Authors Electric

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 ...

  Two months into our new home and my PC is finally up and functioning and I feel that things are beginning to fall into place. In the intervening time I haven’t been without access to technology; I have a laptop, an i-pad and a smart phone, so I’ve been able to do my on-line banking, emailing and checking of social media. With a Kindle ap on my i-pad I’ve also been able to beta-read a friend’s latest ms. None of these devices, however, quite do it for me. My fingers are too old and crooked to use my smart phone quickly, I’m forever tapping the wrong letter or number and I find the laptop, in spite of having a separate mouse, somewhat cumbersome and not very easy to use. Besides which it has a will of its own. Years ago I went on an alternative therapy course where it was suggested that computer chips can be manipulated by the power of the human mind. It may be that there is much research to back up this theory but whether there is or not, speaking from personal experience I woul...

  Tom Robbins died.  Oh, I didn't have any easy way to say it because there is no easy way to tell the world that your favorite author of all time has left you here without another book.  News Report Oh, don't even speak to me. I don't care if I am being dramatic. I cannot tell you how many rough patches in my life this odd man's odd books got me through. Nor can I adequately describe how he made me want to be a writer. I keep my laptop on a stand now, at the behest of my chiropractor, and I have Tom's photo on the stand, looking up at me from under my laptop. Telling me to be laid back, but to also write the thing. You can see me talking about his book Still Life With Woodpecker here . I've met some cool authors in my life: Ken Kesey, Kinky Friedman, Walter Mosley, Juan Felipe Herrera, but never Tom, my #1. And never my #2, which would have to be Raymond Chandler, but I think he was gone before I got here. If you haven't read Tom Robbins try what is probab...

  Alan Bennett’s Killing Time is a Covid fairy tale. It’s set in Hill Topp House (with two pp’s) a council home where residents pay a premium, the cuisine is ‘not unadventurous’ and a glass of dry sherry may be served on special occasions. The worst fate is probably not death but to be sent down the hill to live in the ‘sink’ council home, Low Moor.  Mrs McBryde, the refined, light-fingered, care home manager doesn’t hesitate to use the threat of Low Moor to keep her residents in line, get rid of anyone whose name seems common (Audrey is out, Amelia in) or whose relatives became unable to pay the premium. Then the pandemic strikes and the Hill Topp table top sale must be cancelled (though Cheltenham races need not). When Mrs McBryde develops Covid symptoms and is taken to hospital, she’s so sure that the virus belongs only in places like Low Moor (and will only affect ‘old people and the occasional Asian’) that her last conversations with the doctor are spent explaining why...

 January has been a looooong month. It's never an easy month but January 2025 has been very mixed, not just in the world, but in my own life. Sending my manuscript into my agent was a high, as was a fabulous evening with Barbara Nadel at West Barnes Library. But family illness on various fronts and the death of a very dear friend has taken its toll. The winter blues have continued on from January into February. I only realised today's date this morning so I'm writing this post ad hoc! I'm burnt out and need to replenish myself. This happened a few years ago and I wrote down places I wanted to visit that I knew would minister to my soul. I haven't written a new list yet but without even meaning to, I started the replenishing process yesterday by visiting Hampton Court Palace. It was a beautiful, sunny day. The palace wasn't too busy and although there wasn't an abundance of them, I found some snowdrops. There's something about these little flowers that br...

I had been waiting for quite a while for the third in one of my favourite series by one of my favourite authors, so I could hardly wait to read it when it was finally published. While the story managed to wrap up some plot threads that had been left dangling after the first two books in the series, in a way that was satisfying in itself, I couldn't help finding the structure of the story a bit laboured. After thinking about it for quite a while, I realised why I had noticed this. The answer surprised me. I had myself wrestled with a similar writing problem in the past.  I am a very low-profile writer - I have written and self-published a lot of novels but none have been wildly successful, which I think is partly because I tend to write in the odd gaps between genres. This is more or less unintentional. My cosy mysteries are either not cosy enough or not mysterious enough, and my historical romances are not romantic enough, though I have found a few loyal readers who seem to stick b...

Sometimes you come across a great book by chance, in this instance I found it when scrolling on the Borrowbox library app. Sometimes you read a book and you have to share it with everyone because it is so well written and the theme of the novel is so topical. The book in question is The Great Divide by Cristina Henriquez. I listened to it and the narration is excellent, with distinctive accents for each character. Although as with “listening” to any book I did struggle to work out who was who at the beginning, without the benefit of flicking back a few pages to clarify, but it was well worth persevering. According to Wikipedia “the most common meaning [of The Great Divide] is the Continental Divide of the Americas, which separates the watersheds of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans”. The novel is set in Panama in 1907 at the time when the Panama Canal was built, a construction which crosses the Great Divide and divides a country in the process. Panama has often been in the news...