Authors Electric

  Apologies for contacting you when we have never met or been in touch before. I am trying to trace a Julia Jones who lived in Writtle as a child, and wondered if this might be you? I run a removals and clearance company and have this week been clearing the property of a book publisher called Arne Soova. Within the contents, I came across a portrait sketch by Brenda Moore and on the back of the frame is written “Julia Jones as a child…[something beginning with N] Hall, Writtle, Essex”. Apologies if this is not you but if it is, I am just really interested in the story behind the portrait and would love to know more. I can also send a picture of the portrait if you wished. This unexpected email came from Alexa MacDonald and her husband Johnney, whose removals and clearance company is in Newmarket, Suffolk.   When a house is almost empty, Alexa explained that they often find some remaining letters, photos, small items which seem likely to have a personal significance to someo...

  last book Next month I publish the final volume in the Strong Winds series. It’s called Voyage North,  It’s number 7 and it’s been a long time coming.  At the end of Pebble , the sixth volume in the series, Donny the  central character took a reckless decision to leave school, abandon his beautiful junk Strong Winds , fail to say goodbye to his mother and head north with a couple of dodgy Russians on a superyacht. Well, that was back in 2018 and, as you can imagine, I’ve been worrying about him ever since.... Why worry? Why not get on and write the next story, you might reasonably ask. What use was lockdown except to get everyone  completing projects that had lain forgotten for decades? What could be more enjoyable than to stow away on the former Soviet spy ship MY (Motor Yacht) Raisa , now a luxury, automated, expedition vessel and discover what’s really going on between the morally suspect oligarch Arkady Ivanov and the carefully un-named Russian Presiden...

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 stepmother in Pebble is not a bad person. Her name is Lottie Livesey.  She’s sensitive and caring (if occasionally a little too determined to do what she believes to be right) and there is never any doubt that she loves her stepsons (Luke and Liam) just as much as she loves her daughters (Anna and Vicky). She’s also far too principled and clear-thinking to allow her deteriorating relationship with their father to lessen her concern for his boys. So, how to get her off the stage and allow them the freedom to get into jeopardy? The solution seemed delightfully simple…put her on it.  Lottie is a folk-singer whose career is beginning to take wings. In The Lion of Sole Bay I dispatched her to a recording studio in Italy to make her breakthrough album. I thought she’d earned a holiday after her grim time as an invisible, illegal, worker in the early volumes, living  in a shipping container somewhere half-finished in the Ipswich docklands. Three of the four chil...

Ben Tucker's Snow Petrel Three years ago, almost to the day, I opened my AE blogpost as if I was in Antarctica :  So, here I am in Boat Harbour, Cape Denison with five shore lines attached and the anchor down with 60 metres of chain.  It’s the windiest place on earth but today, miraculously, the sun is out and the water calm. I’m being observed by crowds of Adelie penguins while dark brown Weddell seals lie like slugs on the stained ice.  It’s taken two months to get here – six weeks of frantic, relationship-testing preparation and then two weeks sailing south through the most feared waters in the world. Some readers took me at my word – and, to some extent, they were right, I was in Antarctica, but only in my imagination. My mind and body were elsewhere. Paragraph two began:  Goldenray 2015 It is dark and damp in Suffolk and I should be conserving my torch batteries. It’s four in the morning and I can hear the tide running through the gap in t...

Master Mariner (Cally & Hetty) As a writer of sailing adventures where the main protagonists are older children and young teenagers (with a seasoning of redoubtable geriatrics) I wonder sometimes whether I’m stretching credulity too far as I put them through the trials and tribulations of my somewhat melodramatic plots. It was immensely reassuring therefore to spend a few days in late July at the Cadet World Championships in Bodstedt, Northern Germany in the company of approximately 242 young sailors in my target age group.           The Cadet is a granddaddy of a dinghy. Commissioned by Yachting World magazine from legendary boat builder Jack Holt in 1947 it was a rapid success in the more family-friendly, less class-divided world of postwar Britain and soon went international. As a 1950s child learning to sail in a classic 12’ clinker-built dinghy with plenty of room for Mum or Dad, I looked with awe and envy at my contempor...

Yes, says Claudia Myatt, "being an artist" is a way of viewing the world. Claudia is a marine artist who lives on a Dutch tug and has her studio in a boatyard. She provides illustrations for yachting magazines, drew a major series of instructional books for the RYA (Royal Yachting Association) and it was a happy day for me when she agreed to be the illustrator for m y Strong Winds stories. Because I do not think that anyone can draw boats. In fact I think most people can’t. Not boats in action; boats responding to the pressures of the wind and the resistance of the water; boats at the centre of a complex interplay of forces determined by the shape of their hulls, the set of their sails, the skills of the sailor. One of the children’s books I most enjoyed, years ago, was John Ryan’s The Battle of Bunkum Bay when lovable idiot Captain Pugwash conceived a master plan of sailing into the bay between the English and French fleets (to collect the treasure of course) protec...