Authors Electric

The UK government is currently pushing ahead with a policy to give staff the right to switch off outside normal working hours. Whether you agree with this policy or not, I believe it addresses a much bigger issue that is slowly but surely imprisoning us all in a virtual world of artificial intelligence. There is a general assumption, especially among the internet generation, that we are all online 24/7, ready to dance to someone else's tune at a moment's notice, with no real life of our own. Whether we are having 'fun' online, or we're there for 'work' - and I use those terms loosely, since they are not separate entities - we are still in danger of becoming slaves to the machine. Jaron Lanier's 2018 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now  explains in frighteningly clear terms the ways in which these platforms are manipulating our behaviour and changing us as human beings. When you consider he published this book before the...

photo by WanderingMogwai (wikipedia, CC) It's butterfly season in the UK. Yes, I know... torrential rain as usual! But on sunny days they will be back on the butterfly bushes in search of food. I've always preferred to call them flutterbys, which makes more sense when you watch one flutter past - or should that be flutterbies? Never mind. It is apparently a myth that 'flutterby' was the original name for a butterfly! But why 'butterfly' as a common name? One explanation could be that when Dutch scientists were studying butterflies in the early days they thought the yellow droppings looked like butter, so they named the insects 'butterfly'. In old Dutch, that's apparently what it means... boterschijte ... butter-pooer. Another explanation knocking around the internet is that they were named after the colour of their wings, which in some species is buttery-yellow, although I think that's unlikely since there are plenty of other colours more commonl...

My magical cover quest for  Spellfall began back in 2000. In those days, publishers took care of everything except the writing. They took my manuscript (this book was originally written on a typewriter!), edited it, proofread, formatted, typeset, commissioned the artwork for the cover and sent the resulting book to the printer. They also did most of the publicity, secured reviews and started my book on its journey from warehouse to bookshop, where it could make its way into the hands of my eager readers... provided they liked the cover. Because, no matter how brilliant your story or your editor or your publicist, most of your wonderful words remain hidden inside that cover, and somehow you have to persuade a potential reader to pick your book (from among the hundreds on offer) and open it to see what lies within. I loved my publisher's first cover for Spellfall, and thankfully so did my readers because the hardcover sold out and the paperback went on to sell well, too. SPELLFALL (...

Maybe it's a post-pandemic desire for escape from my own four walls, but I find myself increasingly drawn to TV series such as Kate Humble's Escape to the Farm,  and Ben Fogle's  New Lives in the Wild.  These series build on the formula of old favourites like Escape to the Country , where home buyers (with normally healthy budgets) seek an idyllic country pile as an antidote to urban living. But they go a step further, in that they feature a whole lifestyle change that ties in with a desire to protect the planet and its wildlife, and the people featured are not always those you would expect. I was particularly fascinated by a recent New Lives in the Wild episode, where presenter Ben Fogle stays with Lynx, who once lived alone with only Stone Age technology, and is currently setting up a community project to "rewild" humans called Lithica. https://lithica-rewilding-humans.org/ The aim of this project seems to be to secure large areas with natural resources where p...

 'Tis the season of witches and wizards, spells and pumpkins... hopefully, everyone will be able to get out at Halloween to enjoy some trick-and-treating this year, too! The trees are turning gold, and the world does seem just a little bit more magical at this time of year. There might be a good reason for that enchanted feeling. Did you know that trees can communicate underground via their roots, and will even send help if one of their number needs nourishment or is threatened? This is known as the Wood Wide Web  and was the concept behind my 2000 novel SPELLFALL, where the trees in my parallel world of Earthaven are gigantic soultrees that bear magical fruit and seeds. Spellfall (first US edition) Their root system acts rather like the London Underground, and it's possible to travel around it in living capsules, operated by the trees themselves, known as 'organazoomers'. The soultrees and the Spell Lords who look after them can also use this root system to communicate...

As a fifty-something female, I'm feeling anxious about the UK's r apidly rising pension age  and have been turning my attention to other forms of income to get me through what looks to be a rather alarming financial hole (in my case seven years between 60 and 67 - though I'm not holding my breath). I've considered several options that might fill this hole. Go back to riding racehorses (I doubt I could still jump back on a fidgety youngster if I fell off in the middle of a field). Retrain for a completely different career with a proper pension scheme, like a clever friend who is doing a law degree in her fifties (might be useful for chasing publishers who default on contracts). Dust off my melodeon and try busking on the street corner (quite a decent hourly rate, actually, but my fingers get cold and I can only remember about three tunes). Sign up for the new Universal Credit (many writers do not qualify because they do not earn the 'minimum income floor' each...

Karla Brading One of the best things about writing books for young readers is when a fan of your work starts writing books as well. From her very first letter to me, after she'd enjoyed my fantasy novel Spellfall , I knew Karla Brading was a born writer, possibly even a fellow fantasy author. Many letter exchanges later (and I mean real letters, written by hand on paper and posted into one of those shiny red letterboxes you see dotted around the place), and it became obvious she was highly creative too. Then one day a package dropped through my letterbox containing Karla's first novel. A vampire book, as I remember - it still sits proudly on my shelf among my signed copies. A few more years passed, and Karla now has a book deal with the highly-respected Welsh press Gomer for her latest novel  The Inn of Waking Shadows, which I had the privilege of reading at proof stage on my Kindle. This one is a ghost story for teens set in a haunted pub in Wales, and it'll send...

January Blues in my 'rich and famous' author days. January always seems the wrong time of the year for making resolutions, let alone keeping them. It's dark, it's cold, it's usually wet. Christmas has been and gone, and drained the bank account on its way out. The pretty lights and baubles have been packed away in the loft. All I really want to do is curl up in bed under the duvet with the cat and emerge sometime around April, when the spring flowers are in bloom, or perhaps take off skiing in the Alps like I used to do back in the heady days when my books were in the shops, before Brexit fears messed with the exchange rates. But since this is my posting day, and I'm only dreaming of the Alps this year, I've emerged from hibernation for a few hours to tell you about my 2017 resolutions. Or three of them, anyway. Resolution One I 'closed' my personal blog  Reclusive Muse  at the end of December (you can still read the posts, but you can't...

Today is the winter solstice - the shortest day of the year for those of us who live the northern hemisphere - a time for reflection, fire ceremonies involving holly and mistletoe, and other pagan traditions now more commonly associated with Christmas. However you celebrate this time of year, it is also when newspapers start printing their 'best of year' lists. Not to be outdone, here is my author 'best of' 2016 (which might seem small and insignificant compared to everyone else's multi-book advances from major publishers, no. 1 best-selling supermarket titles, and research trips around the world on elephant-back, but then I am only 5' 4"). Empire of the Hare 1. Inspired by Brexit, I have republished my Library of Avalon Geoffrey Ashe Prize shortlisted story about Queen Boudicca's rebellion Empire of the Hare on my signature list for older readers. The publishing process took 12 hours rather than 12 months so if you're curious to know what B...