Authors Electric

Jan Needle - Baxter Ferret or Boddington Stoat? * Reposted from 9 May 2014 * In memory and appreciation of Jan Needle, 1943--2023 When I was making  plans for a party to celebrate the new edition of Jan Needle's Wild Wood  I began to fantasize about asking all the guests to arrive dressed as the character who most closely resembled their secret self.  The male guests would have had a generous choice: the Big Four from Wind in the Willows -- Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad ( and perhaps Otter for the more elusive spirits) and then Wild Wood 's dour ideologue Boddington Stoat, flamboyant champagne  socialist,   O.B.Weasel, geriatric Harrison Ferret and any number of old sea rats and enthusiastic volunteers. I would be Wild Wood 's Daisy Ferret, the tyrannical illogical mother, always ready to lash out with her ladle at any furry offspring within range while dimpling at O.B.Weasel's waistcoat and raising ...

One of the beauties of swimming in the ebook pool is the flexibility that comes with it. I recently finished the second book in what I intend to be a series of thrillers about an odd partnership between a hardened cynic of a journalist/investigator in his forties and a woman not yet thirty who is learning the tricks of this vulgar old trade the hard way. The first book has been out for about a year now, and has had nothing but five and four stars on Amazon, and a few good formal reviews to boot. It’s called Kicking Off, and is about the modern bleed of criminality into the more respectable world – high finance, politics, the self-styled ‘moral’ press. It starts with the ‘extra-judicial’ death of a rooftop rioter in a Scottish jail, which leads the authorities into a desperate, and spreading, cover-up. At the same time a massively rich businessman is unexpectedly given a sentence much harsher than the one he had paid good money for, while an American super-criminal is ...

I had an interesting virtual conversation with John Logan the other day, which I’d love to refer to but can’t find in my new technology nightmare. I’m running three computers at the moment – big desktop Mac (never liked Big Macs, fries or no fries), which is old and slow and infuriating, a laptop Mac, which is good but prone to sulking now and then, and losing things I haven’t yet saved, and a PC laptop the bloke over the road gave me. This one’s good, but VERY old, and throws enormous wobblies if the document I’m working on is more than twitter length. The doc I’m working on at the moment is about 300 pages. Serves me right. John and I were conversing about nasty reviews on Amazon and why they happen. I’d had a couple of humdingers, which appeared to have a slightly orchestrated tang to them, and I think he was impressed (can’t check, sadly – see above!). But his idea was to embrace them with love and affection, because if they went on it would make an interesting...