Authors Electric

I've been thinking hard about this for some time and now I've come to a decision. I think this will be my last regular Authors Electric blog. I haven't been very well since March and though I'm not far off being restored, I feel that I have to jettison a few things. Writing a regular monthly blog - and after five years at it, trying to find something worth writing about - has become quite a burden, albeit a fulfilling one. However, I find I've picked up a few new projects - the 'ghost writing' I mentioned last month, Dora's story about escaping from Communist Bulgaria, the last part of which I am still waiting for, the birthstone story project and the strange fact that interest has been shown in my long-ago failed novel about Coleridge, the salvaging of which is now a point of honour - at the same time as losing some of my old energy. After all, the years are chugging on remorselessly. However, I won't give in to the temptation to write a f...

The more I write about history, the more I love it. Considering my school tried everything they knew to make me hate the subject, I consider myself extremely lucky that I got there in the end. Kings and queens meant nothing to me until a history lecturer at University – the great and sainted Ian Kershaw – told me that William the Conqueror fell off his horse and burst. Now that for me, is a proper kingly way to die. The real beauty, and frustration, of history is that an extraordinary amount of it is guesswork. That's why I've always been wary of biography. Somebody spends many years examining everything recorded about a certain personage, and is confident at the end of all that they have drawn a perfect picture. Sadly, that is balderdash. I don't even know myself why I do most things that I do, and looking back on them, the problem just gets murkier. Take Nelson. One of Britain's most authentic heroes, still revered, still cited in any naval argument. Then ta...

I seem fated every year to be the bringer of sad news about a person who has been my friend, the friend of others on AE and a figure of respect and admiration  to many other readers and writers. Jim Riordan, Bob Leeson, Patricia Miles. And now comes, for me, the saddest of all. Pam Royds, Children's Book editor, first at Andre Deutsch and then at Scholastic, was 91. She was the editor who started the writing careers of both Jan and me. Our debt to her is immeasurable. Is it significant that my twenty-six years as a Deutsch and Scholastic author ended just before she finally retired?  As Jan will confirm, she was a noted fighter for her own writers. One of the last of the great  children's book editors. My first, initially bruising, meeting with Pam was in April 1973. Our first exchanges made me wonder why I'd even bothered to turn up. Yes, the lunch in Andre Deutsch's exclusive little dining room (those were the days!) was lovely and the whisky she insist...