Authors Electric

 An old friend and I have had season tickets for the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh for as long as I can remember - somewhere between twenty and thirty years, with an inevitable break at the height of Covid lockdowns. Even then the Lyceum was one of the theatres that produced online content,  including a Christmas show filmed on their own stage but without a live audience during one of the early lockdowns, which must have been very hard for the actors but was a treat for the viewers at a time when they were trapped at home and starved of entertainment. We've also experienced a break from going to the theatre together during this past eight months or so, thanks to my hip injury and some further illnesses for both of us. Neither of us is as steady on our feet as we were before, and actually getting to the theatre is quite an adventure at the moment, so I thought going out to the Christmas show at the Lyceum might get us back into the mood so that we could begin to make use of...

I want to share an experience of no apparent import which has, nonetheless, proved to have a lot of personal significance. Many years ago, in a junk/antiques shop in Edinburgh, I bought a bundle of twelve old notebooks. They were some of the personal diaries of a lady called Joanna Hutchison, kept meticulously by her over the years from 1889 to 1921. I was fascinated to get to know whatever they revealed about the writer, so I learned to decipher her tiny writing and read through each one. It took several weeks and the personality they revealed left me with an even greater curiosity about her. Since then, they have sat undisturbed on the top shelf of one of my bookcases. Then, some weeks ago, a chance reference during a regular weekly online meeting with my five siblings reminded me of the diaries and, knowing the impressive research skills of my youngest sister, Lesley Taylor, I asked whether she could shed any further light on the mystery of Ms Hutchison, of whom I had only the f...

I have a dilemma. I’ve got just one point I want to make with this blog, but keeping your attention and managing to persuade you to my point of view will rely on me identifying and somehow reflecting the sort of entertainment you prefer. So all I can do is choose a couple of typical scenarios and hope that you identify with at least one of them. First, let’s assume you favour La Scala. At last you’ve made it for the season opener, December 7th. That unseemly row between Carlo Fontana and Riccardo Muti is years in the past and tonight, it’s one of your favourites: Verdi, La Traviata. OK, the seats have cost umpteen hundred euros each but, with Angela Gheorghiu and Juan Diego Florez performing, you’d have gladly paid twice as much. The lights and the applause for the conductor die down, those long, sad opening chords begin and you settle back, a smile on your face, anticipating a few hours of unadulterated pleasure. But then, just as the tempo changes and the strings lif...

Real book, real author! We writers spend so much of our time chatting and promoting ourselves online, it's easy to forget there is a real world out there, one of real people and real bookshops. This was very much in my mind a couple of weekends ago when I was up in Scotland for a festival in my home town which was great fun and a marvellous opportunity to connect with friends old and new.  Since I had a few hours 'spare' between checking out of my friendly air bnb and catching my flight home from Edinburgh airport, I thought I should build on my face-to-face experiences with a bit of salesmanship of the door-to-door kind.  In good company in the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey My latest book, In the Blink of an Eye , is set mainly in Fife and Edinburgh, by the way,so  a call to B&M bookshops was on the cards; especially niche outlets where I thought the book would sit well and some of whom I, or publishers Linen Press, had already contacte...

Somehow I have got myself involved in organising a writers' event in the real world. This is the kind of thing I never quite mean to do, because I know from experience that there will be a lot of work in it for very little, if any, reward. But on this occasion deciding to organise a writers' event was the lesser of the evils. The original idea someone suggested to me was that I, and another writer who lives locally, should have a stall at the local summer fair and sell our books from it in aid of charity. So I came up with the idea of an actual writers' event as a way of minimising the risk attached to the occasion. At least we will be under cover, protected from the extremes of weather that often occur in Edinburgh in June, and (probably) not surrounded by the smell of burgers cooking on a barbecue, and the unpleasant noise of people complaining. I hate the local summer fair, which takes place every other year in our part of Edinburgh, with such a passion that I am no...

Iconic: Edinburgh from Calton Hill I’ve always thought setting a book in a famous city gives it a head start. The skyline and the iconic views, familiar to most readers, present us with an instant connection to our audience.  Assuming of course we get it right - woe betide the writer who gets a street name wrong or transports the gets the hero/ine across town on the wrong bus! So there’s always a case for making the place as much of a fiction as the characters and adjusting the geography to suit.  Of course the really successful writer (especially one who can conjure up a long-running detective series!) will add seriously to that city’s cachet and tourist offering.    D. O. Hill (Image Preus Museum Norway) In the Blink of an Eye , which recreates the life of an Edinburgh artist – compelled me to use a city I knew as a visitor rather than a native, with the added difficulty of going back nearly 200 years.   As a newcomer to historical...

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...

Angus - farming country in the lee of the hills When we do historical research it’s easy to think that we have to uncover some hidden world lying beneath the accretions of business, construction, technology and all the stuff that has happened between ‘now’ and ‘then’, stuff we often think of as progress. But of course things aren’t that simple, and I was reminded of this last weekend on a bit of an impromptu trip to Scotland to the small town in Angus which was home to many of my ancestors.  Brechin High Street I had been there only once before, in my childhood, and had hazy memories of family walks, paddling in a very cold river, and on rainy days (we had a few!) being allowed to spend my pocket money in Woolworths. (Retail therapy started young in my case!) Returning after 50 (or more) years, I found (no surprise) that even Woolworths has gone, leaving a random mixture of businesses: –an upmarket deli and an unreconstructed corner shop,  a local hardwar...