Authors Electric

  As I may have mentioned, on 1 st January this year I took a leap into the abyss and became a Full Time Writer. This was at once terrifying and thrilling. Yes, I had my well-established freelance writing career, but just as I laid down my other source of income for good, one of my biggest clients changed things around and I haven’t had any work from them since. I got writer’s block for the first time ever while trying to write my third novel. My elderly parents needed even more care and attention which sapped my mental strength and even though I’m a fairly brave and optimistic person, I sat in my Palace of Creativity in the cold, dark days of January thinking to myself, “Ruth, how on earth are you going to make any money?”   A fellow writer, the magnificent Sheila Robinson, had mentioned years before that she booked herself a space on local craft and book fairs and sold her books directly to the public. This seemed like a splendid idea. Having spent twenty years running my...

This is me - and it must have been taken after the reading as I'm smiling! I thought I’d use this month’s blog to give you all a quick update about the meet the author event I attended on July 1 st (click here if you want to read my original post) . Well, I’m happy to report that not only did I make it through the door, but I also read the prologue of my second book, No Safe Home. I won’t lie, my hands were trembling – and I had to hold both the book and the microphone in front of me, so there was no hiding the shakes – and my tongue felt ten times too big for my dry mouth. But, despite all of that, I read the chapter. More importantly, and thankfully, the audience listened intently, applauded and one person even purchased the book after the event due to hearing the prologue. Definitely worth the week of jitters leading up to the event, I think. I have to thank the team at Bloodhound Books and my friends and all the supporters who came to the event. I think my pre-...

Earlier in the year I, foolishly some might say, raised my hand to join an author event next month. Back then, mid-writing my work in progress, July felt like a million miles away. Well, it wasn’t, obviously, and the countdown is now against me. What’s wrong with attending an author event, you might ask? For me, loads. Especially when you’re fourth in line to stand up and read a chapter from your book. Some writers relish in this time and it comes naturally to them to read aloud the words they silently typed on their keyboard. To share a moment with your readers, when they hear your voice and are given the opportunity to ask you questions about the book, or your writing journey. All of this fills me with dread. It takes me back to my first year of university and a creative writing module I was studying. Part of our final grade, I think twenty or thirty per cent of it, was marked on each of us standing in front of the class (no more than twenty people, I’d guess) and read alou...

Well, that was an interesting month. A wise old agent once said to me, “some projects, Andrew, just seem to travel on oiled wheels”, and that seems a perfect description for the birth of my memoir, “Confessions of a Ghostwriter”, this month. The project began to show promise when the editors at Friday Project suggested almost no changes to the first draft of the manuscript. It picked up speed when their excellent public relations company, The Light Brigade, told me that Robert McCrum at the Observer had read the proofs and wanted to come to see me, followed shortly afterwards with the news that Nick Higham wanted to interview me on BBC News’s “Meet the Author” spot. Within days of publication the Observer article was up on the Guardian website, had been picked up by another Guardian journalist, Hadley Freeman, and was being widely tweeted and commented on. Even before “Meet the Author” had hit the screens favourable reviews had appeared close to home in the Telegraph , the Ti...