Authors Electric

This year, I visited Hay-on-Wye for the festival's Romantasy day. Time I found out what this genre is all about, I decided, since I'm a lifelong fantasy fan and yet somehow (probably since I got published as a children's author and write mainly for the 9-11 age group) missed out on the Romantasy side of things! The two lovely authors on the panel, Hazel McBride and Imani Erriu, soon filled me in on the secret of its appeal. It turns out that this hot new genre, being basically fantasy written by women with a romantic twist, is essentially what I was writing back in the pre-internet days of small indie zines produced in people's garages with their equally small but faithful readership of genre fans/authors. In those days, most of these little zines were edited by men, and their content reflected this. But there was one called Visionary Tongue, whose editorial consultants included female fantasy authors Storm Constantine and Freda Warrington, which published a couple of s...

  A Story of Poetry and Song   I recently accompanied my wife, Sue, to Sherington, a local village where a Christmas Market was in full swing. She was part of a choir and they were due to sing a variety of carols. The market was taking place in the grounds of a pub. I bought a drink, took up position and began to listen.   As the singing proceeded, I stood half-shrouded by cream-coloured tents and I helped myself to the free food on offer – sausages, roast potatoes, chicken pieces and the most marvellous pork crackling - while joining in with the carols. It didn’t take me long to realise that most people were passers-by, making their way backwards and forwards to the market and dropping coins into the ready bucket proffered by Santa Claus. I noticed, however, that the charity the choir was supporting was Brain Cancer Research and my thoughts turned to the poet, Benjamin Zephaniah, and his recent and sudden death from a brain tumour. I mentally reviewed what I had known ab...