Authors Electric

Festive flags at Boomtowm  I’ll never feel quite the same about festivals. Over the last few years I’ve written several posts in response to my happy experiences at the Felixstowe Book Festival . But I've usually been looking from a performer's point of view -- never exactly undervaluing the efforts of organiser Meg Reid and her volunteers, but not setting them centre stage.  Earlier this year, observing my daughter Georgie Thorogood turning her vision of Dixie Fields (her debut country music festival) into reality, I began to get a glimpse of the extraordinary level of challenge faced by all festival organisers. (And here's to you too, Ros Green, at the Essex Book Festival. ) In May I wrote a blogpost apologising to my fictional character, Lottie Livesey, for giving her a festival organiser's role to ensure she was sufficiently off-stage in Pebble to allow my child characters an unimpeded adventure. Poor Lottie, when I'd side-lined her previously (in  A...

The stepmother in Pebble is not a bad person. Her name is Lottie Livesey.  She’s sensitive and caring (if occasionally a little too determined to do what she believes to be right) and there is never any doubt that she loves her stepsons (Luke and Liam) just as much as she loves her daughters (Anna and Vicky). She’s also far too principled and clear-thinking to allow her deteriorating relationship with their father to lessen her concern for his boys. So, how to get her off the stage and allow them the freedom to get into jeopardy? The solution seemed delightfully simple…put her on it.  Lottie is a folk-singer whose career is beginning to take wings. In The Lion of Sole Bay I dispatched her to a recording studio in Italy to make her breakthrough album. I thought she’d earned a holiday after her grim time as an invisible, illegal, worker in the early volumes, living  in a shipping container somewhere half-finished in the Ipswich docklands. Three of the four chil...