Authors Electric

One of our founder-members is Pauline Fisk. who died in January after a short illness. Today - 3rd February 2015 - her family and close friends will be mourning her passing and celebrating her life. We at AuthorsElectric remember her and honour her memory by reposting one of her blogs from 2013: I’m not going to recommend my first book to you because it wasn’t very good.    However it was published, and from that day to this I’ve called myself a writer.   I'm now the author of eleven novels and much else besides.  In recent years I've become an ebook author too.    But back in 1970, this is how it all began: Dave and I had been saving like crazy to take a few months off work and devote ourselves to painting on his count, and writing on mine.    We’d found a ruined cottage on a hillside overlooking the Teme Valley and persuaded the farmer who owned it to give us a summer let.    Here, with our own damson orchard and a vi...

Yet another long, warm summer evening and I was in the Dog & Pheasant in Shrewsbury talking publishing to Susan Caroline of Pengwern Books. Our much-loved local indie bookshop has had a checkered life since opening in Fish Street in 2003, and so has Susan.  Her doggedness is astonishing. Keeping in business in the current book-selling climate has taken a lot of ducking and diving. Pengwern Books has had a variety of homes, not least of which has been to the immediate right of the altar in St Alkmund’s Church, courtesy of vicar and PCC - which proved a real refuge when it looked as though Shrewsbury’s only independent contemporary book shop might go down. Nowadays, however, Pengwern Books is thriving in Shrewsbury’s indoor market, a central part of its current renaissance, situated next to Julia Wenlock’s chocolate shop and a stone’s throw from the delightfully quirky Bird’s Nest café.   Susan talked to me about that move, and about her life-long love of boo...

Last month I wrote about the sweet success of having a first book published.   This time I’m moving on the story by fifteen years.   During those years, as befit a child of the sixties, I did the hippie thing, moved to the countryside from the city, grew vegetables [not very well], baked bread in a solid fuel stove, collected cats and dogs – and five children.   I also taught myself to weave, and made cloth, wall-hangings and rugs. Then suddenly I found myself heading for my forties, the mother of five children under the age of eleven, including a new baby. And despite all my busyness, an overwhelming sense of emptiness settled like fog upon my life.   Who was I really?   Was I the person I seemed to be, or someone else? Where was I going?   Where was the person I used to be? That little girl once called Pauline Fisk who had so longed to be a writer when she grew up – where was she? For more than a decade, Dave and I had lived in a cottage in ...

I’m not going to recommend my first book to you because it wasn’t very good.   However it was published, and from that day to this I’ve called myself a writer.   I'm now the author of eleven novels and much else besides.  In recent years I've become an ebook author too.   But back in 1970, this is how it all began: Dave and I had been saving like crazy to take a few months off work and devote ourselves to painting on his count, and writing on mine.   We’d found a ruined cottage on a hillside overlooking the Teme Valley and persuaded the farmer who owned it to give us a summer let.   Here, with our own damson orchard and a view across half of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire [but no running water, electricity or loo] we hoped to create those works of art and literature that would launch our careers. The cottage was called Brick Barns.   It was one of those treasures of English vernacular architecture that you w...