Authors Electric

Two months ago I wrote about getting my first book published and the experience that led up to it.   Last month I wrote about winning the Smarties Book Prize.  Now I want to write about what happened after that. I remember having supper not long afterwards with Jenny Nimmo, a fellow Smarties winner – and Carnegie winner too – and her husband David Millward, with whom my family and I have spent many a happy New Year’s Eve.  I was inclined to brush off the Smarties, thinking it would soon be like yesterday’s news, quickly forgotten and quickly over. But not so, Jenny said. ‘lt’s your CV. It will remain with you forever,’ she said. And she’s been right. After winning a major book prize, finding publishers for your books is easy. Once they were like gold dust.  Now suddenly they’re all over you. And agents.  I’ve had two.  The first brought me disappointment, and that’s all I’m going to say.  The second, however, has been the sort of a...

Last month I wrote about the sweet success of having a first book published.   This time I’m moving on the story by fifteen years.   During those years, as befit a child of the sixties, I did the hippie thing, moved to the countryside from the city, grew vegetables [not very well], baked bread in a solid fuel stove, collected cats and dogs – and five children.   I also taught myself to weave, and made cloth, wall-hangings and rugs. Then suddenly I found myself heading for my forties, the mother of five children under the age of eleven, including a new baby. And despite all my busyness, an overwhelming sense of emptiness settled like fog upon my life.   Who was I really?   Was I the person I seemed to be, or someone else? Where was I going?   Where was the person I used to be? That little girl once called Pauline Fisk who had so longed to be a writer when she grew up – where was she? For more than a decade, Dave and I had lived in a cottage in ...

VIRTUAL READERS? Pauline Fisk says I think not I blogged the other month about the ups and downs of being a virtual author. At the time of writing, I had my first e-publication day in mind but now it’s readers I’m worrying about. Anything that creates a barrier between the books we authors write and the people out there reading them is a bad thing. Too often, whilst visiting schools, I’ve found children amazed to discover that an author like me is made of flesh and blood. But how much less real will I seem now that I’m a virtual writer? And with no physical books for them to buy, or bookshops for them to buy in, aren‘t I in danger of thinking of my readers as virtual too? I hope not, because I hate this use of the word virtual. The connections people make online are as real as anything else that happens in their lives. Authors Electric is a virtual group, but it’s a real group too, full of fellow-writers far too alive and kicking...

To write is one thing. To cast spells another. How to do it? Aged three years old, I used to tell stories to the children next door, weaving fantasies by means of my imagination. Those children were big ones who went to school and could read and write - but they’d line up on their side of the wall to ask what happened next. They were desperate to know but couldn’t for reasons I didn’t understand figure it out themselves. It fell to me - the little squirt peering over her garden wall - to tell them. There’s a knack to casting spells over the imagination. I didn’t know that then, but I do now. Not everyone can do it. But there are a greater number of people who can than do , and it’s not just the hard work, time and effort required that puts people off. It takes a supreme act of self-confidence to believe that the stories going on inside your head are of interest to anybody else. At three I never questioned that they were, but at nine - when I started my first few secret stories -...