Authors Electric

Twenty years ago, I wrote a rather long novel about Alexander the Great from the point of view of his famous warhorse Bucephalus. At the time, I had a brilliant children's publisher (Chicken House) keen to publish my book in hardcover for the 10+ market who already enjoyed my fantasy novels. Unfortunately, bookshops did not share the same view and rejected the hardcover, so publication was delayed while a more suitable format was found for the book that would please everyone - which, as everyone knows, is impossible. In the end, "I am the Great Horse" (edited down from its original 200,000 words to a modest 150,000) enjoyed its scheduled hardcover publication in the US with Chicken House's partner Scholastic, and hit the UK shelves a year later than planned in paperback. Having missed its publicity slot over here, it sold averagely, which didn't help my career as bookstores usually consider past sales when deciding whether to stock an author's next book. Perha...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I trust it’s not too late to wish you a Happy New Year. January does seem to go on for ever and ever, amen. There is a wonderful Brian Bilston poem about that ( Mnemonic ), which is worth looking up if you haven’t come across this. It always makes me grin. There is a plus side to January. As the month goes on, we are literally approaching the light. The evenings seem longer (especially noticeable if you are taking the dog out).  I like to write and read a mixture of light and dark stories. In the latter, I want there to be some sense of hope. For light stories, I want some “bite” to them. Humorous stories can make you think while they’re entertaining you.  I prefer my characters to be a mixture of dark and light given nobody is perfect and I don’t like wishy-washy, too good to be true portrayals. I suppose this is why I identify far more with Jo March from Little Women than I do with her sister, Beth. I al...

The Hungry Steppe. The vegetation, such as it is, consists mainly of herbs. Not very nutritious, but a delightful perfume! In these troubling times, with AI blurring the boundaries between the fake and the true, we need to think how we educate the young about the lies that threaten our very existence, both environmentally and politically. My father was Polish, and my mother was English. But it was my father who emphasised education, as do parents in most Eastern European countries as they have long memories and consequently good reason to keep abreast of global issues. He enthusiastically subscribed me to the children’s magazine Knowledge . There were beautifully illustrated articles on everything from ancient history to entomology, and I really looked forward to it popping through the letterbox each week. But then, we didn’t have a television, and the internet was way in the future. Facts were facts, and we didn’t question them. The first time I started to have doubts about the school...

  January is not a month for make resolutions. When the sky is grey, the wind shaking the trees, the rain bouncing off the roof, it is time to hunker down and keep warm and safe. Even more so when the ground is covered in snow as it has been in many parts of the country this past week. Under those conditions, we are told to stay at home, if at all possible, and avoid all unnecessary travel. To struggle on, would be crazy. We are not designed to fight winter but to adapt to it. Short days and longer nights cause the level of the hormone melatonin to rise triggering the need to sleep. Lack of sunlight affects the mood, spurs the uptake of comfort food, which in turn leads to weight gain. Is that extra fat protecting us against the cold, or preparing us for hibernation? Humans don’t sleep away the winter, but I think it’s only natural to slow down at this time for year. To practise what some call “Wintering” which I see as going with the rhythm of the season. Waking late, going ...

  The New York Times today published a fascinating interview with author George Saunders .  Saunders, born December 2, 1958, is an American author known for short stories, essays, novellas, novels, and books for children. His work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GQ . From 2006 to 2008, he also wrote a weekly column titled “American Psyche” for the weekend magazine of The Guardian. Saunders is a professor at Syracuse University and has received multiple National Magazine Awards for fiction, winning in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004. He earned second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His debut collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and received the World Fantasy Award for his short story “CommComm.” His later collection, In Persuasion Nation , was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007. Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award in 2013 and w...

  cover by Claudia Myatt The Deben magazine is a modest publication. Just A5 size, 40 pages (unless it bursts its bounds to 44, potentially upsetting both the treasurer and the envelope stuffers), it appears twice a year and is supplied on subscription to members of the River Deben Association. I am its fortunate editor and sometimes like to think of it as the parish magazine of the river. Except that, unlike a parish mag, it doesn’t carry advertising and local event notices are posted by monthly email. So, almost all of those 40 pocket-sized pages are available for contributor articles and photos. As editor I find it endlessly fascinating to read about the different ways people relate to the river – whether they walk by it, sail on it, swim in it, paint it, observe the birds, beasts, plants, fish, creepy-crawlies that live in it. One of my favourite articles was when someone started identifying what might wriggle out when you pull up a mooring rope that hasn’t been used for ...

1980s me! I was born in 1964, so most of my supposedly formative years were in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember our family having the first colour television on the street – hired from Radio Rentals as were they all back then. I remember having just three TV channels and the excitement of the launch of Channel 4 in 1982. I also remember the launch of Brookside , the new hard-hitting Channel 4 soap set in Liverpool. I’d just started at Liverpool university and if you got up early enough at university, you could watch them filming in the city.  Brookside was supposedly targeting ‘gritty social issues’ – did it? I honestly don’t know. I didn’t watch any other soaps, so I had nothing to compare it with. I had vague memories of the local charming-but-deadly gangster Tommy McArdle, and then of course there was the infamous body under the patio and the first televised lesbian kiss, both of which catapulted actress Anna Friel to fame.  But compared to modern soap, Brookside  is ...

I've been conscious for quite a few years of an instinctive desire to hibernate during those months of hardly any daylight and weather that varies between being too cold to go out and too wet to go out. Here in Edinburgh, however, January 2026 has begun with several days of the blue skies and dazzling brightness that sometimes happens after a heavy fall of snow, only until today we hadn’t had the snow, thank goodness. In fact, as soon as I had drafted this post the clouds rolled in and we had a couple of flurries.  Until this happened, it was almost as if the weather was trying to tempt me to go outside, though I am not up to full strength yet for walking, and there are some frosty patches on the roads and pavements. Still, it's a far cry from the last time we had serious snow, when the 'Beast from the East' arrived some years ago. I well remember being sent home from work in mid-afternoon only to find the buses had stopped running and I had to walk all the way, taking ...

The right book at the right time In November we lost my brother-in-law, Nicky, quite suddenly - a stroke from which it seemed that he would never wake up. My sister-in-law, my wife’s sister Pen, said she had felt that he was ‘slipping away’. Yet he was a fit and active man, still working as a market gardener, and he had once been the proud owner of two Clydesdales, named Tommy and Morgan, draught horses that he had cared for for many years until their own deaths; so I was surprised and shocked for he was only six months older than I am. In August this year my wife and I had been with both him and Pen, choosing books at Logie Steading in Scotland, a bookstore where he had once himself worked part-time.   I had chosen a few books during that visit, although they were not books that were particularly memorable; and this would have had no consequence except that following my brother-in-law’s death, I needed something which would ground me in my understanding of what this loss might mea...