Authors Electric

Julia Jones’s moving post of 9th January  about discovering long lost letters between her mother and grandmother came into my mind recently as I, too, sat down to look through some family memorabilia.  Wonderfully silly visual joke from Kate Corner's scrapbook. Opening an enormous, scruffy, leather-bound scrapbook dating from 1855, I was stunned. I can’t even remember what I expected: some dull, holy verses extolling faith and humility, a few cut-outs depicting blowsy roses, nature walks described in spidery handwriting, that sort of thing… Caricature from Kate Corner's scrapbook. Instead, a wealth of well-drawn caricatures greeted my eyes, some wonderfully silly visual jokes... ... and two beautifully and comically illustrated invitations, framed as the planned outings of an exclusive club called the Fraternitye of Noviomagians.  Noviomagus Anniversary Meeting 1st July 1856. By George Godwin. Soberer items appeared in between: many carefully scrawled poems I haven’...

  During April 2022 I did something I had never done before. This is not as exciting as it sounds, though I was unreasonably excited by the result. I think my former career in database-wrangling played a large part in the excitement, because I spent at least some of my working life trying to make it easier for people to search for information. These efforts were often foiled by people’s reluctance to use the search tools available, but that’s another story. I’ve already written on this blog about the family history narrative I published last year. Although it was framed by my own search back through the generations, I did include a list of sources, which because of the subject-matter incorporated places to visit – not that it was possible to visit most of them in real life at the time I published. However it was only recently that I thought of adding an index to the book. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the first place, but it might have been because I imagined any reade...

 It's almost exactly a year since I published an account of my family history - under my real name, of course. It would seem quite odd to write something like that under my pen-name, although now that I come to think of it, a fictitious family history might be more interesting! After doing research on and off for years, I had been meaning to write it up for some time, and it turned out that the best time to do it was just when there was lots of other stuff going on in my life as well as in my writing. Actually I found it oddly relaxing to write non-fiction for a change, though there was a narrative thread running through this book as it was really the story of how I did the research, and I told it in the order the research happened, i.e. back to front in terms of chronology. I published it on Amazon, both electronically and in print, not to sell it to others particularly but to let the rest of the family, and some fairly distant relatives I've met in the course of my research, ...

  I had the absolute thrill to be asked by Wendy H Jones to contribute a chapter to ‘Creativity Matters : Find Your Passion for Writing’ *, a wonderful new anthology that published earlier this month.   My chapter is entitled ‘Why write historical fact-based fiction?’ and it was easy for me to write enthusiastically about a genre that I have a passion for. I love history and I love fiction, so when a fiction book has a good amount of historic fact included, I enjoy it immensely. For me facts add authenticity to the setting of the story but also inevitably set me off on my own research and reading. (I particularly like checking out the author’s sources!) My debut novel was inspired by historic facts – the Cistercians choosing to build abbeys in remote and beautiful parts of Wales, the life and times of the de Braose family, and the rule of Llewellyn the Great, first Prince of all Wales. Inspiration for my historical writing comes easy as I spend much of any free time that I g...

As a dedicated procrastinator, there are lots of things I keep putting off doing. They range from making an appointment with the dentist, to swapping some theatre tickets from one date to another, to writing up the minutes for the Annual General Meeting of the local organisation of which I am currently secretary. I suppose the road to my personal hell, if I believed in it, would definitely be paved with intentions, not all of them good, although from my point of view not exactly evil either. I realised when I thought about this that I use a variety of excuses to put off doing things, but they tend to fall into two main categories. There are things I don't really want to do at all, like going to the dentist, and things I think don't have time for, such as writing up the minutes. Writing up my family history research, which is very much on my mind at present following a real-world meeting with a distant relative from Utah, is an odd one as I think I really want to do this, but...

I continue to write about my father's family through my grandfather's large photographic archive. Repeated tagging, reviewing and sharing of these photos has allowed me to see our family patterns in surprising ways, like how my grandparents used their money to purchase automobiles and travel and snap pictures. They were devoted to one American car brand. Cars and photography seem to go well together in the United States. We traverse the country by auto, get out at some known or unexpected vista and take a photo or ten. Our family was no different. My grandparents and father, then later my grandparents with my aunts and me, drove all over Colorado and New Mexico, Mexico, Texas and Michigan. All motoring was done in Oldsmobiles. Three different Oldsmobile 88s moved them through their lives for more than 30 years.⠀⠀ The first instance of their Oldsmobile devotion can be found in the photo below. My father and grandmother prepare to go skiing and have loaded their skis on t...

