Authors Electric

The escape in question, dear readers, is mine to France. I'll be away when this appears, and who knows...I might do a Napoleonic disappearing act. I suspect one ray of sunshine and one breath of warm air would do the trick. Up here in the northern hills is a bit like being in the Antarctic, waiting for Captain Oates to return with the Guardian. Tent gonna happen, is it? So, please forgive me for a bit of self-indulgence. I honestly can't think of anything sensible or exciting to say, so may I show you this? My Kindle Single came out on about (!) June 1, and immediately got a five-star review. First of many, I hope. All reviews are welcome, whatever starrage. More sensibly, I wanted to show you this, from the International Thriller Writers magazine. (ITW - I wrote about it some months ago.) I sent them off this blurb and picture only about five days before it appeared, and now it's available to about 25,000 sensation seekers world wide. Which surely - cannot be bad....

Sitting down here in the wilds of Leicestershire, back on family duty, I suddenly realised that I had a blog to do. Shouldn't have been a surprise, because it usually coincides with our turn to keep the home fires burning now that one of the Aged Ps is sadly no longer with us.   But it did raise the immediate question – what shall I write about? That, being a writer, is not a new question, obviously. In fact many AE blogsters ask from time to time where ideas come from, and how different people process them. As it happens my need for a subject matter coincided with some historical work I'm doing, and a couple of barely-related strands popped unbidden into my sights. One was the extraordinary suggestion/possibility that Abraham Lincoln had been shot because he was gay and refused to come out of the closet, and the other was the destruction of ancient monumental works of art or worship by the ‘new Puritans’ of ISIS. These subjects are hardly related, except that they are...