Authors Electric

  Times have changed. The Story of the Little Mole who Knew it was None of his Business would never have seen the light of day in the 1950s, even though it was a jolly good guide to identifying animal poo. Natural history investigation wasn’t discouraged in the 20 th century, but it was more a case of scoring points over your mates. I-Spy books were actually pretty good, but oh how the order of high and low-scoring birds has changed. Magpies were unusual, and egrets and ring-necked parakeets unknown. Yellowhammers weren’t uncommon at all. The other books I treasured were the Observer books, affordable on a couple of weeks’ pocket money at 5 shillings a go, which tackled everything from Aircraft to Moths, Freshwater Fishes, Birds Eggs and Wild Animals – British, obviously. In those days moles were the villains, who desecrated golf courses and bowling greens, and we even had books in which country types wore moleskin weskits (waistcoats). Foxhunting wasn’t frowned on in pony books...

  In Part 1, we survived the history of feuds and rivalries among writers, the literary minefield of conflicting egos and ambitions. Is it possible, we wondered, for even the strongest alliance to avoid ending in flames. Young Leverett Butts approached Richard Monaco, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, as a fan of the older author's Parsival series and entered into a creative relationship and partnership that lasted for over a decade. Today LB answers questions about the power of becoming both student and teacher. And the importance of choosing the right mentor. 1 .  First Models: All writers start with a model in mind—someone whose work deeply resonates with them. Many even attempt to emulate that writer before finding their own vision and voice. Who was your first model? When I first seriously started writing, I was greatly inspired by John Irving and Robert Penn Warren. A lot of my earlier attempts at "literary" fiction draw deeply from those two writers. As I began to write mo...

Hey there Legends~ Every June, Pride Month arrives in the USA accompanied by celebrations, parades, rainbow logos, and, inevitably, sadly, stateside, more than a few complaints that we no longer need it or never should have had it. Grrrr those irk me no end! As someone who spends much of her life around books and writers, I find myself returning to a simpler question: Whose stories get told? Publishing has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes are easier to find than they once were. Many authors are able to write openly about experiences that previous generations were forced to hide. Readers can discover stories that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to publish in earlier eras. That progress is worth celebrating. At the same time, Pride Month serves as a reminder of how recently much of that progress occurred. Many writers still remember a publishing landscape where LGBTQ+ characters were expected to meet tragic ends, w...

Jon Snow (Wikipedia) Now defined by his dementia diagnosis?   Last Saturday I was tidying up PD’s cabin, preparing to row up the river in the rain, when I got a call from LBC. Would I go on a programme at 1330 to talk about Jon Snow’s Alzheimer diagnosis? I did a quick calculation: yes, I could be home in time. But what was this all about? ‘Jon Snow the broadcaster has written a book about his Alzheimer’s,' said the programme assistant.  Sorry, no. I haven’t read it. I can't help you.’ That was a relief. No need to worry about hold ups on the A12 or about poor internet quality for the call. I did feel worried, however, that there was some major new book about dementia that I hadn’t even heard of.  When I had got home and changed out of my wet clothes, I had a look on Amazon. No book listed. I googled ‘Jon Snow Alzheimer’s.' Ah! Channel 4 are showing a documentary  Jon Snow: the last big story on Saturday June 20 th .  It’s not all about his Alzheimer’s diagno...

  Never judge a book by its cover. At least, that’s what they say. I’ve been doing some fresh research into cover design these past few weeks, gearing up to launch the first in (hopefully) a series of Young Adult books. The book is written (and rewritten, three times), and the manuscript has been edited and proof-read until it’s as polished as I can make it. As an aside, even after three passes for typos, some still remained; my go-to method for a final pass is to print out and read the book in reverse, a paragraph at a time. It’s long-winded and not the most fun, but it does seem to catch any remaining spelling and grammar mistakes. I suspect it’s because I have to force my brain to engage, rather than going with the flow of the story. On the plus side, even after reading the book seven or eight times, I still like it. But back to my original thoughts, cover designs. I hadn’t really thought much about this, but every year, it seems like a theme emerges that almost ...

Below is the opening to my very first (unpublished and unpublishable) novel. It was lovingly hand-written in a fancy binder in about 1978 when I was fourteen. No computers back then and nobody even had typewriters at home. I got a manual typewriter when I was seventeen or so, as I recall. It was (is) a crime novel, inspired by a dream I had, and was written in the evenings when I wasn't particularly happy at school and didn't have much of a social life. I don't think I ever showed it to anybody except perhaps a girl at school who did type some of it up for me - although that may have been novel number two when I was seventeen. Neither novels have ever been edited and I've never attempted to submit them or self-publish. They're nowhere near good enough and being only fourteen would not have cut it! So I’ve typed this up exactly as it appears in my binder, which I still have in the filing cabinet. Every missed comma and dodgy sentence structure! I don't think I...

I had planned to write about the actual writing situation that led me to ask the above question, but instead I found myself wondering if ‘trilemma’ is a real word or not, as I imagined I had probably coined it myself. During my investigations in various online dictionaries, however, I’ve discovered that not only is it a real word but that the word has existed for a few centuries and the concept for a good deal longer. In the middle of my trilemma search, I realised that ‘quandary’ was a more accurate term for my state of mind, as it would not restrict me to two or three options but was much more vague and open-ended than that - though looking at the structure of the word carefully I very much wanted it to mean a problem with exactly four possible solutions. In any case, it seems that a trilemma is often used in a very exact way, to refer to problems in economics or computing, so it would be quite unsuited to solving the less quantifiable question of what to do next. Anyway, I will leav...