Authors Electric

As I seem to be stuck for ideas this month, I thought I'd post some photos I've taken of places I've been and things I've seen, and link them to particular books I've written. I'm quite a visual person, having gone to art school, and pictures do tend to evoke memories for me, and one idea leads to another... This is the photograph of a feisty eleven-year-old in Mongolia, the best rider I have ever seen, herding her goats. She was the inspiration for a reluctant reader story called Lost in the Desert , about a boot camp for difficult kids. This is the foot of a phorosrachus, an extinct bird that features heavily in Ice Feathers , a book set in prehistoric Antarctica. I saw this in the Tring site of the Natural History Museum. This is the ballroom of a castle in Prague. During the depradations of the Mongols, they took it over and rode their horses in there for war conferences. I mention it in Beware of Men with Moustaches , a story about a poetry group who are in...

Recently, I was having an online argument with someone about the BBC. She wanted to abolish it. I pointed out that it didn’t just put out TV and radio programmes, but for a few measly quid a week there was Cardiff Singer of the Year, Young Musician of the Year, the link with Open University, the emerging artistes programme for singers and musicians, support for choirs, orchestras, and also such public amenities as weather reports, the shipping forecast, education packages for schools…etc. etc. ‘People don’t want that,’ she retorted. Really? Then recently a sound engineer was explaining the difficulty she was in during the covid crisis. She is self-employed, so did qualify for the government’s belated financial help, which included those in the creative industries, who were unable to work at present. Ah, but then she was offered a contract for a theatre job, so effectively stopped being self-employed for the duration. But she had a job anyway, right? Wrong! Theatres were closed. She, ...

These days, most people are familiar with Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s boarding school. The building itself is a castle, and seems to resemble an Oxbridge College or public school more than anything, if its dining hall and common rooms are anything to go by. Of course, there are magical additions which make it all the more appealing, such as staircases that change position, and invisible rooms. We can’t invent something from nothing, so we have to have a starting point. Castles are particular favourites in fantasy land, and C.S Lewis used them a lot. Cair Paravel is all that is good about a building like this, colourful and full of feasting and tapestries and golden goblets. The domain of the White Witch, with its stone statues in the courtyard created from living beings and a gateway guarded by wolves, is cold and grey and all that is bad. Harfang, inhabited by giants in The Silver Chair , gives a child’s view of a medieval castle, seen from the perspective of someone very small. The h...

When I look back over the blogs I've written here, it seems that a great number are devoted to telling you what we did on our holidays. Well, I'm sorry about that, but not unrepentant because every visit seems to bring a new insight, a shock which uncovers something I'd never considered before, so that the latest decade of my life seems to have taught me more than all the previous decades put together. Looking back on them after coming home in the small hours of this Friday morning, I  saw that our three days in Prague had carried the process further. Prague is a stunning city. The Charles bridge at night. The castle and St Vitus Cathedral in the distance.  That's enough  travelogue!  These were three days of discovery and unexpected epiphanies. The first discovery was the sculpture in the courtyard of the Franz Kafka Museum. It's by David Cerny (you may remember 'Booster Bus', the Routemaster doing press-ups which he did for the London Olympics),...