Authors Electric

I was procrastinating on social media the other day – as you do, or as I do, anyway – and got involved in a conversation where somebody posted the beginning of a book and asked if anyone would be interested in an ARC in the hope of a review on publication. The cover looked a bit home-made (and yes, it really does matter. Rightly or wrongly, people absolutely do judge a book by its cover), but the plot seemed similar to stuff I write – dark and gritty thriller – and so I said I’d give it a go. I like this sort of thing and I'm always interested in how other writers treat the same material. We can all learn from analysing other people's writing. I don’t do this often. Really, I don’t. I’ve been burned too many times by agreeing to read unreadable books, and I don’t like to be in a position where I’m unable to leave a ‘good’ review and feel morally unable not to leave a review at all. You’d think I’d know better by now, wouldn't you? A PDF duly arrives and I swap it for an e...

As I write this, we have not quite reached the end of the year, and on this morning of 30th December I've just completed the first draft of the novel I've been working on and also the final version of the family history research write-up I've planned to do for a couple of years. There is something unsettling about having finished both these projects at almost the same time, and I have a terrifying vision of the next year stretching out ahead of me as a blank canvas, or a stretch of fresh snow, just fallen and untrodden by any human foot. This has been a whole year of endings. My mother-in-law died in Februrary at an advanced age after a good deal of illness, and my husband died in November, somewhat more unexpectedly but after eighteen months or so of poor health.  I suppose only a writer could compare the blankness of the end of a project to the blankness of losing someone who had been part of her life for the best part of fifty years, but I've found it rather similar....

I’ve just been editing my novel ‘Badwater’ which I hope will be out next year with the small independent publisher, 'Kristell Ink.'I enjoyed reading it again. I hope it is OK to admit that?      I wrote the first draft many years ago. It is set after the impact of climate change has left  most of SE England underwater and, though set in a broken society, it isn’t dystopian. My heroine and her friends are prepared to break with tradition to make their world better.The story was written long before the Extinction Rebellion and my Ollu is no activist, it is far too late for that, but she is brave and resourceful. It was rejected by Bloomsbury for not being an ‘N M Browne’ book, even though, I can assure you that NM Browne wrote it. Reading it again, it is very much in keeping with   every other book I have ever written. By that I mean it is a fantastic piece of work that deserves great success and a plethora of awards,   but in addition to ...