Authors Electric

Last month as part of the annual Chester Literature Festival I took part in a debate about Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. Now, anyone who knows my writing will know that I’m not a huge Twilight fan. I’m quite happy for people to read what they want, and for writers to do new things with established genres - so it’s not the sparkly vampires that bother me so much (although I do personally think they’re rubbish!) It’s the fact that, since Twilight’s astronomic rise in popularity, the misunderstood heartthrob vampire now seems to be the only type being written - and subsequently, a lot of horror markets have placed a blanket ban on submissions of vampire stories, which is a shame for writers like me who like vampires (and werewolves, and zombies, and other newly ‘unfashionable’ creatures!) This was actually the entire reason that me and L.C. Hu produced our anthology ‘ Re-Vamp! ’ in 2011, to counteract all the mopey teenage monsters - but I’m digressing. The thing is, in this debate, I wa...

Sometimes I feel like I don’t quite belong to the horror writing crowd. Sure, I call my work ‘horror’ because it’s the most convenient label for it (‘Speculative fiction’ is a bit of an umbrella term and does tend to get me looks of slight derision) but ‘horror’ is very broad. Almost too broad, as anyone attempting to compare say, H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James and Dean Koontz against one another might find. Any slasher-movie fans reading my work would probably be quite disappointed - there’s no blood, or guts, or… well, horror , really. So I struggle to define it. Then I came across the term ‘fridge horror’. It’s from the marvellous TV Tropes website , where I can spend hours poring over the often hilarious descriptions of character, plot and genre tropes that can be applied to all stories - written or televised - everywhere. It’s kind of nice. It reminds you that, far from it just being you as an author who keeps coming up with ideas that have already been done, there are no new id...

     So, you’re an indie writer. You might be self-published, or you might be a small-press author. Either way, a lot if not all of the marketing for your new book is going to fall on you.      We all know that social media is the way forward for this, but it’s often difficult to judge that fine line between actively promoting your work and being, well, a bit of a pest. Nobody wants to be That Author - you know, the one who Tweets a variation of ‘buy my book! Please RT!’ 25 times a day. People start to blank it out. It’s just words - which is fine in a book, but what I’ve realised increasingly is that the internet is a very visual medium and people tend to respond a LOT better to images and video.      So we come to the subject of the book trailer.      Apparently, we’re all supposed to have one nowadays, although it seems to me to again be a very fine line between something that will generate in...

          The 29th day of the month, and the introduction of a new page for Authors Electric.           The 30th - and the 31st, if there is one - have always been given over to Guest Posters, and that will continue, under the very able management of Debbie Bennett. Debbie, Guest Wrangler           The 29th was, until recently, Hywela Lyn's day - but we're sad to say that Hywela has had to resign, because her other commitments make it impossible to keep up with Authors Electric. Blogging is time consuming - thinking of a new subject every month, writing it, rewriting it, finding pictures, rewriting it... (Because writers obsessively rewrite: that's what we do.)           So we well understand Hywela's reasons for leaving us, and we wish her well for the future.         ...

          So, at the risk of touching upon an emotive and controversial Die's forthcoming book subject for my first Authors Electric post, I really need to talk about the treatment of women in horror (not to mention writing in general). This is a huge topic. I’m not even scratching the surface here.           Horror is no place for women.           Of course I’m saying that as an ‘outrageous opening statement’, similar to the recent and excellent New Statesman article ‘ I hate strong female characters ’. But I do mean it a little. Why any woman would want to bother writing in the horror genre considering the pernicious, outmoded sexism that’s rife in it is beyond me.           Every genre writer I’m sure is aware that (and I don’t want to blanket here, there are good examples out there; this is just ba...