Authors Electric

  I have now been an author for eight years and my journey has been full of surprises most of them of the delightful kind. Occasionally, one comes along which isn't quite so pleasant, and I have learnt to roll with the punches. I was taken by surprise today that it was actually the 16th of the month, the day I was due to put this blog up. As I'm knee deep in an editing project I couldn't muster up a single original thought to help my fellow authors. It was then I realised that this could make a great topic in itself. What do we, as authors, do when life takes us completely by surprise?  If the surprise is a joyful one, the first thing we do is celebrate and party our little socks off. Well, maybe not party like it's 1999 as we are still in the middle of a covid pandemic. However, marking it in some way seems appropriate. I've had a couple of lovely surprises over the past few months. Firstly, I was given a grant by The Society of Authors for a research trip to Antig...

Ginger Torch Lily - totally tropical I’m lucky to be just back from a Caribbean holiday where we were greeted more than once with the words ‘welcome to paradise!’ and it was easy to see the comparison: exotic plants, colourful birds, and the kind of warmth I always associate with the big greenhouses we visited as kids in our local park – except this was everywhere and 24/7 - a joy after a cold December. Add fresh pineapple, melon, papaya and spiced rum punch more or less on tap and you can guess we were happy. Our friend the 'breakfast bird' But paradise? I began to get picky. As we were deposited from our courtesy bus on to a pretty but rather busy beach, I muttered to my companion that I had imagined paradise to be a lot less populated. Then there was the night-time noise. I expect I would eventually have got used to the chirruping crickets and squeaky tree-frogs but   when these were joined by the crash of rain on our homely tin roof I was reaching fo...