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 ...

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 ...

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price Tryst: (Old French) an appointed station in hunting. An appointed meeting place, often of lovers. To engage to meet a person or persons. A cattle market, e.g. 'The Falkirk Tryst.'   A Sterkarm Tryst: an appointed meeting place of which only one side is aware: an ambush.    Yesterday, January 24th, the third Sterkarm book, A Sterkarm Tryst, was published. It's the third in the series. The first two, after being out of print for some years, have been republished by Open Road. They are The Sterkarm Handshake and A Sterkarm Kiss . The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price A Sterkarm Kiss by Susan Price (I've just been messaged on Facebook by a reader, who tells me she can now at last read Kiss, which she's been trying to find for ten years, and has pre-ordered Tryst.  I can only say thank you for your stamina and thank you again.) The books were inspired by the reivers of the Scottish...