Authors Electric

Where’s this ruddy spring, that’s what I want to know. It’s been a long, gruelling winter what with one thing and three others, and I’ve had just about enough of it. Packed the grandkids and their ma n pa off to some damn theme park or another today, and it’s so cold out (Pennines/Lancashire/Yorkshire border) that they’d have been better off staying in bed. Not that they’ll think that, of course. I can remember days at Alton Towers (not where they’re going; apparently they charge £20 a day for the use of a wheelchair, which sadly now is needed for one of Spring is sprung? Come to't sunny north! the party) when it rained so hard the waterproofing of my skin gave up and I filled me wellies from the inside by osmosis. Honest! You ask Donald Trump. And the children? They never noticed it. Just demanded more ice cream… Talking of wellies, my darling Mac rendered it as ‘willies’ both the first time I typed it, then again just then (which is po...

Mallard in all her glory at the the National Railway Museum at York. Picture by Rich Bacon  Research has always been one of the bugbears of writing. In the old days, if one was doing a book based on factual matters, part of the process was finding out where you could find out things that were important and germane. This, as you all know, could take hours, days, weeks, months – it was a pain. Rich and Muava with Adam Fozard in museum colours It hit me hardest when I was writing one of my historical naval fictions. Because of a misspent youth I knew a vast amount about the technicalities of square rigged ships and how to sail them. But suddenly, well into a novel set in the mid-eighteenth century, I wanted to investigate some of the nuts and bolts of gunnery at sea. Simple, I thought. I'll find a book. That in itself wasn't easy, as it turned out. Or even possible, in the area that I was specifically after. And many of the volumes I needed were either in obs...