We had a new addition to the family the other day, and something happened that made me consider the topic of people's names and what we expect from them. When I heard the name given to the new arrival, for some reason I immediately pictured him in 40 or so years' time as a professor, probably of archaeology. His mother, on the other hand, told me she saw him more as a sportsman. Apart from the fact that she was probably joking because she knows how much many other members of the family excel at sports, i.e. not very much, this started a train of thought that led to various different destinations. My grandmother (top left) and her birth family As a family history researcher I find people's names very interesting, especially their first names. In many Scottish families there was quite a structured naming pattern in place, perhaps for centuries. I think I was one of the first children in our family not to be named after some ancestor or other. But it used to be le...

In case you are worried that I'm going to go into detail here about my rather prosaic middle-of-the road Scottish family in which nobody seems to have committed a crime, been transported, ended up in the workhouse or done anything much to change the course of history, don't panic! I just wanted to run through a few options for writing up or otherwise recording family history, mostly because I've been researching for well over 10 years and I'm still not sure what to do with all the information. I'm hoping that setting out various options will make it clearer to me at least. Of course as a self-published fiction writer my thoughts immediately turn to producing an actual book, and I have probably done enough research and have enough pictures now to fill a few chapters, although there is always the urge to try and go back a bit further and find out a bit more before starting. I doubt very much whether anyone outside the immediate family will be at all interested i...

The Amber Heart on Kindle - Polish & Christmassy When I was wondering whether to do a Christmas 'special offer' on one of my books and also wondering which one to choose, I found myself trying to decide between a couple of suitable books. But really, when it came down to choices, it was a no-brainer. It had to be the Amber Heart . Even the cover seems kind of Christmassy and in my heart, when I think about this book, I think about Poland at Christmas. It is a big doorstop of a book but then it's a big story. Epic. Romantic. Heart rending. When one of my previous agents sent it out, she relayed a letter from an acquisitions editor who said that she had stayed up all night reading it and weeping. They didn't acquire it though. Poland was a non starter as a setting. Now if it had been Russia ... No point at all in telling them that Eastern European borders have been so fluid and so deadly, in consequence, that this novel, set firmly in that part of mid-ninete...

Cover by Claire MacLean Because this novel is going to be part of the Authors Electric grand Christmas Sale, I've been looking back over various things I've written about it over the years, and wondering why it's still so dear to my heart. It wasn't me who called it a Polish 'Gone With The Wind' though. I wouldn't dare. That was my agent at the time. She loved it. She couldn't sell it. The first draft was written more years ago than I care to remember. I'd had a novel bought by the Bodley Head and published by Random House. This was back in the days of the big takeovers and I fell victim to one of them, but really, I was a Bodley Head kind of a writer. For my next novel, I had been crafting this big Polish historical saga, or a version of it. I had cut my teeth with a couple of radio plays and some poems and stories. I had done a lot of research. These characters were in my head, itching to tell their tale. We had high hopes. A string of acq...

I wrote my first novel when I was 17 and it was a dreadful, Gothic affair - a blend of Wuthering Heights and Emmerdale, complete with estranged parents, child abuse, strange goings-on in barns, and unrequited love, interspersed with boring conversations about art and life.  I cheerfully sent my masterpiece to a publisher I chose at random in a book shop, and waited for fame to come calling. What should have been my author pic! I received (what I know now was) a lovely letter praising aspects of the novel and suggesting amendments.  If I was to re-write, the editor said, they might just be willing to look at it again. All I saw was rejection - I hurled it into the bottom of the wardrobe and wept.  I knew so little about how the publishing industry worked, or what you were supposed to do, I didn’t even consider sending it to another publisher and I knew nothing about agents. In my twenties I wrote 2 more novels - one, a thriller, set in the middle east where I was l...