Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. I don’t write many seasonal stories. One exception is now when I write festive flash fiction. Sometimes I get ideas for festive tales during the summer so will write them up ready to send later. Festive flash is lighthearted and I’ve had some broadcast on an internet radio station. I usually finish my weekly column for an online magazine with a festive flash roundup and share a story. All fun to do (and I hope for others to read).  On the reading side, I ensure I watch and/or read Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, Discworld’s equivalent to Christmas.   Naturally Dickens’ fabulous work, A Christmas Carol , is on the agenda though usually in the form of the best film version ever made - The Muppet Christmas Carol . Yes!   Michael Caine plays it straight as Scrooge and genuinely comes across as sinister. The Muppets are true to the book - they’ve just added some songs (good ones too, I’m fond of the...

I sporadically keep a log of what I read.  I always start off with good intentions, write them all down for a few weeks and then get caught up in other things, leaving the pages blank.  Only a few out of the thousands of books I’ve read since I left school have been recorded. But, when my mother died a few years ago I discovered among her things a series of little notebooks that were a record of her reading from 1948 until the week before she died, with very few gaps.  She was a voracious reader and had a book in her hand when she slipped into her last coma. In her notebooks she wrote the month, title and author and gave each book a star rating that reflected how much she had enjoyed it.  I’ve found it fascinating to go back and discover who were the most fashionable authors of each decade.  She also read the classics widely - particularly Dickens and Doestoevsky, but not much Hardy or Jane Austen.  Trollope and Walpole were among her favourite...

When I was just starting to write an older, more experienced, author told me that you needed any two out of three particular things in order to succeed as an author; Talent, Hard Work, and Luck. It puzzled me then that talent was optional (I now know better!) and I quickly discovered how important Luck is - like a lottery win, the right review, the right person just happening on your book, an international event at the right moment and you’re projected into the stratosphere. I’d been planning for quite a while to E-publish my biography of Christina Rossetti - a book I’m frequently asked for and which can cost quite a lot on the second hand market. Unfortunately E-publishing the biography of a poet isn’t easy - all those illustrations, all those poems requiring individual formatting for Kindle. A nightmare. But I’m lucky to have a partner who’s not only an artist (he’s designed several of my book covers for major publishers), but also a cyber-wizard. With the help of Mobi-poc...

A few years ago my career as a writer was in crisis.  I was nearing the end of a long biography of Katherine Mansfield and my publisher became one of the first victims of the economic crash.  They were taken over by another publisher, my editor left, and there was a new editorial policy that didn’t include literary biography.  A significant number of other publishers made similar decisions. Then my agent went on maternity leave and announced she was ‘slimming down’ her list.  As an author without a contract I was gracefully dropped.   Enquiry letters to other agents went unanswered.   Worse, Virago told me they wouldn’t be reprinting my most popular book A Passionate Sisterhood, even though it was still selling a respectable number of copies. It felt as if my life as a writer was over.  No one wanted me.  The feeling of despair was terrible.  My partner N,  who’s a resourceful, practical kind of bloke, said ‘Well, why don’...