Authors Electric

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...

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...