Authors Electric

Lunna House, Shetland, overlooking the anchorage This week began 9 days ago. I was self-isolating, having tested positive a couple of days before, and I’d just made the terrible mistake of saying aloud to Francis how conducive I hoped this was going to be to a quiet spell of writing. I’d been playing my usual game of not exactly mentioning the current project, clocking up a few hundred words here and there and hoping they would turn into something. They’d crawled nicely past the 30,000 sticky point and my characters had anchored in the evocative West Lunna Voe in Shetland. They and I were both eager to know what would happen to them next. A spell of enforced seclusion seemed the ideal opportunity to find out. What actually happened was a message from Delyth, a dedicated, passionate, dementia nurse in Wales introducing Liz Saville Roberts MP who was offering to support the John's Campaign on-going struggle for the rights of people in hospitals and care homes to maintain their rela...

  The broch of Mousa: by kind permission of David Simpson. A bit of a departure, this month. Instead of a blog about writing, a broch blog. Brochs fascinate me, partly because no one knows who built them, or why or what they were for. And where no one knows, that's where the writer gets in. Mousa is a small island off the coast of mainland Shetland with a Norse name. The 'a' at the end, as in many British place-names, means 'island.' 'Mous' means 'mossy.' The 'Mousa boat' ferries you across to the mossy island. It's a nature reserve now, and well worth visiting for the birds and seals alone. But what I wanted to see -- what I'd wanted to see for years -- was already ancient when the Vikings called the island mossy. The Broch of Mousa. It did not disappoint. The first glimpse of the broch is a striking: a monumental tower, against sky and sea, its walls gently curving like those of a modern cooling tower. Towers in the North by Armit A...

Me at Eshaness, Shetland Literary festivals aplenty both hither and yon have been honoured with my presence and performance, among them several Crime Festivals. The venues for these are becoming more and more atmospheric Noir-wise, especially with the burgeoning popularity of Scandi Noir. Last November, I was at Iceland Noir, snowmobiling on a glacier, enjoying the spectacular landscape in the four-ish hours of almost-daylight, and meeting some luminaries of Icelandic crime fiction, some of whom are now translated into English. This November, I again headed North, to Shetland for the eponymous Noir instigated by Ann Cleeves who has a series of novels based there, now on TV. View from my hotel bathroom... View from my hotel bedroom... bit wet out there. The festival got off to a thrilling start, with storm Abigail throwing our tiny planes with their cute little propellers all over the sky, until they stopped flying altogether (perhaps the rubber bands got tangled inside)....