Authors Electric

I enjoy reading Brian Bilston’s poems on Facebook. One of my favourites is his Mnemonic , where the last line implies January goes on for ever and ever, amen. He has a point! January does drag. How is the New Year going so far ?   It took me a while to resume my usual writing routine after a lovely Christmas break but equally that gave me a “soft start”. January is when I book my place at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick , which is a major highlight of my year. It is held in August at The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire. I enjoy a wide range of workshops and courses (with full board accommodation). Naturally I meet old friends, make new ones, and hear wonderful evening speakers. I’ve led courses here too. Booking Swanwick cheers me during the dark days of January. It matters to have something to look forward to writing wise, whether it is booking a conference, or knowing you will finish the first draft of a project by X date. (Seeing the finishing line is always a good enco...

  You can look at any number of books, watch any number of films, but if you want a real taste of what mediaeval England was like there’s nothing better than a re-enactment. I have been to a reconstruction of the Battle of Hastings, which was really educational. I always assumed that, as in films such as Henry V, the opposing sides just went at one another until one side had killed all the rest, or the opposition had surrendered. Not so – both sides had rest periods, and then they’d start fighting again. War was a far more gentlemanly pursuit in those days, although the slaughter and the life-changing injuries were real enough, and no antibiotics or pain relief. I have been to the Loxwood Joust twice now, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Each time it was absolutely terrific. The food was pretty authentic the first time I went, too – I remember the venison stew. These days they still have the hog roast, but there was also Vietnamese food, fish and chips, hot dogs and burgers...

--At last, I'd exhausted all my excuses! And I'd had some great ones for not returning to the WIP I'd orphaned after a knee replacement last June. Check these out: --The post-surgical pain was extreme and I was stoned on meds for most of the first month. --PT offered worse pain with discouraging results.: my  lack of flexion seemed hopeless. At home, when I wasn't force-flexing or icing the knee, I brooded on the strong chance that I'd end up a cripple after FIVE procedures on the same right knee. since 2021. --I could neither stand or sit long enough to write. --Worse, I lost track of the two plot lines meant to fuse in this new book--one rooted in a novel I'd abandoned years ago. And along with losing track I found myself losing my creative  nerve as three months, four months, five months passed. But wait. As I wrote in last month's post, I decided the first thing I needed to do was regain my confidence in every way I could. With luck, I could transfer unr...

 Take two. If this blog came up blank put it down to the best laid plans going wrong yet again.  Last month, for the first time since I started posting on this blog, I missed my spot. We were in the middle of a somewhat stressful house move when we didn't know whether we'd sold our house till the removal men were loading the van. Due to the buyers insistence that we move a week earlier than we wanted we were also effectively homeless, though thanks to my son and daughter-in-love we did have somewhere to stay until we could move into our new home in Somerset.  Now that we're here and some of our 79 boxes have been unpacked my office was set up and this afternoon I thought I was ready to go. Not so. Switched on the PC displayed not even the blue screen of death but the Megaton message of despair. I was to press F1 to restart the machine, but the computer had frozen and no pressing was possible.  Back in Stoke I would know who to call. Here I need to find a computer per...

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 Just before the pandemic (the 2020s, to clarify for when I beocme nothing but a blip in history), we sought a better situation for our daughter and enrolled her in a private school. Moving from a class of 30 to one of 12 transformed her academics, though it strained our finances. Among her new classmates was an unexpected addition—a guinea pig named Miss Addie. The school asked for volunteers to care for Addie over Christmas break, and we eagerly stepped in. Addie and I bonded instantly (I’m a self-proclaimed pet whisperer), and when it came time to return her, I delayed by almost a week, because I just couldn't! I mean, look at those lovely, soulful, pink eyes! Pink! When the pandemic closed the school in March, they asked me to take her in again. By May, the school announced its closure (lack of funds... and at 1500/month, in a rural farm area, I understood why), and Addie became a permanent part of our family. During lockdown, my daughter discovered, through taking a guinea pig...

There was a moment, last autumn, when I was rummaging through old storage boxes and came across a container I’d never seen before. This happens periodically. It’s as if the layers of softening cardboard boxes, plastic crates and vintage suitcases convulse and shift to throw up unexpected treasure. Metal detectorists would understand the breath-stopping moments of surprise, the quickening excitement with which one picks out the unfamiliar item, brushes off the dirt, peers at the possible treasure.  This trouvaille  is a cuboid cardboard box, 8 ½” square and 6” deep. I’ve no idea what it had have held originally. A teapot perhaps? It was tied with string and marked LETTERS / Old Letters (Family). I prepared myself for disappointment: business correspondence, school Sunday letters kept out of duty.   Inside there was a mass of letters, hundreds of them, many on blue airmail forms  – I haven’t counted them all yet. I felt a thrill when the first letters I glimpsed w...

