Authors Electric

  Why has a wider knowledge become so narrow? Every time I teach a new literary text to a student, I am excited to share the context of its historical period with them. Understanding the social and historical background to a text can help to bring it to life, illustrating what motivated the author, what they rebelled against or were shaped by, whether they realised it or not. It is crucially important when studying older texts, like Shakespeare or Dickens, which can seem so remote from the lives of young people today, but it is also important to remember that events which happened in the 1980’s and 90’s might as well be medieval to a 15-year-old. Studying Willy Russell’s  Blood Brothers   requires an understanding of Thatcherism and the politics that shaped the decade in which she presided over No. 10. Knowing the background not only enriches understanding, but it also helps to present the authors as real people with real lives. Furthermore, it is part of the curriculum i...

You can find the Book DNA site here. It's a site that aims to put people who love reading and books in touch with other people who love reading and books. You can join as a reader and/or as a writer (since writers tend to be book-lovers and avid readers often write.) You can put forward your favourite books of a year, as I've done here  ...and Book DNA will make you a beautiful page to show off your choices. Or, if you join as an author, you can choose one of your own books, and then show-case five other books which you think will appeal to a similar readership, as I did here... At the beginning of this post and again at the end, I have the opportunity to mention my own book of ghost stories, Hauntings . This doesn't cost the writer anything except the time spent compiling their choice of books -- which, as always, is rather a pleasure. And I noticed a definite up-turn in the sales of my ghost stories after posting this.  The Book DNA site is building a community of reader...

This month I'm reading some non-fiction aimed at adult readers: The Spell of the Horse and its sequel The Spirit of the Horse . The author Pam Billinge offers Equine Assisted Therapy with her small herd of horses and ponies, which together with the associated Equine Assisted Learning are becoming more popular in the UK as beneficial therapies. Simply being around horses, it seems, works wonders for people, and with the guidance of a trained facilitator time spent with the herd can be as powerful as any conventional medicine. These two books combine Pam's personal equine journey with selected case studies (names and details changed to protect clients) to make an interesting and digestible read.  The Spell of the Horse The Spell of the Horse  begins with Pam bonding with a mare called Carabella on a riding holiday in Spain, and noticing how her own horse reacted when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As the book progresses, we meet the various equines that have acc...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. It is ironic the longest month ever, January, is followed by the shortest, February. Writing wise, it gives me the shortest time to prepare my next author newsletter, due in March, but I discovered long ago the joys of drafting in advance so I add to my draft as the month goes on. I do likewise for my blogs and articles. It takes the pressure off.   I enter a number of reputable flash fiction and short story competitions in the year. It’s fun to do and a great challenge (and I always look for those where it is free or the fee is reasonable).    I’ve found it useful to take a week off any official deadline and make that the day I submit my entry. I pencil into my diary when I need to have my first draft done by, my first edit, my second one, and the final one to check for those pesky typos which have escaped the previous edits. I wish I could say there weren’t any but I’ve found it pays to assume there ...

My great-aunt Dorothy, and her mother I used to get a lot of fanmail, in the days when the Divide trilogy had just been published, a fantasy aimed primarily at the 10 – 13 age-group, although there was a lot of subtext intended to appeal to the parents... Apart from all the requests to be sent free books, some of them led to real friendships, even transatlantic ones. I am still in touch with the one that said: I bet you don’t get many emails from 26-year old men.           But I can go back a lot further than 2003. The first stories I ever had published were in the Evening News, a newspaper that is now sadly no more. This one was published in June, 1978. I’ll put what I remember of the letter I received after the story. The other amusing this about it is a photograph I discovered after my mother’s death, of my great-aunt Dorothy. She was the nearest I ever had to a grandmother, and she was huge fun.   The old ton-up fossil There wa...

  AI brings us all to Plan A or Plan B, each of which has its gradations. Plan A, at its extreme, allows the use of AI as an equal or even main partner in the creative process. Hardline Plan A-ers may yield to all of their AI's stylistic suggestions as commands. Along with most of the writers I know,  I find this repulsive. If I want an incomplete sentence or a dangling participle or some dated slang, it's my book and the decision is mine.  Even so, I found myself in a quandary with a completed novel I'd worked on for six years and had had professionally edited. You see, after four traditionally published horror novels, I'd turned to my first love, crime thrillers, and worked in a shorter form--40K words--for more than decade. The short length was a deal breaker for any agent I approached. But I loved working in tight spaces with no padding. So, no tears. My refusal to compromise cost me a traditional career, bringing me to the company of other indie-minded authors. ...

