Authors Electric

A very happy Christmas Day to a ll our re aders! And a Prosperous New Year to come!  Here's what I've been working on, in the run-up to Christmas... This is what I've been slaving over a graphics programme to produce. A new cover for Ghost Song.           The blurb on the back reads: At white midnight, in the endless midsummer of the far North, Kuzma the bear-shaman demands a new-born baby boy from his father, the slave and hunter, Malyuta.      Steadfastly, throughout the long summer night, Malyuta refuses.      The powerful shaman, thwarted, leaves at last.      Malyuta names his adored son 'Ambrosi' or 'Immortal.' But, as Ambrosi grows, the villagers begin to fear him.      The bear-shaman still walks in Ambrosi's dreams and still calls him...            The old cover looked like this:-        ...

Dunfermline, the town where I grew up, has always been defined by the stretch of water separating it from Edinburgh the ‘new’ capital. (Yes, Dunfermline came first, although not a lot of people know that!).  Our history lessons started with Queen Margaret who came all the way from Norway and alighted at the Queen’s Ferry and then there were all the adventure yarns from Stevenson onwards where the water had to be crossed one way or another.  But the Firth of Forth (how that name puzzled me before I could spell it!) was not just geography and history but also our holidays, on beaches with views of Arthur’s Seat, or on picnics to a tiny beach near Cramond made memorable by a trip on the ferry boats where burly sea-men in navy jumpers tossed ropes and took our tickets as we stepped onto the oily smelling deck.  (Thanks to Dennis Penny of http://www.queensferrypassage.co.uk for the ferry boat graphic and the ticket just like the one I clutched in my hot little...

We seem to be blogging a lot about CreateSpace just recently. A Flash In The Pen      I have a CreateSpace confession. It was my job to turn Authors Electric's first anthology of short stories, A Flash In The Pen, into a CreateSpace paperback. I said I'd do it - I thought I could do it - and I made a right pig's ear of it. When you log on to C/S, you download a template, into which you paste your book. They give you a choice of a 'blank' template which has little except the formatting for page lengths - and the formatted template, which has formatting for front and back matter, page-numbers, and headers for title and author name at the top of the page.      For my very first C/S venture, years ago, I used the formatted template, and got hopelessly confused and frustrated by it.      So I ditched it, and used the blank template, with which I got on okay. You simply paste your whole book into the template and off you g...

A sky A friend claims she doesn’t have a ‘strong visual sense’, and asked me how I create visual images for readers. It’s an interesting challenge and one I hadn’t thought of before. I write DVDs for training, safety and promotional purposes and the actual visuals there are obviously very important. But that’s not what she means. In those scripts, I call for real images and visual sequences – it’s not a question of conjuring them up in the text. I’ve never read stuff about this, so I can’t offer theories – all I can do is stop and think of how I use visuals and what dictates the way I describe or convey them. And I think the answer to that is that I work backwards, starting from the reaction I have or a character has to what’s being seen. If it’s a beautiful scene, a sunset, the look of a lover’s hair or eyes – things like that – I try to imagine how I’d feel as I looked at it, then isolate and describe the aspects of it that provoked that particular response. In other words...

Most of us take for granted the fact that we can read and know what it's like to enjoy a good book. But how sad it is for those who have never known the pleasure of reading either because they are dyslexic or they struggle with reading for some other reason. It's so rewarding to a writer regardless of the genre of book they write, when they get positive feedback or a good review. Even more so when the reader is a child or teenager who admits that they don't like reading - yet they loved a particular book that you'd written. But the idea of actually writing for the market of reluctant teen readers was something of a challenge - but also a great experience, and one I hope I'll get the opportunity to do again. It's only something I've been doing for the last six months or so. I was excited to be asked by the publisher, Badger Learning if I would like to try for a series of horror books for 12-15 year olds with a reading age of around 8-9. Wh...

I’ll tell you what’s an eye-opening experience: editing someone else’s writing. As well as being a handy source of extra work on the side, it gives an invaluable insight into how the whole creative process operates. This process may be wildly different for different writers, but it’s those very differences which, when laid side by side, show you how a piece of fiction comes into being. My commissioning editor (I’ll call him my commissioning editor, though our relationship is both closer and less formal than that) recently got in touch with me to help out with a particular book. He’d had a submission from one of his regular authors, and was asking for my help with getting it right. Basically, he knows this author from long experience, knows his many qualities but also his limitations, and admits (his words) that ‘he’s never going to get this thing readable by himself’. Thankfully my editor knows me just as well, knows my rigorous approach to story structure, plotting, voice an...

One of the great things about stumbling into the world of electronic books is to be freed from the lazy categorisation imposed by publishers.  I know it's not entirely their fault - the chain bookshops and supermarkets started it with their need for products that could be heaved onto the 'appropriate' shelves by staff devoid of knowledge or interest - but (as with discounting) late 20th century publishing houses yielded without a fight, and it is now so normal for a book to be a narrowly 'targeted' commodity that writing for a diverse readership seems downright perverse. For years I have been running a spectacularly unsuccessful one-woman campaign for 'The Family Book'.  I truly believe that there is a place for writing that can be enjoyed by anyone, of any age, at their own level.  It's not really such a mad idea, surely?  We all know what a 'Family Film' is, and the best of them are among the greatest movies ever made.  But books?  Si...