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The Sterkarm Handshake     How did you get the idea for the Sterkarms?  I had no idea of writing anything remotely like it. Then I went on a walking holiday in the Scottish Borders. The guides kept saying, 'This is an old Reiver's trail,' or pointing to a tower and saying, 'That's an old Reiver's tower.' I was intrigued and bought George MacDonald Fraser's book, THE STEEL BONNETS , read it, and was absolutely fascinated. I got that feeling - 'I want to write about these people!'  The obvious thing was to write an historical novel, set in the reivers' time, but my gut-feeling said no to that. I felt that the present day had to be in the book too. So I played about with various ways of transferring characters from one time to another - the knock on the head and waking up in another century, the mystical time-slip, the dream. None of these ideas satisfied me. They all seemed too fussy, and all would involve the ...

The Sterkarm Handshake - Susan Price Thanks to Theresa May and her cronies, there will soon be a great revival in cooking cheap and nutritious meals, possibly over open fires of hedgerow twigs and dried dung. So I present some useful recipes from the Sterkarm cook-book. Groats.     Take two and three quarter cups of sour cream, and simmer in a closed pan for about fifteen minutes. Maybe you have some sour cream because the electricity is off again. If you haven't, milk or half water and half milk will do. While your cream is simmering, take one and a quarter cups  of oat-flour.  This can be pin-head oatmeal, or porridge oats ground very fine.        Sieve about a third of the flour into the cream and continue simmering until the butter-fat begins to separate.  Skim off the fat, and save it in a bowl.          ...

Ocean surface wave. Jon Sullivan. I read a few ‘how-to write’ books when younger but as I remember, they concentrated mostly on how to lay out your book and how best to approach publishers. Apart from that, they directed you back to good writers with the instruction to pay attention to the way, for instance, dialogue was used to tell the story and reinforce character. These peeled back the Art a little, so you could take a look at the hidden art. Some things I’ve seen lately differ from this in that they seem to be trying to provide a formula or recipe for writing a story or novel. Write so many words, make chapters so long, put in so much description, add a certain mix of characters… O.C.E.A.N, for instance. It stands for:—  Openness — Conscientiousness — Extraversion — Agreeableness — Neuroticism  It began as a a tool used by psychologists to assess patients but has been co-opted by writers to help them build and understand character. Each of these qualities...

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price The first reviews I ever had were for a radio play, and it was a salutary experience. At twenty-eight my self-confidence was not of the highest order, and the column and a half of invective I had in the Times was devastating. Fortunately I had a middling review from The Guardian , and a brilliant one from the Financial Times , otherwise I might have stopped writing altogether, like someone I knew who never picked up a pen again. Rule one for a writer: develop a thick skin. It was good training for online reviews, though, although how objective I manage to be is another matter. I had two kids conducting an online battle for their favourite books, and rubbishing the opposing one. This can seriously affect your ranking. You also get reviews by people who clearly haven’t read it, and say something totally untrue. The one that most annoyed me was when someone complained of a blatant coincidence, and said that two people had “just happened to meet by ac...

Twenty years ago - yes, it was twenty years ago, though it doesn't The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price: Scholastic seem possible - I went on holiday in Northumberland, walked along Hadrian's Wall and bought MacDonald Fraser's book, The Steel Bonnets , about the riding families, or reivers, of the Scottish Borders.      As a result, I wrote The Sterkarm Handshake - which tells how a 21st Century multi-national company, FUP, develops a time-machine, and travels back 500 years, to the early 16th Century, in order to exploit the fossil fuels. They intend to bring the coal, oil and gas back through the time tube to their own time, and sell it at huge profit.       They come into conflict with the natives, the Sterkarm family. Windsor, the 21st Century executive,  makes the mistake of dismissing them as 'peasants armed with sticks.' The 'sticks' are longbows and eight-foot lances and the Sterkarms - shrewd, quick and bolshy to the bo...