  On a dismal February afternoon, I got to thinking how food plays an important part in all my books. It’s never centre stage, but it often underlines how my characters are feeling, or is symbolic of what is going on in their lives. In “House of Shadows” my time slip novel Jo Docherty has an issue with food. When anxious or stressed, she cannot eat and at the beginning of the book she is struggling with the aftermath of yet another miscarriage and what feels like a failing marriage. Moving away to her studio in the grounds of Kingsfield House she is haunted by a girl in a blue dress, the girl who she played with as a child, but who lived two centuries before Jo was born. As the past encroaches and the sense of menace grows, Jo looks for help. Helene and Cecile have an insight into the occult and the danger that lurks in Kingsfield House, giving Jo hope that somehow she will be able to deal with what she must face. It is at this point that Jo bakes her Florentines. “In the bri...

  Have you been to a poetry reading where some of the poets read in the same way? The stretched pauses. The careful pacing. The slightly mystical cadence. The voice that quietly announces, “This is a poem.” If you have, you'll know that the prior   sentence, in “poetry voice,” would probably sound like this: The voice  that quietly  announces,  “This is a poem.” And it would be read with rising inflection at the end of every line, like everything was a question, or a revelation, or both. A recent  New York Times  piece looks at this, often called the “poet voice,” and asks why so many poets end up reading their work in nearly identical ways.  Poetry lives in two spaces at once. On the page, it’s quiet, interior, personal. Out loud, it becomes physical and shared. Breath matters. Silence matters. Tone matters. Pace matters. The same poem can feel like a different piece of writing depending on how it’s voiced. But sometimes readings by different po...

Credit: RAF Valentines Day 1943 The plane home from Hamburg thrummed steadily through the night, down the western side of Germany to Amsterdam, then across the narrow sea to Essex. I think a returning WW2 bomber would have crossed higher, spent more time over the sea than the land. Thousands of ordinary people fly to and from Germany every day. Our countries are allied against larger aggressors to the east and west. It’s not necessary to wake these hurtful memories of things that happened before most of us were born.  Except … when I had asked my brother earlier that day whether he’d like to live in Hamburg, he thought not. ‘Too many horizontal bricks,’ he said. We laughed at him of course. ‘That’s the way bricks are laid!’ but when he pointed across the street to one of so many postwar, Lego-like, redbrick rectangular blocks we understood what he meant. The pervasive evidence of rebuilding. My brother normally lives in former East Berlin, a city hung over by its own c20th history....

A couple of weeks ago, we had  an unusual day - a first for us. Early start to the day and we were were off to Prestbury in East Cheshire, where Andy gave a talk on the history of stained glass. at a Probus group. This is one of the offshoots of  his small business  Moulton Glass , and he gives short (45 minute) presentations to community groups. Moulton Glass makes and repairs/restores leadlight windows, plus we have a presence at various craft fairs in the area, selling decorative items. We even run wiorkshops! But since he's been visiting the local WI groups, word has got out and he's now being contacted by the National Women's Register, Probus and the U3A. He's a good speaker and people seem to enjoy listening. We're currently booked throughout this year and into 2027 and branching outside Cheshire now. There wasn't that much wine! Then later on in the afternoon, it was my turn. Northwich's new local bookshop Cover2Cover invited me to host a talk about...

When I speak to people about my writing, if they haven't felt the urge to write themselves they usually express either blank disbelief - 'why do you do it?' - or mild interest in how I've managed to think of so many ideas. Some of the stories have their roots in real life incidents or situations, though I have only rarely attempted anything that actually depicts real people, so I doubt if I will be bothered by any libel suits in the near future. Actually the only example I can think of is a short story called 'Murder at the Drama Group' that I dashed off in a fury after someone annoyed me at a drama group for young people that I was involved in ages ago. I definitely won't be publishing it as it started with a (real) local council employee being found stabbed in the costume cupboard. I recently found myself using something that had happened in real life quite some time ago as the basis for a mystery novel. This isn't unusual, of course, though in this ca...