Authors Electric

  No Artificial Intelligence Was Used In the Creating of These Books. Just Saying...  Hauntings Overheard in a Graveyard Nightcomers In a week's time, it's Hallowe'en. The night before All Saints' Day, when all the bogles, ghouls, boggarts, ghosts, night-walkers, bargeists, phantom ladies of many colours, not to mention the long-leggety beasties, come out for a big celebration before the Christmas season begins. Because, famously, at Christmas the bird of dawning kicks up a tiresome racket all night long and no spirit dares stir abroad, no fairy takes and no witch hath power to charm. So the Supernatural Community has to get all its jollies before then.  Hallowe'en, seemingly, is the office Christmas party for the undead. M. R. James (wikimedia) But remember: Ghosts aren't just for Christmas. I've always been ready for a ghost story at any time of the year. The great M. R. James wrote a particuarly chilling one, The Wailing Well , set on Midsummer Day, in br...

Hauntings  A week to Hallowe'en — party night for ghosties, ghoulies and witches. I don't believe in ghosts. Of course I don't. I'm far too rational. I just write about them. My parents didn't believe in them either. They were adamant about that. "There's no such thing as ghosts. Go to sleep." Except my mother would sometimes tell me about the house where I was born, which she hated. It had no water indoors and no bathroom. You had to go over 'the track' to the wash-house for water and walk to the end of the row for the toilets. No electricity in the house either, though it did have gas. But none of these were her reasons for hating it. She'd never lived in a house that was any better equipped. She hated it because it was haunted. My Dad often worked late, so Mom spent many evenings alone. She'd always loved reading, so she'd curl up in a corner of their third-hand sofa, with her library book, and her cat, Tiny, purring on her lap. ...

My mother loved Christmas.   You know who he is - illustrated by T Nast ( Public Domain Review)      She was born in 1929, the youngest of six children. Every year, at Christmas, she told us about Christmas when she'd been a child.      The Christmas, for instance when, coming down in the morning, she found a monkey in the kitchen. One of her three older brothers had somehow acquired it at the Christmas Wake (a fair.) Christmas spirit had probably been strong in the brother, if not the monkey. What happened to the monkey? As with many of my mother's stories, I don't know. I can't remember her ever telling me that. Perhaps she didn't know herself. I can't imagine the monkey remaining a member of the household for very long after my grandmother saw it. Every Christmas without fail, we heard about the big white enamelled bucket. It had a lid. It was a lidded big white enamel bucket.      For most of the year the big white...

A friend, asked  me about covers for ebooks recently.  She didn't think she would make back, in sales, the cost of paying for a cover to be designed, and she didn't feel capable of creating one herself. So, what to do? I pointed her in the direction of CreateSpace and its free 'Cover Creator.' CreateSpace is the Amazon company which enables you to publish in paperback. You download a template, into which you load your 'interior files' or the text of your book. Then a cover has to be designed, which will wrap around the paperback book - so it has to have a front and back, and a spine. The thickness of the spine depends on the word-number of your book. Paperback cover of 'Ghost Dance' With my first POD paperbacks, the Ghost World series, I got my brother to take his Kindle cover designs and turn them into paperback covers, following the formula which Amazon provides. But I felt that I couldn't go on pestering my brother. When I turned ...