Authors Electric

Resolutions. Don’t we all just hate them? It’s like we deliberately set ourselves up to fail. Start the diet. Do the exercise thing. Give up alcohol. And we start out from such an overindulged, lazy and alcoholic place that we convince ourselves it must get better and it can’t be that hard just to get clean, can it? But then we set impossible targets and beat ourselves up when we consistently fail to achieve them. January is too dark and cold and miserable to do much more than scoff all the Christmas leftovers while watching the latest must-see series on Netflix. Add to that the ever-gloomy news of pandemics and plan Bs, face-masks and lateral flow testing and it’s no wonder we’re all so bloody miserable, is it?  I don’t do dry January. I like my weekly pub quiz nights accompanied by wine. I don’t feel the need to prove to everybody that I’m not an alcoholic – I know I’m not, and I don’t actually care what other people think. Diet and exercise? Hmm. Not a resolution, no, but I do...

I have just returned from an inspirational Arvon residential course at Tottleigh Barton. At least I found it inspirational, I cannot necessarily make the claim for the sixteen eleven year olds from Newham I was tutoring. These days I generally work with adults, tutoring and supervising MA students and much as I enjoy that, there is nothing like the mind of a child.   Years ago, when I first started writing for young people, I was often asked if I wrote for my own young children. My answer was always ‘No.’   I would fix my interlocutor with a beady eye and firmly state that I wrote for the child I had been and to some extent remained. It is true that I have always written the kind of story that would have excited me as a child. I’ve got a little wiser and a great deal greyer but haven’t changed that much in any essential way: I still love strange tales of magic and transformation, other worlds and secret powers. I have added to the repertoire of stories I love, but subtrac...