Authors Electric

As I strolled along the beach yesterday, paddling in rockpools and generally being the four-year-old I still am at heart, an idea 'happened' in my head. From nowhere, apparently, it burst upon me and grew into a plan for the sequel to Charity's Child. Not the sequel I've been planning for about two years, which has continually failed to materialise, but a wholly new 'take' on following up the lives of the characters I created in that earlier book. It may have been something to do with the appearance of the rocks at low tide (there is such a scene in Charity's Child , where a big decision is made), or perhaps it was just that I finally relaxed enough for my creative side to wriggle free of all its constraints and start to play again. Anyway, here's hoping. It's always dangerous to say too much too soon, and I'm certainly not going to tell you anything about the new book. But it's good to be reminded of the way these things work. Fiction...

The photo shows yours truly adding a pen to a fine collection in Highgate Cemetery. I didn't want my partner to take this photo, but he took it anyway and I'm quite pleased that he did. It was my first visit to Highgate and the tub of colourful pens caught my attention as I passed what was otherwise a rather unassuming headstone. Stopping to look, I saw it was the grave of one of my greatest heroes and favourite writers, Douglas Adams. As for the connection to this blog... well, The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - not Douglas Adams's book but the original (and fictional) work upon which is it based - is arguably the Milky Way's first electronic book, though of course there may be others as yet unknown to our civilisation. It was certainly the first one to reach Earth. This revolutionary piece of technology predated the web and most of the internet, foreshadowing it while Tim Berners-Lee was probably still wrestling with BBC Basic. The entry in it for Earth de...

A word from our founder today. Our usual blogger, Rosalie Warren , has suffered a family bereavement, and can't post today.  So, instead, here's Authors Electric's onlie begetter, Katherine Roberts ... Those of you who have been with this blog from its early days might remember me… later comers to the party won’t, because I’ve relinquished the reins since then and others have very ably taken them up to ride the electric horse onwards across pastures new. But I thought this might be a good time to explain why I am still with you in e-spirit, if not in e-body. Originally, Susan Price and I set this place up as a joint blog to promote our backlists, which we were both in the process of converting to Kindle to rescue our out-of-print work from oblivion. A few others in our Scattered Authors group for children’s books were doing the same, but there weren’t very many of us. So we made an important early decision to open the blog up to adult authors with Kindle projects –...

Following on from yesterday's post about book covers from Sue Price, I should say I'm delighted with the cover designed for me, at a very reasonable price, by designer and photographer Rob Tysall of Nuneaton.   Rob did an excellent job of bringing alive my somewhat blurry vision of the character Charity from Charity's Child - imbuing her with a wonderful mixture of scariness and vulnerability that for me exactly captures her persona in the book. So huge thanks to Rob. I'll be asking him if he'd like to do some more work for me soon... and that brings me to the topic of my next book... This one is for adults and it's called Alexa's Song. The publishers of my first novel for adults, Low Tide, Lunan Bay , made encouraging noises at first but then decided that Alexa's Song  was 'too depressing'. (Gosh, I'm being my own worst publicist here. Though I actually quite like 'depressing' books...) Not that Alexa really is depressing...

Cover Design by Rob Tysall   Fear. Fear. A fanatical devotion to the.... no, fear again. I'm not a complete e-publishing newbie. Last November, the Coventry Writers' group, to which I belong, ventured into e-publishing with our Coventry Tales . It was a rewarding and educational experience and the sales, while not amazing, have not been bad. Nor am I a stranger to conventional publishing (or whatever it's OK to call it now... I can never remember). I've had two books for adults and one for YA published that way and I have another series commissioned, this time for younger readers. So I'm not a complete beginner, though I'm relatively inexperienced in comparison with many of  my esteemed co-contributors on this blog (I'm learning lots from them). And I now have a book ready for e-release. Well, almost ready. It's been revised to within a jot and tittle of its life. It's been edited and proofed. I've hired a professional designer and pho...

Hello! Charity's Child was my first novel, published in 2008 by the small new independent publisher Circaidy Gregory Press (still going strong and branching out all over the place). Kay Green, who runs the press, gave me my first experience of working with a savvy and eagle-eyed editor, and without any doubt she helped me turn Charity into a better book. It came out; we did some publicity - oh, the story may sound familiar. My family and friends were excited and supportive and we had a celebratory barbecue in our back garden (it poured with rain but my wonderful partner found us a last-minute canopy and carried on cooking - thank you, Paul). It was a memorable day. I had signings, too, including one in the much missed Borders, five minutes' walk from home. That one was great - I told tons of people and many of them turned up. One couple who are old friends bought six copies - thank you, Keith and Sue. I had another signing, this time in Borders in Birmingham. It was August Ban...

Well, why not? I'm a writer - what I do is make things up and write them down. OK, I accept that an author in today's world can't get far without doing at least some of her own publicity. But for me, however much I may enjoy it, publicising and marketing my books will always be a sideline - one I think of as not quite worthy of my best creative energies. But what if I were to combine the two? That's the thought that struck me a few weeks ago, when I was working on the sequel to my first published novel, Charity's Child (Circaidy Gregory Press, 2008). The main character in the sequel is called Marie-Thérèse, or Marie T, and she is already taking up quite a lot space in my mind, vying for attention with family and friends, as my characters always do. So why not let her loose? Create an account for her on Twitter and encourage her to tweet (possibly lending her a helping hand to build up her followers by retweeting some of her tweets). Give her a Facebook page of her ...

As I write this, just before Christmas, I'm feeling rather sorry for myself. I have a sore throat and a cough, which get much worse if I lie flat. I also have a painful back, which complains unless I spend every alternate hour or so lying flat on it! Sitting at a desk, even on my new super-dooper-bad-back-chair, is impossible for more than five minutes at a stretch. I have shopping, baking and cleaning to do, guests arriving for Christmas, a father up in Yorkshire who needs lots of help from me, his only daughter, and - urrgghhh, I won't go on... (Btw, I know, really, that I have many things to be thankful for and am much, much better off than some. But if you remind me of that, some nasty primitive reflex might be triggered and I might try to kick you, so please beware...) A kind Twitter friend just recommended that I try lying on my tummy in order to type on my laptop, placed on a stool at the end of my bed. It works, at least for a short time, and I'm very grateful for h...