Authors Electric

  Hello everyone, it’s so great to be given the opportunity to blog with the Authors Electric!    As this is my first blog, I’ll give you a rundown of what makes me tick.   I’m a mother to three grown ups, and two enormous dogs named Bear and Baloo, they’re Black Russian Terriers and weigh 65 kg and 44 kg respectively. I spend a great deal of time wiping up dribble, from the dogs, not the grown up kids! Baloo the baby! Bear the big boy! Nearly three years ago now, my husband and I decided that we had really had enough of our jobs, the state of the country and the weather, so we upped sticks from the UK and moved to central France. As such our Great French Adventure began! We bought a rundown granite stone farmhouse and embarked on restoring and renovating it. When we arrived we couldn’t speak French and didn’t know the area but the kindness of strangers is real and our French neighbours have been fantastic.  This was how the house looked when we moved in! The mo...

Apologies for the quality of the image on the right, but it comes from an Early? Mid? Nineteenth Century French children's book called, "LA POUPEE PEINTE PAR ELLE-MEME", its cover image faded almost to oblivion. It came originally from an ancient house in La Vendee, a house full of such historical treasures, and which had been in the family of our very close French friends for centuries (at least three centuries, if not four). I set one of my Young Adult novels there - "WOLFSONG", which is currently available as an ebook on Amazon, if you're curious. The house itself, sadly, has had a dramatic end to its very long and doubtless dramatic life. When the estate was  broken up and divided - French inheritance law is quite uncomfortable and often destructive - it went on to become a hotel in a part of rural France that didn't really attract tourists, so it failed, and eventually, after a succession of owners, was abandoned to the elements and the vandals...

I have already posted this on Facebook, so lazily scooped up the info and popped it in here, too. I hope some of you might be interested enough to grab a free copy, and if so, that you enjoy reading it. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00846FYX0 There is SO much more to say about both the house and the story. The house itself, with its strange and magical name: "Chanteloup", is in the Vendee region of France, and quite remote. It belonged to our Parisian friends who came from that region, and had been in their family for an incredibly long time. When we first went, it was, of course, with them, and quite a long time ago. Later, at their generous invitation, we returned twice, to take holidays there, which was when I made the drawing of it below. The house was extraordinary, and almost unchanged since the 1930s (we did NOT attempt to take a bath!) Much of it is described in the novel. It had once been a swamp area, infested with mosquitoes, hence a high instance of dis...

I have written horror and crime for some years now and I do have a reasonable library of books to fall back on but sometimes those little details need to be checked, and it is so easy to do that online.  It occurred to me this week, however, that the browsing history of the average writer must ring bells somewhere on some watcher-server in some secret place.   It goes as no surprise to those who know me that I own up to being a compulsive researcher, spending hours looking into small details that are a sentence – nay half a sentence.  Now on occasion that could be classed as classic displacement activity  -  but then again it never hurts to check. In a recent read the female protagonist catches her skirt on the mistletoe. That sentence pulled me up sharp. Was she tiptoeing through the tree tops? Not that I could see.  A quick search confirmed that mistletoe varieties native to the UK are to be found growing on trees.  A minor p...

The good old days -my father and Pop Meadows heading for France. WW2 not so far away.... Off to France in two days time, if our English football charmers have left any of it to go to. And while I’m there the referendum will take place, in which a large proportion of the fighting English will express their contempt for people of another race (any other race), happy in the knowledge that they’re superior. Fair enough, it’s what we have to get used to as we grow up and learn world history, but this one is something of an eye-opener anyway. Firstly, the idea that referendums are more democratic than democracy. Which, taken to its logical conclusion, means that hanging should be brought back if enough people push for a vote, and that’s only for starters. Nigel Farridge, the man of French extraction who pronounces his surname like a Frenchman and has a German wife, will be on the loose. The five most stupid men in the Cabinet (and boy, that’s saying something) will be in control. ...

I sometimes feel that I'm not very helpful in this blog. Some posts by other people are full of information and suggestions, more likely to be to do with how and what to write than baking scones. I don't know if I'm meant to dispense handy tips from whatever imagined reservoir of expertise I might be supposed to have (non-clumsy sentences being at the end of that list, judging from that one!) But a couple of nights ago I had a revelation, and I'm going to share it with you. Pin back your lug’oles! Trying to look serious for once I was sitting in my bed (one of my favourite writing stations) flipping through the Kindle notes I have made on a textbook I've been working from. I made the notes as they occurred to me, and they're all germane to a novel that I have in hand. I knew the novel had several specific points I needed to research more, or to polish up, and as I read the textbook over days and weeks I put in a Kindle bookmark at any point that struck ...