trainers have already given up on him. To be fair to our plu...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. Do you have favourite themes in writing, whether this is in your work or someone else’s? I’ve always wanted to see justice done in stories. This is one reason I still love the classic fairytales, as well as the more obvious home for this topic, crime fiction. Even as a child, in the fairytale world I knew the rotters wouldn’t get away with it. Pity that’s not more true in life! I will often use themes as my way into creating characters and stories. If I know my theme is going to be honesty, say, I will create a dishonest character and show them not getting away with it, or I will show a truthful creation being rewarded for their honesty (not necessarily in money).   I lead an online flash fiction group for a Christian writing organisation I’ve been a member of for years. It’s fun to do and this has led me to rediscover the joys (and otherwise) of PowerPoint after a break of many years from it.  But I’ve fou...

Manifold Magazine folded many years ago on the death of its editor, Vera Rich. In each edition she would propose two challenges, one subject related, and the other to be written in a specific poetic form. I really looked forward to these – they were terrific stimuli to write something that might well get published. The Spectator performs a similar function, sometimes 150 words of prose sometimes a poem, 16 lines maximum. I only discovered these competitions a year ago; they kick-started me, and I’ve had several published. But near-misses also get a mention, so I thought I’d give some of them an airing here. Blissfully ignoring – something you dislike about your loved one The distinctive call of an eider duck Plus the sound of an airbed deflating Or the distant growl of the M25 Then the huffing of two hedgehogs mating. A grunt that trails off to a whistle is next, Then a silence, a false dawn of hope – But it never lasts long, and the snuffles resume, The top of that ...

  So you've finished the novel you've worked on for months or even years. You've done three drafts or five or ten. You've proofread it frontwards and backwards, then hired a good editor. And this is as good as it gets, you believe. Time to move on to the next one. But is the game really over? Might you still have a strong trick or two up your sleeve? These thoughts were on my mind as I came to the finale of a novel I've worked on for nearly six years. In the long stretch I'd lost sight of certain details and made changes I hadn't expected. I'd also lost track of the time that had passed and couldn't be sure, in my mystery, that the clues had been placed to perfection. When I chanced on the term punch list, a dandy tool for use when a novel appears to be finished. Setting the ms. aside next month, I'll compose  a good long list of things my instinct tells me have to be added, deleted, or fixed. I'll tracked the placement of the clues and the t...

  Once upon a time, in a century long gone, to send your book out into the world, there was only one path to follow. It was not the easiest one to negotiate, for there were a number of obstacles to be overcome; beginning with the quest for an agent. The Writers and Artists year book, a might tome, was your bible. You scanned the details of each agency and marked the ones which looked promising. Then the precious manuscript was packed into a padded envelope and taken to the Post Office, making sure that you’d included return postage. After this the wait. It could be days, which raised the suspicion that the sample chapters had not even been read. The classic was the time I bought the agent’s book on how to submit, followed her instructions to the letter, and in less than a week had the manuscript returned with the suggestion that I bought her book and followed the instructions on how to submit… If after all the angst and frustration and agent expressed interest and took you on...

  It was a rainy and cold day in Roxborough when my future husband, Dave, and I went to see a new movie at our local movie theater,   Rushmore,   the first film to be in wide release from director Wes Anderson. I was already pretty loaded in on our relationship because my husband wore Doc Martens, wrote and drew satirical comics, and liked some cool music. When we came out of the movie I felt even more in love, with my husband, with life, with the world in general. I was vibrating. So, there was no question of what I was going to do last weekend: I was going to go see Anderson's newest movie,   The Phoenician Scheme . It was everything I could have hoped for, weird, hopeful, sad, funny, well-acted, well-written, and the set was amazing, as were all the props, details, etc. The postcards were absolutely gorgeous, and how many films have you been to where there are postcards? I will say this, having seen  The Phoenician Scheme,  I do think Wes Anderson is mak...

