Authors Electric

  The 11-year-old girl who inspired the book concerned I am no stranger to scams. There are two I would like to mention, both telephone calls. The first was in the 1980s by a man who wanted to know what underwear I was wearing. I hung up, but he was persistent. This was a landline, and I was waiting for a phone call, so I couldn’t just leave the phone off the hook. I tried everything, blowing a whistle down the phone, saying nothing for as long as I felt I could before I hung up. I think it was the eleventh call when I decided to take a different approach. I listened carefully to what he wanted to do to me, then I said, “I don’t think you’d like that very much. You see, I have this disease…” and I went on to describe some imaginary condition which had every disgusting visual manifestation and smell I could think of. He hung upon me, and never rang back. The object was to destroy the picture he had in his head, and it was very successful. I wrote and article about it, and had it pub...

As I seem to be stuck for ideas this month, I thought I'd post some photos I've taken of places I've been and things I've seen, and link them to particular books I've written. I'm quite a visual person, having gone to art school, and pictures do tend to evoke memories for me, and one idea leads to another... This is the photograph of a feisty eleven-year-old in Mongolia, the best rider I have ever seen, herding her goats. She was the inspiration for a reluctant reader story called Lost in the Desert , about a boot camp for difficult kids. This is the foot of a phorosrachus, an extinct bird that features heavily in Ice Feathers , a book set in prehistoric Antarctica. I saw this in the Tring site of the Natural History Museum. This is the ballroom of a castle in Prague. During the depradations of the Mongols, they took it over and rode their horses in there for war conferences. I mention it in Beware of Men with Moustaches , a story about a poetry group who are in...