Authors Electric

On Facebook this week, Guardian Teen Books was asking ‘Where are all the girls in adventure-ready trousers ’ in children’s books today. If you can think of any, they want to know.   Why? Thought we’d won that battle. I recommended my battle-ready girls, Joan of Arc’s friend, Mariane, Viking girl, Beren,  and Aoife, my Druid elephant keeper but I don’t think they meant our heroines from past ages.   No, what they had in mind, I think, was feisty tomboys, girls ready to explore and jump from rock to rock and light fires, capable, brave, self-sufficient and hardy. That sort of thing.  Well, where are they, then, and why is the Guardian asking? Are they suggesting that writers practise some kind of social manipulation, by inventing a certain kind of female role model?  Mm.   It set me thinking about the role children’s books play in children’s lives. Do they reflect them, exploring real problems, or do they actually mould them, to promote...

Are writers by nature anti-social? Is this why we write?  This month, I was supposed to be blogging Part Two of my Spring Clean-Up post, with the focus of how edited my collection of fiction. We.ell, as so often happens with any type of cleaning in my house, I’ve started, so I’ll not finish. Tra la! My butterfly mind hops on to a different track.  What interrupted my Clean-Up blog?  An interesting piece from the Huffington Post, about Introverts. Now, I’m not a fan of labels for people, in any form.  We can only pin people down for a very short time. In the next moment we’re different. Influenced by something in our environment, we change our minds, we learn and grow, we evolve, as written in stone as blobs in a lava lamp. Yet, this piece on Introverts really spoke to me, because I recognised myself and for the first time acknowledged my weirdness as perfectly normal. There, I've said it! I've come out! I'm an Introvert!  Finally....

  In last month’s blog, I said I was spring cleaning my office and, specifically, tidying my book shelves, which meant I had to throw some books away to make room for new ones.  As other bookworms will know, what this really means is to make enough room to stand all my books upright with spines to attention, instead of slotting them in higgledy-piggledly, to lounge languidly about, horizontally, on top of the others. Ha! I’ve tried this before and I know exactly what happens. I pick up a lounging book and it infects and entrances me, so that a while later I come to and find myself lounging about too, in my armchair, half way through its pages..  You know it’s true. To be fair, you have to give a book on death row a chance. In order to find those I can safely discard, I’ve decided that a book worth keeping has to have taught me something, ie it’s one of the ‘great’, or it has entertained me, in which case it’s one of the ‘good’. All keepers have to be some...

If no one had said 'Spring's here! ', if I’d not been able to see the light and the primroses and hear the birds shouting, I'd still have known. Spring! What a good word for it!   Today I sprang out of bed at 6am and,  eschewing the usual slorming about in my pjs until after the post’s arrived,  sprang through my ablutions and into my clothes. Primped, prepped and ready.  ‘What’s got into you?’ asked my partner. ‘Are you going somewhere?’  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s just that I want to be ready. I don’t know what for, I just do.’    Did he know something we don't know?  Deep in the limbic Neanderthal recesses of my brain, something stirred, a bright blood compulsion to clean out my nest, and my thoughts and my life, to make all clean, clear and fresh again.        Do you suffer from SAD? Seasonal Affective Disorder. Disorder? Really? But, isn't this alteration from low to high spirits, as the year moves from wint...

(1-A. 2-A. 3-B. 4-B. 5-B. 6-A. 7-A. 8-A. 9-A. 10- A. I'll explain later).  Did you catch Stephen Fry on Radio 2 recently, talking about words? He’s something of an expert having worked on a series of programmes about plain English. His main point this time was that, unlike more regimented languages, English is constantly evolving, to embrace how people actually use words. I hadn’t really thought about it, that dictionaries record usage rather than dictating the rules. What a great example of honouring creativity! How sensible! Fry pointed out this aspect of our beautiful language, when he was asked if he really was the creator of the term ‘luvvie’ for an actor sort of person. The OED lists him as the first person to use the word.  Fry quoted another example of his creating a word that has entered common usage, with his friend Hugh Laurie. The word was ‘spoffle’, to described the muffler spongy bit which is placed on the end of a microphone during recording. He...

Writing takes up so much time, doesn’t it? You spend hours creating your novel, then, unless you’re a best seller, you wait months for a publisher’s decision. Even if you catch the editor’s interest, you still have to wait for the marketing department to say ‘Yes!’  I’ve never been good at waiting, nor taking publishers’ advice: ‘Write something else,’ ‘Get on with the next thing’, ‘Plan your next novel!’  All very well, but it all takes so much TIME! And there are no guarantees. For every novel I’ve had accepted, I’ve had another turned down. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. So much time wasted on more piles of paper, abandoned, left to languish dustily on the shelf.      Does anyone write only for the love of it, content to write without ever being read? Can writers actually exist without readers? I don’t think so. The thrill for me has always been that someone has read and enjoyed my writing. It’s about contact, isn’t it? Communication. To e...