Authors Electric

Yesterday morning, my husband woke up from a particularly vivid dream in which he was driving a traction engine. He had no clue about what might have triggered it. His conclusion: ‘My brain has a mind of its own!’ Oh yes, Papa Freud! The brain/the Muse is a funny old duck. Capriciousness isn’t in it.   Sometimes walking wakes the Muse up, especially in a special place, like the salt marsh at Keyhaven, which I’ve written about before. There’s something about the rhythm of the movement and the air in the surroundings…but it’s never predictable and can never be forced. Sometimes there’s an out-of-the-blue inspiration that doesn’t seem to relate to anything. Sometimes a long fallow period that can’t always be accounted for either. Thank goodness I now have the inestimable luxury of writing for pleasure rather than trying to earn my living by it (although, in fact, I never did. It was always the jam in the sandwich rather than the bread). Now, we are giving books away as fast as we ...

Recently, I was asked, by a Scottish Person, ‘What’s the connection? You wrote The Silkie and Tattybogle – what’s your connection to Scotland?’ I wasn’t sure if this was an aggressive challenge or what. In any case, the answer   - which I didn’t give because other things intervened before I could – was complicated. My name before I married was MacDonald and there is both Scottish and Irish ancestry there, but it was my name by adoption, not blood. I’m English with a dollop of Cornish, so I could claim a connection that allows me to write about The Mud Maid and The Giant, and I grew up in Sussex, so The Hob and Miss Minkin is probably permissible too.  My play for children, very loosely based on the Aboriginal dreamtime myths, is apparently taboo, however. Wait a minute, though: there’s the possibility of an ancestral name linked to Ashkenazy Jews who came over in the 17 th century. Hooray! That opens up more possibilities! Yes, this i...