Authors Electric

Rain, heavy cloud, mud, Omicron... So this is a picture post of happy memories connected with writing. This one is of my wonderful agent, Carolyn Whitaker, on the balcony of her house in Turkey, which I visited many times. We also went to Iceland together. She died in 2016, and I miss her more than I can say. A generous, funny, adventurous woman with the most incisive and down-to-earth mind I have ever encountered when it came to editing a manuscript. "Let's start with the first f--- on page thirteen." She had a speedboat at her place in Netley, and piloted it at terrifying speeds. She also owned racehorses, and I was there when she had a winner at Epsom. A total original, who was an enormous influence on me. I was very touched when she left me some money; I realised it was exactly the same amount she had earned off me in the previous twenty-five years.    This is a humming bird from the garden in Monteverde, Costa Rica, which was the initial setting for my fantasy The Di...

 Setting is one of those things that is really important, and it can be the starting point for a plot. I have found the photographs I have taken on my travels to be particularly important, as they evoke memories. Extreme landscapes are the best, and in this post I’ll concentrate on ones without people. Next month I’ll do cities. The emptiest landscapes – other than being at sea – are deserts. My first experience of desert was when I was eighteen, and I went to Morocco. In those days it was not a tourist destination at all, and I was captivated by the open spaces and the feeling of freedom it gave me. I grew up in North London, before we moved to Surrey when I was ten, and my earliest memories are grey; concrete, fog, smoke, post-war austerity. I hated it. Ever since, I have sought out landscapes with no obvious trace of human interference. I have experienced deserts in Tunisia, Egypt, Mongolia… and they have all been different.   Cold is as atmospheric as heat, and my hol...

Mention fiction about Genghis Khan, and you're probably thinking fierce Mongolian horseman, bloodthirsty battles, and books for boys along the lines of Conn Iggulden's acclaimed 'Conqueror' series. But that would only be half the story. The saying "behind every great man there is a great woman" is as true of the Mongol people who roamed the steppe in Genghis Khan's time, as has so often been proved true throughout history. So where are all the books about these great women? In September, author Starr Z Davies launches a brand new saga starting with the powerful story of Mandukhai, blood of Genghis Khan, forced into marriage with a man she does not love in an attempt to restore the Khan's great empire, which has fractured during the 200 years following his death. But when she falls passionately in love with one of her husband's young warriors, how long can her head rule her heart? For adult readers. Daughter of the Yellow Dragon (Fractured Empire Bo...

Since the advent of digital photography I’ve been an addict – and I’ve used a lot of the photographs I’ve taken in different books. Here are a few, with extracts from the book concerned. The Divide I decided to open this book in the most magical place I had ever visited, which was the humming bird garden in Monteverde, Costa Rica. …the humming birds returned to the sugar-water feeders that were hung around the outside of the Study Centre. They used their beaks as rapiers, fencing in mid-air as they tried to knock one another away from the rim. The ones that won looked smug, and the ones that lost zoomed around the garden pretending they didn’t want a drink after all. Back to the Divide Although this description comes from The Divide, lot of the action in the second book is set in the library of my alternative world. I based it on a café in Bristol. This one was made of wood, with asymmetrical window-frames and doorways. Pear-shaped windows, kidney-shaped wind...

Today is  World Poetry Day , which was started by the United Nations in 1999 to celebrate poetry as a way for society to regain and assert its identity. The thing I've come to realize about poets, as opposed to novelists or other types of writers, is that they don't expect to make a living from their poetry alone, even if it gets published widely. It seems to me that this detachment of art from commerce might be to poetry's benefit, as there is presumably less temptation for a poet to "sell out" in pursuit of a lucrative contract, dumbing down or otherwise editing their work to appeal to the widest possible audience (as it's been suggested I do by various agents and editors in the course of my career as a children's author - my resistance to this idea is possibly the reason why I am not more widely published as a children's author, and why I can identify with poets!). I remember attending a poetry festival some years ago where, after the  poet Seli...