Authors Electric

In the UK we tend to be very preoccupied with the weather. Which may seem strange, when we are not a country of great extremes. A few snowflakes are a talking point, and rain is a disaster when a cricket match is in jeopardy. The old joke about what to do in a drought; a lot of men in white walk onto a field, the shaman tosses a coin, and it starts to rain. We did have a real heatwave last summer, but we weren’t prepared for it and few houses have air conditioning. It’s just not needed normally – open the window for a bit. Of course, you may well need the central heating on instead for a day or two in August. We get fog, but not that often, we get ice, but not that often either. Which is why it is such a shock when we travel abroad and find out how well they cope with such disasters as a couple of centimetres of snow, or a bit of wind. The public transport elsewhere always seems to function. If a bus is two minutes late in Tromsø , up in the Arctic, people look at their watches, shake ...

As I seem to be stuck for ideas this month, I thought I'd post some photos I've taken of places I've been and things I've seen, and link them to particular books I've written. I'm quite a visual person, having gone to art school, and pictures do tend to evoke memories for me, and one idea leads to another... This is the photograph of a feisty eleven-year-old in Mongolia, the best rider I have ever seen, herding her goats. She was the inspiration for a reluctant reader story called Lost in the Desert , about a boot camp for difficult kids. This is the foot of a phorosrachus, an extinct bird that features heavily in Ice Feathers , a book set in prehistoric Antarctica. I saw this in the Tring site of the Natural History Museum. This is the ballroom of a castle in Prague. During the depradations of the Mongols, they took it over and rode their horses in there for war conferences. I mention it in Beware of Men with Moustaches , a story about a poetry group who are in...

The recent floods in Leatherhead, where I live, brought home to me how much the vagaries of the natural world affect our lives. And because they’re dramatic events, we tend to use them in fiction, both for adults and children. Growing up in England in the nineteen-fifties it was hard to imagine anything momentous ever happening to me, and it led to a real thirst for adventure. My first opportunity came when I was eighteen, in between school and art college. I came into a small amount of money, and signed up for an overland trip to Morocco, which was not a common tourist destination in those days. It was an eventful trip. There were twenty-one of us, and we drove through France and Spain in two long wheelbase Land Rovers, camping on the way. It wasn’t a trip that health and safety would have sanctioned, and two events in particular could have had very different outcomes. The first was when we were travelling in the Atlas Mountains, and looking for a sheltered place to camp. Our tou...

   Cinnamon hummingbird I’ve recently returned from three weeks in central America. The first part was an organised tour of Nicaragua, with seven participants, including me, plus our guide, and the second part was staying with a friend in Costa Rica.      I’ve always used these holidays as material for stories, but this time I was intrigued by the differing reading habits of the others on the first trip. Most people brought books, not e-readers, much to my surprise. When you have a 20 kilo weight limit on an aircraft books take up quite a lot of it, so for me an e-reader has been a real bonus as I never run out of something to read.      What seems to happen is that people read the paperbacks they’ve brought, and then leave them somewhere for other people to read and use the resulting space to bring back souvenirs. It never seems to occur to them that authors get nothing when a book is passed on, or sent to a charity shop. ...

In the olden days (when I started writing) paper accumulated like snowdrifts on shelves, in corners, on table-tops and work surfaces. Those of us who went to college had no office training whatsoever, and filing was something you did to your nails. Typing up handwritten copy was time-consuming and fraught with mistakes which had to be Tippexed over, as none of us could touch-type. Everything had to be carbon copied, and manuscripts frequently got mislaid or completely lost. It’s so different now. You can save draft after draft (as long as you remember to name them correctly) and the storage capacity of a home computer or laptop exceeds any amount of shelving that Ikea can fit into a home office. You can change the name of a character throughout a book with just a few key-strokes. And you should hang on to all these drafts, as cyberspace is searchable and flicking through page after page after page to find that one paragraph is a thing of the past. So why should you turn into a virt...

I always had trouble with the phrase pathetic fallacy . It seemed like an extremely harsh condemnation of the British obsession with The Weather, and a wagging finger at attributing any sort of malevolence to it. We Brits all know The Weather has a particular delight in ruining Wimbledon fortnight, bank holidays and test matches. So it was with some surprise that I discovered the words have changed their meaning, and when Ruskin first coined the phrase it didn’t mean stupid misconception but simply emotional falseness. What’s wrong with the occasional foray into personification, if it’s deliberate? When I’m writing a fantasy involving a desert it’s quite nice to have a callous sun with a definite mind of its own. Writing has fashions, and the fact that a Greek chorus is as yesterday as a codpiece shouldn’t stop you using one if you feel that’s exactly what your story needs.             All that was just a way of getting me in...