Authors Electric

I've just read John's 'Rage of the Fleas' blog and feel almost inhibited from writing any blog at all this month!  The chasm between the brilliant and the workaday is going to be rather marked. No matter. Here we go. An aspect of this wonderful new world of Createspace and its lovely-looking paperbacks which seem to come from nowhere is the possibility of 'bookmaking', which Lynne hinted at a few days ago and which I hadn't quite appreciated until I got hooked on the whole Createspace process. It's a temptation which could be satisfied by producing ebooks but which somehow isn't. Like most writers, I suppose, I have a scrapbox full of stories which haven't been published. Some were written for projects which publishers accepted and then axed half-way through even though they'd already paid me (who says publishers can't be generous benefactors?) Some were rejected outright - often deservedly. Some of these were quite beyond any attem...

I can't quite fix in my mind the moment I decided that enough was enough and I would leave the world of conventional publishing for ever. It's a bad sign of a senior condition when you can't identify even the year it happened. But I think it was in 2009, even before I had to accept that Walker weren't going to do the third in the Ellen's People trilogy, an event which almost made me lose heart about writing completely. But not quite. There was still a possibility of a new beginning, an enticing prospect with a new publisher who had already reissued The War and Freddie , a book for which I have a huge affection. I'd just finished a novella for the YA market. It was about something I'd never really considered writing about before. That was because it was something I'd not experienced directly. I'd only watched and enviously read about it. Sailing. With Julia and Jan around on this blog, I hardly dare mention the word. Besides which, I still have ech...