  People who’ve read previous posts of mine will know I have a deep love of music, primarily classical but other genres as well. It forms a permanent soundtrack to my life, and provides a palette of colours as a background. See, I have synaesthesia. I ‘see’ colours when I hear music (well, all sound, really, but music is much more overt). It’s not something I’ve spent much about – I was in my twenties before I realised it wasn’t the normal state of being for people, and that it had a specific name. All I knew up to then was it was easy to tell when my guitar was in tune as each open string was a specific colour. I say I ‘see’ the colours, but that’s probably a simplification. It’s not the same as seeing something visually, as closing my eyes makes no difference – I still get the same images as I do with eyes open. It was earlier this year, when the BBC Proms were on, when my wife discovered that when I talked about the different colours of the music, I was being lite...

 I'm delighted to be in conversation with Barbara Nadel at West Barnes Library, on Tuesday 28th January at 7.30pm. Barbara is the author of the Inspector Ikmen series, the inspiration for the TV programme,  The Turkish Detective, as seen on BBC2 last summer. It's still available on BBC iPlayer and it's a compelling watch. Barbara has written 26 books so far about Inspector Ikmen and I'm looking forward to finding out more about how she created this character and why she chose Turkey for her location. I've only written 4 books in my DI Bernie Noel series so I'd also love to know how Barbara sustains her series. If you'd like to join us, you can sign up  here.  Cost is £2 cash on the night. West Barnes Library is right next to Motspur Park train station which now has lifts for disabled access. Please note: there are no disabled toilets at the library.

Happy New Year! At this time of year I traditionally make an annual writing plan. Quite often, and usually to my own surprise, I tend to stick to it, more or less. Early in December 2024, I happened to have completed and published something, and because I know I get very bad-tempered if I'm not writing anything new, I had to decide on something to start on - despite having all sorts of other things to do, needless to say. But that's beside the point. On this occasion I already had a kind of mental shortlist of options. Having written books in four or so series so far - there's actually a fifth one but I see it as complete, for now at least - I would have been fairly content to write another mystery in one of three existing mystery series or another historical not-quite-romance in my rambling historical series. I say not-quite-romance because some critics don't seem to think they fit all the  tropes, something I have also found with my 28-strong cosy mystery series. Ther...

Do authors need a website is a question I have been pondering for a while. More specifically do I need a website now I am a published author. I already have an online presence. I’ve been on Facebook for many years, just a personal account, mainly to keep in touch with friends but I tend to make my writing related posts public and shareable. Many years ago, I started on Twitter to connect with other writers. After a while my writing bubble burst so I deleted my account. A few years later, my username was still free so I started again   – things had changed a lot, then the changes went too far and I quit for good earlier this year. I’m on Instagram – a fellow writing friend told me I need an online presence there, and now I’m on Threads too, which I am enjoying but I’m not sure if being there is helping with book sales or even general recognition. It takes time to grow an audience, but how do some people’s innocuous posts garner viral status - if I try to be funny, there is n...

                                                                                                                  Sefton Park, Liverpool 1970 Looking Forward, Looking Back   As you may know I am a frequent Twitter user and now that it has changed to X, despite some misgivings, I have continued to interact the with the site. So it was that during December I became the follower of another Twitter user, Beci, who had posted there a recording of a poem by Charles Lamb, poet and essayist, who had lived from 1775-1834. I knew very little about Lamb apart from the fact that he had written  Tales from Shakespeare together with his sister, a book designed to make the plays more accessible to children - I h...

Happy new year!  2024 brought much rejoicing to my wider family, as five new babies were born, beginning in January and culminating in twins in December. Babies bring hope and joy and also a little trepidation. We can’t tell what the future will bring for them; the best we can hope is that whatever it is, they will cope.  In his Christmas broadcast of 1939, King George VI quoted these lines from a poem:  And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:  "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown".  And he replied:  "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way". So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.  And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.   It's a truism that the world in which Minnie Louise Haskins wrote her poem (originally called God Knows ) in 1908 was very differen...