Authors Electric

  Winter is coming! The edge of the ice cap in Greenland My grandson did a degree in geology, and which got me thinking about minerals and fossils and rock formations, and how we use them in fiction – and a good opportunity to use some of my photos! C.S.Lewis fired my imagination with the underground scenes in The Silver Chair ( many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands ,) and I really wanted to see formations like that for myself. Many years have passed, and I have seen some really interesting geology on my travels, both under and overground, and they provide good settings. Form bat caves in Borneo and Cambodia to limestone formations in China and Slovenia, there’s a lot of atmospheric material there. Galapagos I think Cheddar Gorge was my first experience, and I was stunned by the fantastical landscapes and sculptural beauty of what I saw. And that was nothing, compared the Postonja Karst Cave System in Slovenia, which is over fifteen miles long. So long, that you need t...

  The sheer beauty of the underwater world is amazing I taught myself to read in secret whilst sitting on the lavatory. The girl next door was six months older than me, and started school six months earlier. She lorded it over me, saying she could read but I wouldn’t be able to until I went to school, so I felt I wasn’t allowed to tackle books yet although I really wanted to. I would struggle through a sentence of Brer Rabbit until it made sense, and then the next time I locked myself away in the only room in which that was permitted I would read my practised sentence, and then struggle through the next one. Consequently, I could read before I went to school but I kept it very quiet. The very first book that I couldn’t stop reading was The Deep Sea Horse , by Primrose Cumming. I don’t know how old I was, probably about six or seven, but I remember my mother saying “Put that book down now Elizabeth, it’s tea time”, and my father (noticing how engrossed I was) shaking his head at her...

When you read this, I'll be climbing off a boat in the Galapagos. I shall have been snorkelling, gazing at exotic fish and corals. I shall have been tramping on tropical islands and gawping at giant turtles and blue-footed boobies (that's a bird, just in case your imagination was taking you elsewhere). And I shall have had no phone nor internet connection for a whole week. (I don't, as I write this, know if I'll be connected by the time you read it.) So here's the dilemma. A week on a boat, sailing among the most exotic islands in the world. Or faffing about on social media, marketing a book or few? For me, the answer is easy. Travelling comes first, then writing about travelling, and finally the delights of blogs and Facebook and Twitter.  (Actually keeping in touch with my daughters and grandchildren comes very high on that list - and they know that.) As writers we are told we should be out there, all the time, reinforcing our brand. Being generally witty a...

I wanted to be a writer from the age of four, as soon as I realised that there was such a profession. And all through junior school I seemed to be on track; my headmaster put me in for every children’s writing competition there was, and I won a variety of delightful prizes provided by various companies such as a crate of creamed rice pudding for a story about a cow. Senior school was different, though. Although nearly all my teachers were excellent, the one who had a real down on me was my English teacher. I  would try to do experimental things in my stories, and I remember one in particular which came back with a red line through the whole thing, an F as the lowest mark she could possibly give, and the comment “You can’t do this”. I’d written a story about an escaped tiger, and was trying to build up the tension by switching scenes at crucial moments. Unfortunately this was the person who had the power to decide whether or not I took A level English. She took one look at me ...

The book that really captured my imagination as a child was The Lost World , by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It mentions blank spaces on maps – imagine! There actually was a time when the word Unexplored was commonplace. The Romans and mediaeval cartographers used to write Hic sunt leones (here be lions) , for unknown territories. There’s one instance of Hic sunt dracones (here be dragons) on The Hunt-Lenox Globe, which dates from about 1510. So what was that about – Komodo dragons, or fossilised dinosaur bones? Hunted by Elizabeth Kay I was into dinosaurs long before they became popular – in fact, I don’t think my mother even knew what they were. Someone had given me a book called Animal Life of the World , a 1930s compilation full of wonderful chapter headings such as Death Dealers of the Deep, Queer Servants of Man and Hunters of the Air . And there, amongst them, Big Game of Other Days. Clay models, photographed in black and white and resembling over-endowed rhinoceroses...