Authors Electric

I started with this, drawn on a sheet of scrap paper, copied from a photo of a stuffed fox. I scanned it into the computer. Before I adjusted the contrasts, you could see the type showing through from the other side. Then I opened the ink sketch in Photoshop, took out the white background of the scrap paper and added a dark background layer. Coloured the drawing, added a title and a screamer. This is only a try-out for the front cover. I can't do the complete one until I've finished laying out the interior and know how thick the spine will be.      I used various photos for reference, sometimes using the 'eye-dropper' tool to get an idea of what the colouring should be.      I was so pleased with the result that I hailed a passing brother. "Cop a butcher's at this," I said.      He came, he looked. A long silence. Then, grudgingly, "That's pretty good. Come out of it."      He took over my chair. He over-laye...

I’m a sucker for novellas. I always seek them out in the bookshops, although they are sometimes hard to locate, their narrow spines often lost between the thicker books on the shelves. Once popular, the novella has languished in the past few decades and it was difficult, as a writer, to sell a novella to a publisher or agent. But, today the novella is having a bit of a revival. Some American magazines will accept novellas, Bath Fiction recently had a competition for the novella-in-flash and there are now small publishing houses, such as Peirene Press in London, who publish novellas in translation and Melville House in the USA.  What exactly is a novella? It’s a short novel, yes, between twenty and forty thousand words - long enough for a reader to inhabit a world but short enough to be read in one sitting. But it is much more than that. A novella tends to focus on one view or one voice, highlights one feeling and portrays one psychological human trait. It zooms in on one asp...

Last month I picked up the award for the Arnold Bennett prize. This is an annual event run jointly by The Arnold Bennett Society and The Sentinel our local newspaper. Established in 2017, the prize is open to any writer living in north Staffordshire, or writing about the area. It was a lovely evening early in June and in spite of being hampered by a broken wrist, I dressed as elegantly as I could and was driven to the North Staffs Medical Centre for the award ceremony which was to be followed by dinner. Although I knew only one or two people there, I was made very welcome and was enjoying a glass of prosecco when the time came for the announcement of the winner. There were five books short listed and as there is no restriction as to genre they ranged from crime and thrillers, to non-fiction and a children’s picture book. As Dr Catherine Burgass, the vice chair of the society began her speech, my stomach did flutter and I crossed those fingers that still worked ...

On the Halloween that’s just gone, I was fortunate enough to have been granted exclusive access to the normally reclusive Vladimir Poignard, writer of some of the most chilling horror stories to have appeared this century. Poignard is consciously part of a tradition which stretches back to Poe, Wilkie Collins and even encompasses the excrescences penned by the Divine Marquis himself. When I went to meet him, I was surprised to be shown into the parlour of a small terraced house in Wigan by a woman in her seventies. She sat me down, brought through two cups of tea and a plate of shortbread biscuits, settled herself opposite me and said ‘Well, shall we get started?’. In the course of the interview which followed, nothing compared with this revelation that the purveyor of some of the most explicit violence and psyche-shattering episodes in the whole of western literature was, in fact, Ethel Gringe, 78. Her three husbands had all died in mysterious circumstances but left he...

Holidays begin with lists. First there are the things that must be done, the travel arrangements, booking hotels and flights and making sure that passports are in date. Then all the domestic stuff, who is going to look after the cat, water the garden, collect the post etc. Finally, what has to be bought, sun cream, new swimwear and books.      When it’s time to pack there are other decisions to be made, which clothes and shoes to take and which to leave behind. At which point the laptop/notebook question has to be addressed.      Is this going to be a holiday with, or without? Am I going to take my work with me and have a holiday like any normal person?      On a practical level, this means that my hand luggage will be lighter and there will be no tangles of wires to wrestle with at check in when, inevitably, after passing through the x-ray machine, mine is the case which is selected to be unpacked. Even though I know...