Authors Electric

  Wake up, check the clock, sit up, drag laptop onto duvet, open it up, find the file, check the word count and write it down.   63762 this morning. It’ll need to be 64+++ by tomorrow. 64762 I hear you say - well no, not every day. Anything beyond 64000 will do. There’s a cheating get out clause whereby as long as the first two numbers have changed there’s a little less stress about the others. Okay that’s not so admirable but there has to be a little bit of slack in the system, doesn’t there?  If I was offshore racing and suggested a little bit of slack in the system, the answer from any serious competitor would be a shocked NO! I’ve recently been reading the section of Tracy Edwards' autobiography Living Every Second where she and legendary navigator Adrienne Cahalan made their 1998 attempt at the Jules Verne Trophy. That’s the prize for the fastest circumnavigation of the world by any type of sailing yacht. The starting line is between Ushant and the Lizard and...

Tennessee Fields - went ahead in 2021 All set again for 2022 It’s festival time. Book festivals, music festivals, dance festivals, beer festivals, curry festivals, car festivals. There are garden festivals, BBQ festivals, happenings, experiences, shows, regattas, fetes, fairs - and fayres.  Margery Allingham makes a guest appearance  Our family summer is dominated by Georgeanna’s Tennessee Fields Country Music Festival (July 15 th – 17 th this year) and I’ve lost count of the number of years Francis and I have been participating in the Felixstowe Book Festival, always the last weekend in June and different every time. I've joined in with dementia life-stories, primary school adventure sessions, boats and books, ebooks, detective stories, children's writing competitions and have introduced novel writing friends such as Jane Thynne, Amanda Craig, Salley Vickers. This year it's Suffolk and the Sea on Saturday while Francis is interviewing Justin Webb ; then Celebrating Ma...

The tip of the organisational iceberg Tomorrow (more accurately 53 minutes from now) it's my daughter Georgie's Tennessee Fields Festival, 2021.  A country music festival to which she's expecting about 2000 people. 400 of them are campers, arriving tomorrow. The fun will begin with Country Karaoke, then the Honky Tonk Roadshow, Campfire social and the bars closing at midnight. Saturday, the main festival day begins with a Songwriters' Workshop while the main gates open to welcome the bulk of the audience (all of whom will have to show proof of a negative Lateral Flow Test after which, as it's all outside in a very large field, the atmosphere should be fairly relaxed. Eight acts on the main stage alternate with six on the acoustic stage in the big top. There's line-dancing too but only one artist directly from the USA. Jessica Lynn and her band arrived a week ago and have been quarantining in a cottage ever since. Today the Tests to Release came though so tomorro...

Perhaps this is a lockdown experience or perhaps it’s a reversion to earlier ways of living and working. We, like so many other families, find ourselves working from home, each in our separate spaces. Bertie’s in the attic, laying-out books with Indesign; Francis somewhere downstairs trying to find the right angle of physical endurance for solid hours of Private Eye deadlines and me … well, to be honest, I’m most characteristically surrounded by WW2 naval memoirs, copies of Lloyd’s Registers and overflowing scribbled papers … in bed. Together with my faithful laptop, miraculously fact-checking and emailing, tweeting and posting. Thus Golden Duck (UK) ltd keeps busy. One of my favourite Margery Allingham novels Flowers for the Judge (1936) tells the story of Barnabas and company, publishers since 1810 at the Sign of the Golden Quiver. It’s a perfect setting for a classic murder mystery: an enclosed location, limited number of suspects, distinctive atmosphere, ra...