Authors Electric

Sitting at my keyboard, or terminal as we call it nowadays, I look at my watch (or little panel at the bottom of my screen, as we et cetera et cetera) and realise I’ve done nothing at all in two hours, maybe longer, except twiddle and fiddle and piddle about in the name of being up with the times. I’ve looked at Facebook, I’ve even posted something on my ‘wall,’ I’ve wondered as so often before why it didn’t behave exactly as I expected it to,  and why a link I typed in (inputted?) did not appear as it should have done. I— Oh! New technology strikes again. My mobile phone, lying in front of me before the screen, has just given a couple of sickly buzzes. Why sickly? I set it up only yesterday to be loud and brash and insistent. Apparently it’s changed my mind for me – I deserve only a sickly buzz, and it’s just lucky it was lying in the open and not stashed in a pocket and inaudible. The message is interesting, and requires an answer. Unfortunately, the caller is ‘unnamed,’...

It may seem odd to do your research some while after finishing the book - in this case, five years after publication. But everything is useful to a writer, and I’m sure that somehow or other I’ll make use of the stone-carving I did last summer. It’s not that I did no research at all for SET IN STONE. I talked to stone-carvers, handled stone, studied the work of Eric Gill, learned about Jurassic limestone. But last May several things fell into place and I found myself chip-chip-chipping away. Shortly after SET IN STONE was published, I met a local stonecarver, Bernard Johnson, who was exhibiting during Artweeks in Oxford. I loved his work, and could see at once that he was influenced by Eric Gill. I’d decided that if my publisher gave me a commission to write LOB, I would find a stone-carver to make me a Green Man for my garden, and was hoping to find someone suitable; as soon as I saw Bernard’s work, the search was over. He made me a calm and wise Green Man, in Portland stone, whi...