Authors Electric

 Ever been writing something, and suddenly realised you have no idea how to get from A to B? In fact, you have very little idea of what A and B actually look like apart from a few important details such as the pub, the flooded quarry and the cave in which the escaped tiger is hiding. Which direction you would choose? What you would have to pass through/over/under? How long would it take? What method of transport would you use? Or do you suddenly realise that C couldn’t possibly be related to D without some very unlikely incest, or that E and F would never speak the same language or be old enough to have met Stalin? We tend to think we understand the worlds we create so well that we don’t need any help to remember the details, but you can get it so wrong. Even a well-respected author such as C.S.Lewis can create anachronisms, especially when you have two worlds where time moves differently. What really upset me as a child was the time discrepancy between The Voyage of the Dawn Tread...

It's been a tough year for many people, and things were pretty tough in publishing even before the dreaded virus and its associated emergency rules locked down half the world. That was March and we're still panicking over here in the UK, which makes me wonder quite how long this current 'emergency' status will last? But this is not a post about people dying of, or even with  the virus (words are important, as authors and readers know only too well). It's merely something related to the situation that affects me as an author and possibly you as a reader. The latest casualty of this summer is the small but passionate UK publisher of historical fiction, Greystones Press, which has sadly now closed its doors taking my YA Genghis Khan novel Bone Music out of print, along with all the other books published by them. Readers might gain briefly from this, since you can still get these books from third party sellers at a reasonable price - but be quick if you want one, becaus...

Author launch - Then (take one) I started publishing book-length fiction in 1999, about ten years before Amazon opened their Kindle Direct Publishing platform and made it possible for authors to publish themselves without first winning the lottery. In other words, there was only one route to market, and it relied on an editor saying "yes". My first book Song Quest did the rounds, agented by me out of necessity, and eventually came out with a small UK publisher in the traditional way: hardcover first with a modest print run of about 1,000 copies (which sold out), and then paperback with a slightly larger print run that probably would have done quite well in the shops, since by then my book had won the Branford Boase Award  given to a debut author and their editor for an outstanding book for young readers, on the strength of which I had been taken on by a top London agent keen to develop my career. Unfortunately, though, Element Books went into receivership a few weeks after t...

A good friend died just before Christmas. She was about 10 years older than me but still too young. She had cancer but it was still a shock. In the summer when I went back to Wales to see her, she seemed quite well. She had completed a course of chemotherapy and was walking 15 miles a day, writing and keeping up with her various social activities and her family. Now she is gone, and I will never again walk with her along the banks of the River Wye discussing books and publishing and putting the world to rights. Sue in Usk Before she died, Sue self-published a book set in the near future in the Welsh border country where she lived. She'd been writing it for several years but kept quiet about the story, most of our discussions being about how she might find a publisher. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she decided she couldn't wait any longer for publishers to say 'yes' and took the book to a local printer. After her death, her daughter kindly sent me a copy. ...

Ever since discovering a copy of Stephen King's On Writing  in my goodie bag at a British Fantasy Convention way back in the 1990s, I've admired the man for his no-nonsense approach to writing. I'm not especially a horror fan - those familiar with my work will know I'm more into fantasy and legends with a bit of science fiction mixed in. But I enjoyed the screen adaptations of King's books, such as writer's nightmare Misery , where the author of a popular series finds himself incapacitated at the mercy of his No. 1 fan, who forces him to write another book in that series. Having someone smash your ankles with a sledgehammer must concentrate the mind, I suppose, and makes me wonder how autobiographical that book was when he wrote it. After all, Stephen King's No 1 tip in his tips for writers published recently in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/30/ten-things-i-learned-about-writing-from-stephen-king  is "Write whatever the hell yo...