Authors Electric

Lynne Garner’s blog post on the use of the senses struck a chord with me, as I’ve just been writing up my ‘tip sheet’ for the writing class I run on a Monday evening, which is all about using the senses in writing. I was thinking about calling it: Making Your Characters Smell. It’s always good to start off with a bit of a laugh! Lynne’s link to the sounds of wildlife was really useful, and I’m sure I’ll be looking at that again and again. It’s funny the sort of websites you need to look at in the course of a day’s work. I’ve been writing thrillers recently and have been trying to check out security levels at MI5’s Thames House. As Big Brother is no doubt keeping tabs on what everyone is looking at on-line, I’m wondering if I’ll have the men in black knocking on my door one of these fine days.   I even came across a site that listed the Top 10 Spy Sites in London which was quite interesting, and probably quite inspirational if anyone is looking to write so...

I don’t think I’m very good at knowing when to stop. When I wrote the first version of Margery Allingham's biography back in 1991 and had to leave the unsolved mystery of what went wrong in her marriage in the early 1950s it irked me. Discovering the existence of her husband’s unknown child, Tom, conceived in 1951 with lesbian icon Nancy Spain it didn’t answer every question – in fact it posed a few more – but there was a feeling of yes! as puzzle pieces slipped into place. It was enough to persuade me to re-publish the biography in 2009 as The Adventures of Margery Allingham , the title I’d always wanted but which the original publishers didn’t quite get. And that was the first volume under the Golden Duck  imprint. One thing led to another and more pieces of unfinished business pushed their way insistently to the front of the publication queue until GD volume 13, The Cruise of Naromis: August in the Baltic 1939 by my father, George Jones, caught me unawares in a c...

                      Three Billy Goats Gruff Story Book Three Billy Goats Gruff Colouring-In and Activity Book US Edition (Conforms to American spelling.) For Next Episode, Click Here

Welcome to the second installment of my second count down . This time around, instead of counting down my favorite novels, I'm discussing my five favorite comics/graphic novels that are in some way metafictional. That is, comics that are on some level aware of themselves as works of fiction. Great, now everyone's doing it. Last month, I discussed Dave Sim's 300 issue saga, Cerebus the Aardvark , which involves a fictional world that includes fictionalized versions of writers from Oscar Wilde to Ernest Hemingway to Dave Sim himself. This month we are looking at an alternate version of the "real" world in which the events of all fiction actually occurred. Now this is a tea,-up I wanna see. 4. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Alan Moore (writer) and Kevin O'Neal (artist) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen  is essentially Moore's answer to the superhero team-up comics that became popular during the 1960's and 1970's such...

Writers who get their evil on. Bwahahahaha! Just musing, should I murder my ex? Hmmm. A fellow-writer, fictional but then aren’t we all one way or another, Richard Castle in the eponymous TV series, says ‘ There are  two kinds  of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill  people : psychopaths and mystery writers. ’  I’m a crime writer (and not a psychopath at all, honestly. No, really.) And I suspect that quite a few authors have bumped off or tormented in print those they have reason to dislike in ways the law of the land unsportingly refuses to sanction. Advice for writers ‘I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.’ Thus DH Lawrence, and it is obviously true, he must have felt malevolent when he saddled us with his whiney novels and cluelessness about female orgasms. But perhaps writing for spite is more common than gamekeepers shagging posh birds? (Oops, unfortunate kinky image conjured up there! You’re welcome!) ...

You don't have to be a saint to like Roger Moore's James Bond. But if you like the action packed stories of Ian Fleming and Leslie Charteris, then it's good news to see these classics which first made an appearance way back in the late 1920s, and grew in popularity over the following decades are out as ebooks. Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charteris Bowyer-Yin in Singapore in 1907 and wanted to be a writer from the very start. His first published work was a poem which was published in The Straits Times when he was just nine and a half. Leslie Charteris He wrote the first Saint story, Meet the Tiger when he was just 20 and it was published in 1928. He continued writing about his hero, Simon Templar for a further 89 titles, many of which became films, radio series, TV series and even a comic strip. I've always liked Roger Moore, and The Saint TV series was one of my favourite programmes back in the 60s. When he took ove...