Authors Electric

No wonder I’m feeling exhausted. I’ve just published my third book in the space of three months. Now, I’m usually a book a year writer, so where did that spurt of productivity come from? I suppose it all started at the end of last year’s summer. I was working on my historical crime novel, The Death Game, but I’d taken a bit of time out to act as the Crime Writer in Residence for the Edinburgh Ebook Festival, and during that time I posted a series of twelve posts on the different subgenres of crime. Once that was out of the way I got my head down to complete The Death Game . Things were trundling along and the book was taking shape when a chance meeting with another indie author, Bill Kirton, suggested I turn my Writer in Residence posts into book form. That was what planted the seed. I went back to the Edinburgh Ebook Festival posts and discovered they were no longer online. They had vanished into internet cyberspace. All my lovely Pinterest postings now had no information...

The Death Game has finally made it. It’s now published as a Kindle ebook. However, the road to publication for this novel has been far from smooth. This was actually the first crime novel I ever wrote. Prior to this I’d written a historical saga which is now published as A Salt Splashed Cradle . I’d also written a lot of historical articles, many of them published in the US magazine The Highlander, as well as various UK magazines. So, I reckoned I was a historical writer. The Death Game went the rounds and met the usual thanks, but no thanks response. Although Penguin did seriously consider it, but at the last minute they decided they didn’t like it 110%. Now I’m no mathematician, but I did wonder how a writer could ever manage to reach that additional 10%. Nothing daunted I continued to submit and was over the moon when a new publisher ran a competition for the best unpublished crime fiction in the world – notice I said world – and I was one of the twenty winners. ...

Earlier this month I was interviewed by Peggy Stanton for Famous Five Plus , and it was lovely meeting her again. However, in her summing up she said, and I quote “Inviting you here to my little chat studio was a great choice as it fits perfectly into my New Year’s resolution which is to brush shoulders with the rich and famous this year.” D’you know, I had to go back and read that twice. Was that me she was referring to? Or had she included someone else in the interview? Once I got over the shock of learning I was rich and famous, at least in Peggy’s eyes, I started to think about it. Was I rich? Was I famous? Well, let’s break it down into its individual parts. I started out thinking I wasn’t really rich at all, certainly not in monetary terms. You know, the folding crinkly stuff we keep in our wallets and purses, and the jingly stuff that usually takes up space in our pockets. My needs are simple, but there never seems to be quite enough of it. And even if I was r...