Authors Electric

My great-aunt Dorothy, and her mother I used to get a lot of fanmail, in the days when the Divide trilogy had just been published, a fantasy aimed primarily at the 10 – 13 age-group, although there was a lot of subtext intended to appeal to the parents... Apart from all the requests to be sent free books, some of them led to real friendships, even transatlantic ones. I am still in touch with the one that said: I bet you don’t get many emails from 26-year old men.           But I can go back a lot further than 2003. The first stories I ever had published were in the Evening News, a newspaper that is now sadly no more. This one was published in June, 1978. I’ll put what I remember of the letter I received after the story. The other amusing this about it is a photograph I discovered after my mother’s death, of my great-aunt Dorothy. She was the nearest I ever had to a grandmother, and she was huge fun.   The old ton-up fossil There wa...