Authors Electric

I'm also awfully fond of bluebells As a novelist, I like to think I make everything up.  While the standard disclaimer appears on my copyright pages declaring each book a work of fiction, little details creep in from real life.  Snippets and snapshots are dredged up from the ragbag of my memory. Sometimes this is for no apparent reason, such as the recycling bins that appeared in three separate stories in my flash fiction collection, Quick Change . I didn't even notice the repetition until one of my beta readers asked why they kept cropping up. For fear of seeming obsessive, I replaced one bin with a bonfire, which made for a much better story.  Other times I manage to wrestle the reasons from my subconscious after I've finished writing the story, such as the forget-me-not motif that runs throughout my Sophie Sayers Village Mystery series.  The first book in the series In the first novel, Best Murder in Show , Hector, the local bookseller, r...

When I started planning the cosy mystery series I'm currently writing, I thought I had a bright idea: I'd make the seven books span the course of the year. What's not to love about writing a book for all seasons, and then some? Whatever the time of year, I'd have a topical book to tout. Summertime for Sophie Sayers Given that my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries are set in a small (fictional) English village (no surprises there), its residents are naturally very conscious of the seasonal changes, and their social calendar dictated by the time of year. That's just how it is in the small (non-fictional) English village in which I've lived for the last 26 years. Here in my real life village, I'm so much more aware of the passage of the seasons than when I lived and worked in and around London. Working in a city centre, I was more likely to spot the season by what was in shop windows , rather than by the appearance (or disappearance) of lambs an...

Novelist Debbie Young shares thoughts from a country garden Have you ever been surprised at how few people know a word that you've always taken for granted? That happened to me this week when I was working my way through suggestions and queries raised on my current work-in-progress by my extremely helpful team of beta readers . Oh, and before we go any further, just in case you've never come across the term "beta reader", that's the book's equivalent to a test pilot - a pre-publication reader who offers feedback on a book prior to publication. A Harvest of Words Autumn story now available to pre-order The work in question is the second in my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries series of lighthearted classic cosy crime novels, Trick of Murder? This series will run the course of the village year from one summer to the next. Trick or Murder? spans October to November, thus incorporating both Halloween and Guy Fawkes' Night, and the tail end ...

If you go down to the woods today... When I started writing my new series, the Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries , and set myself the ambitious target of publishing a cycle of seven novels over two years, I had no idea how much I would come to enjoy escaping into its fictitious Cotswold village of Wendlebury Barrow. Having now drafted the first three in the series -  Best Murder in Show   was published in April,   Trick or Murder? will launch in August, and Murder in the Manger will be my 2017 Christmas special (no surprises there) -   I feel as if the characters are old friends. I feel entirely at home with them. My second home... That shouldn't really come as a surprise, because in real life, I've  resided in the small Cotswold village of Hawkesbury Upton for over a quarter of a century.  Both the fictitious and the real village are safe, fun but eccentric places to live . Frequently heard in response to Hawkesbury Upton events is the...