Authors Electric

  Virginia Woolf memorably said that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” both of which I had when I retired from teaching. My pension was reasonable, my office had everything I could possibly want. I loved the view from my window. The way the light fell over the rooves, the stunning sunsets and neighbour’s beech tree that changed with the seasons. The shelves were full of books and photos of my family. There were inspiring pictures cut from magazines on my notice board and the room was the warmest in the house. In such an environment one couldn’t help but write and I did. Six books in the Letty Parker series for 8-12 year olds, five novels, numerous short stories and a piece of drama for an evening at the Wedgewood museum. There were also a short stories that were published in various anthologies and workshops prepared for school visits. Outside my room, I did the housework and the laundry. Mike shopped and cooked. He watched sport. I read ...

  Ellis Elliott is a poet, author, and the founder of  Bewilderness Writing , a weekly online workshop where writers gather to explore the fertile wilderness of their creative subconscious through freewriting from poetry prompts. Since 2020, she has cultivated a brave and supportive community that values expression over perfection, helping participants quiet their inner critic and discover their authentic voices on the page. This year, Ellis released the first  Bewilderness Journal , showcasing the powerful, intimate work that has emerged from these sessions. I sat down with Ellis to talk about how the workshops began, what it took to grow this community, the inspiration behind the new journal, and what’s next for  Bewilderness Writing .   Dianne Pearce (Dianne):  Thanks so much for the meetup Ellis. I was lucky enough to be in one of your Bewilderness sessions, and I have always wondered w hat inspired you to start Bewilderness Writing back in 2...

  ‘Why do you want to republish The Tuesday Boys ?’ my youngest brother asked. My immediate answer would be 'Because I love it,' and I know he agrees with me. Libby Purves and Claudia Myatt say the same. But is that sufficient reason to republish?   The Tuesday Boys is a book about a project to take eight young East London  children sailing. It began in 1975, fifty years ago. Will it make any sense to readers today? On one level, yes, belief in the potential for sail training to widen horizons and change lives has been in existence since the late c18th when the Marine Society began taking boys from London workhouses and providing initial training before they went to sea with the merchant navy. Through the c19th and early c20th, while Britain's need for seafarers remained obvious, charities continued to work to ensure that the most deprived inner city children (boys) had their chance to succeed at sea.  More general charities, such as sea scouts and sea cadets, ...

Musings on the Nature of Time The last few months have been manic for me and seem to have passed by in a blur. The daytime job has been full-on, and my old laptop decided to die (top tip – have a decent backup strategy; when the hard drive failed I only lost a few hundred words due to multiple backups. I got my fingers burned many years ago when I lost work due to not having backups). It also took quite a while to source laptop – admittedly because I have slightly unusual requirements, chief of which is an unlocked bootloader to load my preferred operating system. I’ve been a Linux user since 2003, and my workflows have evolved around it; trying to use Windows is jarring for me (and TBH, I’m not a fan of Windows 11, or the latest version of Office that comes with it – it also doesn’t play nicely with my home server setup). To cut a long story short, I eventually found a reasonable spec Dell that’s only a few years old. Twenty minutes after powering it up, I was up and...

It doesn't seem that long ago we had our previous event but it's been four months! We're returning to police procedural again but we have some amazing authors for you – Simon McCleave and John Sunderland. Here's more about them. Simon McCleave is a multi million-selling crime novelist who lives in North Wales with his wife and two children. Before he was an author, Simon worked as a script editor at the BBC and a producer at Channel 4 before working as a story analyst in Los Angeles. He then became a script writer, writing on series such as  Silent Witness ,  The Bill ,  EastEnders  and many more. His Channel 4 film  Out of the Game  was critically acclaimed and described as ‘ an unflinching portrayal of male friendship ’ by  Time Out . His first book,  The Snowdonia Killings , was released in January 2020 and soon became an Amazon Bestseller, reaching No 1 in the UK Chart and selling over 400,000 copies. His twenty subsequent novels in the D...

Ever since I first heard it, the Flanders and Swann song entitled 'The Gas Man Cometh' has struck a chord with me and I've found myself applying it to all kinds of situations.  For anyone who doesn't yet know it, the lyrics are here:  https://genius.com/Flanders-and-swann-the-gas-man-cometh-lyrics (for some reason the live link doesn't always work but if you are really keen to see the lyrics then you can always copy it into the search bar) The first time I found it relevant was when we had someone from British Telecom round to install a second telephone line. Yes, this was some time ago when we still had landlines. In this case we needed it because my husband had complained to his then employers, who were in fact British Telecom, that I had had to go downstairs to answer the phone in the middle of the night when alone in the house with a small baby only to find that nobody in the family had died after all, but that my husband, who was in fact away from home on a re...

All good things come to an end, but endings can be hard to bear. Turning over the last page of a favourite novel can tear your heart in two, particularly if you have invested so much time getting to know the characters. Maybe that is why sequels are so popular, you can pick up where you left off and continue the story, with a new adventure, because let’s face it no one’s story really ends. Even when some people die, they can leave behind a legacy and the circle of life continues. I’ve just started reading a Dr Ruth Galloway book. The Locked Room is, I think, the penultimate one in the series. I could have devoured them all in one go, but I’ve spaced them out through the years. Elly Griffiths’ writing has kept me coming back for more but even she has now moved on. I must read her Brighton series and the Harbinder Kaur books before I investigate her brand-new series. There is so much I have to look forward to. The joy of new books – shiny with uncracked spines, unread but just wa...

                                                 “Responses to war”, A Commentary   For this blog I have returned   to my theme of two years ago when part of the world seemed to spiral out of control so violently that it was impossible to see how sworn enemies could ever be reconciled. My subject now again is war and is an account of how I have tried to come to terms with its horror, such as that precipitated by the massacre of Israelis by their Palestinian neighbours on October 7th 2023, and the Israeli response.   Not far from where I live is a meeting place for The Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. The Meeting House and its surrounding rooms contain an extensive library, and it was there a few weeks ago, that I entered The Meeting House and visited the library before the meeting began.  I looked at the section on Quaker ...

Thanks to a clever company called Slightly Foxed , I find myself reading a lot of memoirs nowadays. For those who haven’t yet discovered it, Slightly Foxed brings out a quarterly magazine  of essays about books - fiction, non-fiction, all genres - particularly prized by the contributors. Not recently published ones, no Booker shortlist here, but ones that have stood the test of time and become personal favourites. Reading these articles have not only reminded me of much-loved titles, but got me tracking down others I’d never heard of before.  Slightly Foxed Editions: pleasingly harmonious. (from foxedquarterly.com)  It was a natural progression, then, for Slightly Foxed to start its own imprint, Slightly Foxed Editions, a delightfully produced series of pocket hardback reprints of classic memoirs, unjacketed, each with a different colour binding, so that a whole shelf of them gives a pleasingly harmonious look. I know this because we have two and half shelves full, and ...

                                                            I am a neurodivergent tutor, businesswoman, performer and writer. I am very successful in all of these areas, even winning awards, yet I mask my very real struggles every day, leading to disbelief and gaslighting. So what are the realities of a ‘hidden disability’ for this ‘Superwoman’?   I know some of you won’t believe me, so maybe I am wasting my ink, but I struggle everyday with some aspect or other of daily life, and what you see in articles, professional life and on social media is only the tip of the iceberg. Yes, I appear to be quite annoyingly successful at everything I do. But the next time you call a person like me ‘Superwoman’, imagine that I am also battling with Kryptonite on a daily basis.   In 2018, I was diagnosed with Autis...