Authors Electric

Not long ago I wrote here about opting for fiction rather than non-fiction in my latest book, but recent events have made me wonder if I achieved what I set out to do, since I’m delighted that In the Blink of an Eye is listed for the People’s Book Prize but a bit disconcerted to find it in the non-fiction category! I daresay the competition may have its own reasons or its own criteria and I guess it’s too late to ask for a ‘reassignment’. Nor is the book so far from the facts for the classification to worry me unduly, although it does feel odd to be alongside (and up against?) books like Understanding BRCA or Rock and Pop on British TV which I am sure are entirely laudable in their respective ways.  A trip to an indie bookshop on Saturday which had lots of genre fiction also made me wonder again about where my book lies in the scheme of things. I couldn’t help feeling it looked more at home in the biography section than next to Robert Harris, Karen Maitland and Sim...

My hero D.O. Hill, by permission Preus Museum, Norway I may not have said much about my latest project here on Authors Electric, so in case you haven't heard, I have a novel coming out in April called In the Blink of an Eye . I was inspired to write it by the real story of one man's journey through art and photography and the women who fell, in different ways, under his spell.   The accepted term for  a life-story written as a novel  is 'fictional biography' , but t rawling through some older posts across at https://alibacon.com , I remember that for quite some time I wasn't sure what kind of book In the Blink of an Eye   was going to be.   While I explored the shape of the story on the page, I was aware of keeping as closely as I could to ‘the facts’. And new facts were popping up all the time. If I included them all  surely it would be non-fiction, or perhaps more correctly 'narrative non-fiction'.   Had I really only plumped f...

Remember how books ‘as we know them’ were on their way out? I seem to remember a few years ago the same kind of prediction was going on around Christmas cards: rising postage, conservation, e-alternatives and a multi-faith society made it look like the white bendy things were heading for oblivion and I think that was a reasonable prediction. I culled my list, signed up for an e-card service and found old friends turning up in my inbox rather than on my door-mat. I can’t deny a pang of conscience for however many thousands of jobs relied on their production and design and the possible loss to charity coffers (how many of us make that donation we really mean to?) but that was balanced out by the feel-good factor of thrift and eco-friendliness. Well here we are a few years on and I glimpse a small revival of the robin and reindeer cheeriness. Cost of postage it has to be said is a factor and I’m surprised (in a good way) that my children are now asking for addresses of cousins and...

Over the past two years I’ve spent time and energy defending libraries here in South Gloucestershire and neighbouring local authorities where they are being subjected to ever more drastic cuts. This is partly because as an  ex-librarian (working mainly in the academic sector) I feel for the staff, but more because our local library played such a formative part in my childhood. So much so that it won a starring role in my first novel A Kettle of Fish (which I always hasten to add is nothing to do with my childhood - apart from the locations!) Of course the library in Dunfermline wasn’t ‘just any library’ but the very first Carnegie Library and we were always being reminded of our debt of gratitude to our famous benefactor. ( Andrew Carnegie was a native of the town). Staircase to the new museum Having moved south in my twenties, it's a while since I had darkened the door of my old library, until last month, when I was invited to speak at  the Undiscovered ...

Prologues - why not jump right in?  Prologues in fiction are popular with writers, though less so with readers, and I am of that very ilk. There’s nothing more likely to raise my hackles when I pick up a book than a few pages headed Prologue ,  Before, Then , or In the Beginning . And regardless of the fact I have read many good books with prologues, there’s always the suspicion that here comes something not strictly necessary, something holding up the story we’re about to step into. So why take the risk of putting your reader off on page 1? Let’s think about the nature of the conventional prologue. First of all why is it there?   1)      To create atmosphere and suspense – my mystery takes a few chapters to set things up,  let’s flag up what's coming or get a bit of creepiness/excitement in at the start. 2)      Because it’s in a different timeline – if the reader is going to understand the plot t...

From time immemorial (well at least since the coming of the railways) a British holiday has meant the seaside, and for me even a mountain retreat in Wales and Scotland is all the better if there’s a golden beach to run down to at the end of the day. Our coast has been celebrated in all kinds of ways in print and on TV because in our hearts it’s where we like to be.  In my case even reading Paul Theroux’s A Kingdom by the Sea   which pulls no punches,   didn’t rid me of my beach love, and Tenby – the only place he had a good word for– is still on my bucket list. Southwold is respectable but Something Might Happen  But we don’t need Theroux to remind us that away from the waters edge, our seaside towns are a mixed bunch and very many of them are in decline. Of all those I’ve visited in the last couple of years, I can see how those that have remained quaint have added a chic and gentrified air that sometimes feels odd. I can think of several that have si...

Big books from monthly book-clubs (growing dusty!)  In my childhood everything- even Mallory Towers! -  was in hardback, and in my early married life I indulged in a book club (remember them?) which delivered a chunky novel once a month.           I think I can pin down my change of heart over hardbacks  to when I asked my young teenage daughter for a copy of the newly published Donna Tart ( The Little Friend ) for Christmas, on the basis it wouldn’t be too big a drain on her pocket money. Being out of the book-buying habit at the time, I'd missed that it was only out in hardback and was filled with guilt as I unwrapped the unwieldy and expensive brute.           From then on, I have never chosen to buy fiction in hardback. (Non-fiction, poetry and illustrated books are a different matter). A novel in my mind is either e-book or tree-book, and a tree-book is a paperback. A ...

Long nights - good for the writing soul? Apologies for some writerly introspection today, but in these darker months when there should be more  time to sit down and write, it’s somehow just as hard – or even harder -  to keep at it. When I gave up full-time work and looked forward to ‘being a writer’ I envisaged a nice daily routine of, say, writing in the mornings and editing or dealing with submissions etc in the afternoons, with a reasonable number of days off /trips out for good behaviour.  I suppose for some periods of time this has worked, but somewhere along the line I discovered that creativity and routine are not happy cohabitees, at least not in my brain, and at various points my ingrained Protestant Work Ethic has driven me not to new summits of achievement but to a grinding halt. I often wonder how I have managed to write two novels and more than enough words for a third when my ‘average daily wordcount’ (not that I often think of it that way) is r...

Cross-channel confusion Last autumn I had a disturbing experience. Well it wasn’t too bad because I was only sitting in front of the telly and no blood was spilled, and you know how it is when a character appears and your immediate reaction is ‘oh that’s so-and-so from what’s it’s name,’ because with any actor worth their salt you’re bound to think of them as their most recent persona.  But this time it got out of hand.  I was watching the dramatisation of Capital by John Lanchester  and couldn’t miss the fact that city financier Roger Yount was actor Toby Jones aka Lance from cult BBC4 comedy The Detectorists . But then Roger’s wife Arabella turned out to be Rachel Stirling who happens to be the wife of the other guy in The Detectorists , Lance’s mate Andy. Confused? No, not exactly, but it didn’t help with my suspension of disbelief. Then there was Nicola Walker (great actress, loved her feisty farmer in Last Tango in Halifax ) playing two different d...