Authors Electric

Author Ann Evans and class Author visits to schools are really rewarding – not just financially, although you certainly earn your money; but because it's great to encourage the youngsters to enjoy books and to write better stories. World Book Week is fast approaching, and I've got a busy week, working some days as a solo author in a school, and a couple of visits when I team up with author Karen King, for one of our KAT Visits – Kids and Authors Together.  Doing this we can cover the whole of a primary school with Karen working KS1 and me doing KS2. We'll usually start with a joint assembly for the school, which somehow we've got down to a fine art! Each of us knowing the other one's anecdotes, and feeding each other the right question or comment to lead into our humorous tale (or tale of woe!) to entertain 200-300 bright eager faces. Ant and Dec have nothing on us! However, generally our KAT visits have some sort of 'disaster' suc...

Karen King, Ann Evans, Chrissie Bradshaw, Sheryl Browne, Lynda Stacey. Last weekend was one of my writing highlights of the year – the Romantic Novelist Association's annual conference.  This year is was held at Lancaster University, and it was my third conference. My good pal, author Karen King and I teamed up, and we took the train north feeling really excited to be going along to another RNA gathering. It's the thought of meeting up with familiar faces, making new friends, and basically just being around so many people who share that love of writing. It's such an amazing atmosphere, lots of buzz and noise, lots of laughter and chat – and of course plenty of time to eat and drink. Of course it wasn't all socialising. It was brilliantly organised with th e programme of talks, workshops and one-to-ones sent out to delegates some weeks before the event so that you can say which sessions you plan on attending, and arrange a one-to-one consultation with ...

Apologies for being so late on duty! I didn't highlight doing today's Authors Electric blog in my diary, which is pretty fatal. Well caught on the hop with nothing planned, here's a quick run down of a day in a writer's life – well this writer. Yesterday I drove from Coventry to Worcester to meet up with fellow author, Karen King. We do a joint school visit thing, called KAT, Kids and Authors Together, also Karen and Ann Together, inspiring younger readers to enjoy books and their creative writing. We were just creating a KAT facebook page (check it out) when I got a phone call from BBC Coventry & Warwickshire Radio. They wondered if I'd like to go in and talk about audio books. But seeing as I don't know anything about audio books, I said as much, but got chatting about what Karen and I were actually doing that moment.  Low and behold, we were invited to go in today and chat about inspiring kids to read and write. Well ...

l-r:Kevin Brooke, Chas Eden, Sheryl Browne, Polly Robinson, Sue Johnson, Ann Evans, Linda Bromyard, Karen King, Rod Griffiths, Diana Harrison. It's always a good thing to inspire the next generation to have a love of books and reading, so I wanted to tell you about the Living Library event that I've been involved with over the last couple of years. It's organised by friend and school librarian Linda Bromyard for her school – Blessed Edward Oldcorne Catholic College, usually for years 7 or 8. As she tells the children, usually when you go into a library, you see books. On these occasions they come into the library and meet authors. There's generally between 8-10 local authors, both traditionally published and self published who give up a couple of hours of their time for free to take part. Each author has their own table to display their books, leaflets, bookmarks, posters etc.  Then small groups of children – no more than four ...

As well as writing children's books, I'm quite partial to writing a nice romance every now and then.  In fact when I first started writing 30 odd years ago, it was romances that I particularly wanted to write. At the time I joined The Romantic Novelists Association (RNA) as a probationer, and went along to a couple of their events. One was a weekend in Bournmouth where I heard author Mary Wibberley talk, and recall being absolutely awe inspired by her. I bought her guide on writing romance, To Writers with Love which she signed for me. Such a useful book I was saddened to learn that she passed away in December last year. She'd written almost 50 books for Mills & Boon, the first being Black Niall in 1973. When my writing went in the direction of children's books and non fiction, romance got put on the back burner for some 20 years. Then a couple of years ago, I caught the romance-writing bug again and finally got two romances published as flopp...

Some of you might remember that my April blog was about my visit to the London Book Fair with author Karen King. We weren't sure if anything would come of the conversations we had with various publishers but I thought I'd just report back to say that we've both got work from it. It's not mega-bucks and it's writing to their guidelines, but every little helps, as they say! Karen has a commission for some picture books and I'll be writing some non-fiction to do with local customs and cultures.  This subject is something I've done before - and it brought back an an amusing little tale which I thought I'd share with you. Years ago, when I was just starting out in this writing business I was approached by a publisher to write a little book on British customs for the Polish market. So I included things like Valentines Day, Shrove Tuesday, Bonfire Night and that sort of thing, describing what we Brits get up to, and what each occasion was all abo...

Did anyone go to the London Book Fair this week? I'd never been before and was curious to know what it was like and whether it was mainly for agents and publishers or whether it was useful for authors too. So, teaming up with author Karen King, we set off last Wednesday for a day out in London at the famous book fair. Like me, Karen hadn't been before either, so we'd made up our minds that even if we felt like outsiders, we'd enjoy our day out in London regardless. It turned out however to be an excellent day, perfect for networking and seeing what opportunities there are for writers. Obviously a lot of authors aren't interested in working with publishers, but I'm always on the look out for writing opportunities and will gladly write what needs to be written if it will help pay my bills. The first thing we noticed was that there was a real buzz as you walked up the steps to Earls Court, with everyone keen to get in and start exploring. At ...

          I don't know about you but I strictly adhere to 'sell by dates' on food - or anything else for that matter. If the label tells me that the bag of potatoes has to be used by 20 April then in the bin they go on the 21 April.  My partner keeps telling me that 'sell by dates' are only a guide and I should use my common sense. If the food looks and smells okay then I can still eat it but I don't like to take the risk so throw it out.           I think publishing can be a bit like this. Someone decides that a book is old-fashioned, out-dated and that people won't be interested in reading it anymore. It's too 'gentle', set too long ago, isn't pacey enough. So the book gets remaindered. Or no more are printed once stocks run out. It doesn't matter that the book is very popular, that people still ask for it. It's past its 'sell by date' so in the bin it goes - metaphorically speaking. No matte...

I am by nature a hoarder, only the fact that I’ve moved house quite a few times in my life and was once two days away from moving to Spain has made me have a clear out. And now I'm moving again so once again am making decisions about what I keep and what I take.  Like all authors, I keep manuscripts of published work. I also have some work that has never seen the world of print and probably never will. Some of it I have shredded during various moves - a lot of stuff got destroyed before the almost-move to Spain - others I have hung onto because I’ve liked the idea or plot and want to tweak it when I have time. There is one manuscript I will always hang onto and that is the first children’s book I ever wrote which never got published and deservedly so but will always have a place in my heart. Much of our early work is part of the learning process and it’s good to read old manuscripts and realise how far you’ve come. The world of children’s fiction has moved on though and manu...