Rusty, newly arrived Rusty arrived two weeks ago and trotted straight into my heart. Not that I flatter myself that my feelings are of any more than pragmatic interest to him. He seems a self-possessed little pony, not nervy, not needy, sizing up his new situation and making the best of it. A sensible chap.       My own riding days are over but we have two stables and some sheds which enable my daughter Georgeanna to base her two retired racehorses here. Rusty’s job is as a minder for Backbord, a hurdles winner at Cheltenham in his day (not with us, I hasten to add). Georgeanna was his work rider, led him up at the races and bought him for a nominal sum when his career came to an end. He’s now 23, elderly for a thoroughbred, and has recently suffered the loss of an eye.       Backbord is so devoted to his stable companion Bo (22)  that it’s become impossible to separate them. Theirs is an intense relationship with a competitive edge. They can...

  June is National Crime Reading Month and there are many events happening up and down the country. You can look  here  for events in your area. At West Barnes Library, we're welcoming back Rod Reynolds for the third time and introducing debut author, Sam Frances. Both have written police procedurals but in very different ways. Come along on Monday 16th June at 7.30pm to find out more! £2 cash entry on the door. West Barnes Library is right next to Motspur Park Station on the Epsom and Chessington South lines to Waterloo. Click  here  to book your seat.

Once upon a time, before the dawn of the World Wide Web, the internet was in its infancy. Some of us had computers with modems – those little boxes that sat next to your pc with whizzy lights and beeps that kidnapped your telephone line and charged you money for every minute it took to upload/download emails and read a few online text-only forums.  I’m talking late 1980s into the early 1990s, when monitors were green-on-black and gaming involved answering simple questions and hitting <RETURN>.  I had an email account that was linked to a site (not a web site, they hadn’t been invented yet) called CIX. It was American, I think, and had several interesting forums – the most active one for me being Cult TV. Remember, this was way before the age of digital streaming, when TV shows were broadcast once, maybe again if you were lucky and after that you had to see if it was available on VHS video somewhere. Cult TV was a discussion of all things sf and nerdish. From Doctor Who t...

I recently discovered that AI is being trained to do something I want it to do even less than I want it to write novels or design book covers or publish social media posts. It’s organising travel. Although there is very little point in making travel plans myself at the time of writing, because, for various boring medical reasons, I can’t actually travel anywhere for a while, I am no stranger to the task of organising travel. I must admit that in some cases (though not always) the planning process has been quite a bit more fun, or at least very much less stressful, than the actual travel. In fact I am quite tempted to start planning a trip now even without making any real bookings, just to keep my hand in. Of course, the more complicated the trip and therefore the more fun to organise, the more potential there is for things to go wrong. I had several panic attacks in the time leading up to my ‘North American tour’ of October 2001, partly because I hadn’t flown since 1978 and partly ...

brooch from a writing course goodie bag Sometimes as a writer it is essential to be selfish, especially for those who are carving out a writing career in between paid employment and family life. I am fortunate in many ways that my circumstances allow me to write whenever and wherever I can, but there are still times when I need to prioritise my own writing above everything else or I will never publish another book. “You can’t be a one hit wonder!” said my brother at my book launch. Well actually, I can if that one book has scratched an itch and fulfilled my dreams, but I want to write another and another after that. I scour my to do list for the things that I can drop rather than juggle this month. Sadly, writing for the Author Electric blog is being cut this month. I won’t say sorry but instead offer some advice – sometimes it is not only good to say NO to things but it is essential. Sometimes it takes many years to develop this wisdom, but at the age of 57 I’ve almost cra...

                             Mum and Dad, Their War Remembered   The photographs stood on top of the dark mahogany tallboy throughout my childhood. The frame of Dad’s was made of wood, and the date on the back of the photograph is December 1944, Mum’s frame was of metal and there is no date on the photo.    Mum had kept them on the tallboy long after Dad had died in 1962 from a long-term illness. I had put them away for storage following Mum’s death in 1999, after we had cleared the house.  The tallboy was taken away by a furniture recycling centre from Garston, an area of Liverpool near my home.    Today, I removed the photographs from their frames and copied them so that I could post them on this site. My parents were in the RAF - Mum a WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), Dad an astro-navigator, who had eventually risen to the rank of Flight Lieutenant. He had started the war ...