Authors Electric

Antonio Banderas and Victoria Abril in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! A few weeks ago, I came across an excellent blog post by Emma Darwin on writing about sex. It’s something I’ve been pondering a good deal recently, (I know, I know) because I’m in the middle of reworking an old idea and central to it is the theme of an intensely physical and virtually irresistible sexual attraction. Emma makes the very valuable and astute point that erotica, while often deemed to be ‘literarily unrespectable’ is just like any other kind of writing and subject to the same demands, the same constraints – not of what’s depicted, but how the writer exercises his or her craft. ‘What is it about writing sex which makes both writers and readers regard it as a wholly different business from anything else?’ she asks.  If you decide to leave the bedroom door firmly closed in a novel about relationships, it always seems to me as much of a cop out as - for example - leaving out the dialogue just because you...

This time last year I sent a tweet that said ‘after so long ghostwriting, this book’s for me’. I was preparing to self-publish my first novel. In the sunny land of tweets, I was keeping up a front of jolly emancipation. Behind the scenes, all was frantic. I’d done a last edit that turned drastic. I was pleased with it but my first advance reader bawled me out for my robust treatment of reincarnation. Although we’re now great friends, this was not reassuring. I had no clue how to market the book, but if I aimed at the wrong readers there’d be hate mail. I was blogging about it here and there, attempting to sketch my multilayered story in a thumbnail. Each time it sounded like a different book. And as for a back cover blurb? I was totally failing to write one that grasped the novel satisfactorily. But flap copy was a detail because I had no front cover. I was designing roughs and hated the way they were going. Even if I was going to use a designer (which in the end I didn’...