Authors Electric

The Sterkarm Handshake     How did you get the idea for the Sterkarms?  I had no idea of writing anything remotely like it. Then I went on a walking holiday in the Scottish Borders. The guides kept saying, 'This is an old Reiver's trail,' or pointing to a tower and saying, 'That's an old Reiver's tower.' I was intrigued and bought George MacDonald Fraser's book, THE STEEL BONNETS , read it, and was absolutely fascinated. I got that feeling - 'I want to write about these people!'  The obvious thing was to write an historical novel, set in the reivers' time, but my gut-feeling said no to that. I felt that the present day had to be in the book too. So I played about with various ways of transferring characters from one time to another - the knock on the head and waking up in another century, the mystical time-slip, the dream. None of these ideas satisfied me. They all seemed too fussy, and all would involve the ...

A Sterkarm Kiss by Susan Price '...There had been a lot more dancing, and drinking and eating, and the evening light that came through the door... had flickered into dusk before the fiddlers and the pipers began to play, once more, the tune called 'Come to the Wedding.' As they played, they bore down on Per and Joan, and people cheered and clapped and stamped. It was time that the wedded pair were put to bed...           Mistress Crosar put her mouth so close to Joan’s ear that it tickled, and shouted, “Undo thine garters!”           Joan froze. They were at the back of the dancing hall, near the benches. People were everywhere. How could she pull up her skirts and undo her garters?..           "Oh, come here, lass!” her aunt said, and turned her round, tutting at how slow and clumsy Joan was in moving. Other women gathered round he...

It's still sharper than my sight without my specs Over the past year I've been trying - with a satisfying amount of success - to make my garden more attractive to wildlife. By which I mean birds, frogs, newts, that sort of wild life and not certain friends. (Apologies for the photo's poor quality - new camera that I've not got the hang of yet.)       Chatting recently to my agent about the possibility of selling a non-fiction book, I happened to mention this. My agent was interested. A non-fiction book for children on the how and why of 'creating a wild-life garden.' She could get behind a book like that.      Ah, but what to call it? It's one of the banes of a writer's existence that books and articles have to have titles.        I started the book with the working title 'Why You Should Make a Wildlife Garden.' But this very blog's own Karen Bush strongly objected to this on the grounds that it sounded ...

Twenty years ago - yes, it was twenty years ago, though it doesn't The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price: Scholastic seem possible - I went on holiday in Northumberland, walked along Hadrian's Wall and bought MacDonald Fraser's book, The Steel Bonnets , about the riding families, or reivers, of the Scottish Borders.      As a result, I wrote The Sterkarm Handshake - which tells how a 21st Century multi-national company, FUP, develops a time-machine, and travels back 500 years, to the early 16th Century, in order to exploit the fossil fuels. They intend to bring the coal, oil and gas back through the time tube to their own time, and sell it at huge profit.       They come into conflict with the natives, the Sterkarm family. Windsor, the 21st Century executive,  makes the mistake of dismissing them as 'peasants armed with sticks.' The 'sticks' are longbows and eight-foot lances and the Sterkarms - shrewd, quick and bolshy to the bo...