Authors Electric

Two months ago I wrote about getting my first book published and the experience that led up to it.   Last month I wrote about winning the Smarties Book Prize.  Now I want to write about what happened after that. I remember having supper not long afterwards with Jenny Nimmo, a fellow Smarties winner – and Carnegie winner too – and her husband David Millward, with whom my family and I have spent many a happy New Year’s Eve.  I was inclined to brush off the Smarties, thinking it would soon be like yesterday’s news, quickly forgotten and quickly over. But not so, Jenny said. ‘lt’s your CV. It will remain with you forever,’ she said. And she’s been right. After winning a major book prize, finding publishers for your books is easy. Once they were like gold dust.  Now suddenly they’re all over you. And agents.  I’ve had two.  The first brought me disappointment, and that’s all I’m going to say.  The second, however, has been the sort of a...

It's a biliously grey November day, rain falling softly all morning (tolerable) and then working itself up to an undramatically dreary all-afternoon downpour - yellowish-grey sky with no hope on the horizon. It was during weather like this that I began work, many years ago, on TO SUMMON A SPIRIT - wading past soggy leaves drained of their Autumn colours, and watching the kids from the nearby secondary school waiting, in a damp and morose huddle, outside the newsagent's shop to buy their after-school treats ( only one customer at a time please... ) As in Pauline Fisk's recent fascinating blog on AuthorsElectric about her Young Adult novel 'TELLING THE SEA', weather and the landscape are great incubators of stories. Pauline's comments on re-publishing her previously published and well-reviewed novel were interesting, too, because we writers never really let go of our work - we're always polishing and improving, even after we're 'out there', which...

'Telling the Sea' by Pauline Fisk Three weeks ago I went down to Pembrokeshire complete with film crew to make a film about my writing life in general, and one book in particular – ‘Telling the Sea.’ We moved into the same cottage in which the book was set, and spent two and a half days filming it and its surroundings, which included  boggy marshland, pot-holed tracks, muddy cliff-paths and beaches that might be fabulous in the summer - and relatively easy to pick a way down to - but were perilously inaccessible in November at the end of a rainy summer.  Even so, we managed to get down to them [though it has to be admitted that the film crew weren’t quite as healthy by the end of the shoot as they were when it began] and the results were worth it.  Looking at the footage afterwards, I was thrilled by the view it presented of a wild and rugged coastline faced with remorselessly grey days - which is exactly how Nona, the heroine of ