Authors Electric

Call me old-fashioned, but I love a good bookmark, and I have a large collection ready for action whenever I need one.  Some of these have been made for me by those too young to read my books yet... I have some that I've treasured since I was very young - I've had these two since I lived in California at the age of 8... I have some handmade ones, such as these two I embroidered when my eyesight was sharper than it is now... Some are souvenirs of bookish events I've enjoyed or at which I've spoken... Bookmarks make great low-budget souvenirs of places that I enjoy visiting as a tourist... So when I decided to produce some swag to promote my growing Sophie Sayers Village Mystery novels (four and counting...), a good bookmark was the obvious choice. But as to the design, I was stumped. I love the gorgeous book cover designs produced for me by the wonderful Rachel Lawston of  Lawston Design , but with three more books to come in the ser...

Debbie Young in Hawkesbury churchyard (Photo: Angela Fitch) In 2010, realising that no matter how hard I worked in my day job, it was leaving me unfulfilled, I made the radical decision to walk away from it without a job to go to. I intended to refocus my life on my writing ambitions . Reading Between the Lines It felt like a miracle when I almost immediately landed a part-time job with a wonderful children's reading charity , Read for Good , which served two purposes for me (apart from giving me an income, that is): It reinforced the importance of books and reading not only for children but for all ages, which in turn validated my ambition to write books myself.  It gave me space to explore different ways in which I could write what I wanted to write - and indeed to discover exactly what that was.  Using commissioned non-fiction projects and experimental short stories as stepping stones, I gradually gained the confidence and competence needed to achieve my ...

I'm also awfully fond of bluebells As a novelist, I like to think I make everything up.  While the standard disclaimer appears on my copyright pages declaring each book a work of fiction, little details creep in from real life.  Snippets and snapshots are dredged up from the ragbag of my memory. Sometimes this is for no apparent reason, such as the recycling bins that appeared in three separate stories in my flash fiction collection, Quick Change . I didn't even notice the repetition until one of my beta readers asked why they kept cropping up. For fear of seeming obsessive, I replaced one bin with a bonfire, which made for a much better story.  Other times I manage to wrestle the reasons from my subconscious after I've finished writing the story, such as the forget-me-not motif that runs throughout my Sophie Sayers Village Mystery series.  The first book in the series In the first novel, Best Murder in Show , Hector, the local bookseller, r...