Authors Electric

 Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I can guess what you’re thinking. There is no such thing as a reading/writing season. We read and/or write all year around, right? True but do you find there are certain times of year when you read certain types of book? Or you write certain types of story in the winter as opposed to the summer?   I love reading humorous works throughout the year but I read more during the autumn and winter months. If you don’t need cheery reading then, when would you? I usually find I write more humorous flash fiction during this period too.  I write festive flash fiction, which is cheery by its nature, so have often written some during the autumn and submitted it somewhere in the run up to that word beginning with C we won’t mention yet because it is far too early to do so. (Supermarkets, please note). My TBR pile has a good old mix in it, which is how I like it, and this is consistent all year but the funny books ...

'Telling Tales' by Susan Price I was on the track down of an elusive and prolific beast -- one that's common but camouflages itself so well that you can be staring right at it and not see it. I knew that no matter how dedicatedly I hunted it, no matter how many hours or days I spent on the trail, I would miss many of the pestiferous things. So I asked my friend, Karen Bush,   an ex of this blog, to help and she bagged quite a few of the critters, having an expert eye for them. Using Karen's spotter notes, I culled all she discovered – but in the process found a whole lot more of the pests. They breed, I think, as soon as you turn a page. Because I'm talking about typos, of course. I've been proof-reading my latest self-published book, Telling Tales.   There are several breeds of typo. They can be mistaken spellings. I know to be wary of any word containing 'ie' or, indeed, 'ei' because I seem incapable of learning which way round they go in any...

 Hi, I thought for my first post here I’d share some of my life changing books. They all show the power of stories! The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey Tey’s Inspector Grant is confined to a hospital bed after  a nasty fall (and it was set some time ago! They’d have him on his feet and out now!). Grant is renowned amongst his colleagues for having an eye for criminal faces and he is brought a picture of someone he discovers is Richard III.  The only thing Grant knows is what everyone thinks - Richard killed The Princes in the Tower to take the throne. Grant decides, with the help of a research assistant going to the British Library for him, to investigate. Whatever your views on Richard III, this is a great detective story. (Colin Dexter uses the same  premise when his Inspector Morse is confined to hospital - see The Wench Is Dead ).  The book made me change my views on Richard III. It is renowned for being the catalyst for many joining the Richard III Societ...

One of many           I’m currently re-reading Julian May’s Galactic Milieu and Pliocene trilogies: as I finished one and scanned the shelves searching for the next volume, I noticed that a lot of my books are serials or series.           My serial addiction probably started with Winnie the Pooh, before moving on to The Dark is Rising sequence and the Earthsea books via the Narnia chronicles, Swallows and Amazons, The Minnipins, Paddington Bear and Mrs Pepperpot ...           As I got older I moved onto Asimov’s Foundation, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion in his many guises, Don Camillo, the world of Vanyel Askevron, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, Robin Hobb’s trilogy of trilogies featuring Fitz and Liveships (and she’s now three books into a quadrilogy set in the Rain Wilds), Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum,  and I’m heavily addicted to Alexand...