Authors Electric

Coventry's Lady Godiva, Pru Poretta at the Heritage weekend. Photo by Rob Tysall. As most people will know, Coventry, which is my home city, is to be the UK City of Culture 2021. Naturally, everyone is delighted and hoping that the new status is going to bring more prosperity into the city, as it has done for Hull, the current UK City of Culture. There was competition for the title from Paisley, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland and Swansea. And actually, if Sunderland had won it, that would have been my second choice as my parents and past ancestors all hail from there. The title is awarded every four years and Coventry will be the third UK City of Culture. Londonderry being the first in 2013, followed by Hull. Our city has so much going for it despite no longer having the motor and machine tools industries that it once had. During the 1950s  and 60s Coventry was the second largest car manufacturing city in the world. It also led the way with machine tools. Alfr...

Coventry's very own Lady Godiva, Pru Poretta.  They say that inspiration is all around us, and if any of you have taken part in your local Heritage Open Days run during September by the National Trust, you're probably buzzing with new ideas. Here in Coventry, the Heritage Open Days weekend began on Friday with the city celebrating 1,000 years of the birth of Coventry.  As many people know, Coventry is famous for the story of Lady Godiva, and the city is so fortunate to have its own resident Lady Godiva. A lovely lady named Pru Poretta who has taken on the role for the last 30 years or so and is a real ambassador for the city. Lady Godiva (Pru Poretta) in the new Coventry Cathedral. On the Friday of the Heritage Open Days, Pru headed a multi cultural procession from the town centre to the new cathedral for a ceremony which included the unveiling and presentation of a unique Travelling Tapestry, created and inspired by hundreds of people. ...

I suppose we're all constantly trying to find ways to tell the world about our books, and seeing that quite a few authors are now having trailer's made for their novels, I thought I'd give it a go, and see if it makes any difference to sales. Not being that technically minded I took up the offer of a fellow author in the USA, who runs Videos by O , creating videos for any budget. My budget wasn't very big, but that didn't make any difference to the effort that Opal put into the video, with her sending me mock ups throughout the process, and making the changes that I asked for. I'm fortunate to share a studio with a photographer, so a couple of weeks ago, we set out to take the necessary photographs that I'd need to create the look that I wanted for the trailer. This was for Celeste, my YA time slip book, which is published by American publisher, Clean Reads,  (originally called Astraea Press .) The story is about teenager, Megan Mil...

My very first YA book, Celeste has just been released, so I hope you'll forgive me for wanting to tell you a little about it, as the story has been rattling around in my head for these last 15 years! The spark of an idea for this story was lit way back when I was researching Coventry's 11th church of St Mary Magdaline – the city's oldest church which incidentally is still regularly used. While I was making notes about its factual history, another little compartment in the old grey matter was devising a fantasy story of a young woman realising she was hearing echoes from a past life. To begin with the story didn't get past the first page, and because I was busy writing articles and other books, this one got put on the back burner to be occasionally re-ignited when I'd nothing better to do. Slowly, in between various writing projects, the story began to form some sort of shape but then it would get shoved to the back of the queue and it would disa...