Authors Electric

The more I write about history, the more I love it. Considering my school tried everything they knew to make me hate the subject, I consider myself extremely lucky that I got there in the end. Kings and queens meant nothing to me until a history lecturer at University – the great and sainted Ian Kershaw – told me that William the Conqueror fell off his horse and burst. Now that for me, is a proper kingly way to die. The real beauty, and frustration, of history is that an extraordinary amount of it is guesswork. That's why I've always been wary of biography. Somebody spends many years examining everything recorded about a certain personage, and is confident at the end of all that they have drawn a perfect picture. Sadly, that is balderdash. I don't even know myself why I do most things that I do, and looking back on them, the problem just gets murkier. Take Nelson. One of Britain's most authentic heroes, still revered, still cited in any naval argument. Then ta...

I seem fated every year to be the bringer of sad news about a person who has been my friend, the friend of others on AE and a figure of respect and admiration  to many other readers and writers. Jim Riordan, Bob Leeson, Patricia Miles. And now comes, for me, the saddest of all. Pam Royds, Children's Book editor, first at Andre Deutsch and then at Scholastic, was 91. She was the editor who started the writing careers of both Jan and me. Our debt to her is immeasurable. Is it significant that my twenty-six years as a Deutsch and Scholastic author ended just before she finally retired?  As Jan will confirm, she was a noted fighter for her own writers. One of the last of the great  children's book editors. My first, initially bruising, meeting with Pam was in April 1973. Our first exchanges made me wonder why I'd even bothered to turn up. Yes, the lunch in Andre Deutsch's exclusive little dining room (those were the days!) was lovely and the whisky she insist...

Having been recently forced into close proximity with the section of society that keeps the rest of us from going under, I’ve been pushed to wonder, not for the first time, what writing is actually for. Without going into too much detail, I have been meeting carers, cleaners, bum wipers and suchlike unregarded, ill-rewarded members of our Big Society. All but one of them, so far, has been black, all of them have been on the minimum wage, all of them have got degrees. I have been, ridiculously, too polite to ask them how much they might earn, or if indeed they are on zero hours contracts. I do know however, that they are not paid for their driving time, have to provide their own cars, and pay for their own petrol. This, incidentally, in a rural area far from town, in a village that does not even have a shop, let alone a bus service. It does not even have a public telephone. The oldest of these people is perhaps twenty-eight, from Zimbabwe, and highly qualified in compute...

Isn't there something missing? I'm sure most of you reading this will be as relieved as I am that I'm not going to be scratching around for new things to say about Wild Wood. We had a wonderful launch party in the Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road, another in the Albert Club in West Didsbury, and a third last night at the Conservative Club in Uppermill, near Oldham. Now, still slightly hung over from Ma Ferret's Special bitter, I intend to lie back and wait for the money to roll in. In case my fellow authors assume that that is just a normal part of writers' fantasy, let me tell you of something rather wonderful that happened today. I opened a letter and found a cheque from sales of my cut-down and edited version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. (Pleased to see that my voice recognition engine did not put in a hyphen. Like me, it assumes that that unnecessary, and technically incorrect, punctuation mark was stuck in by a junior printer while Herman...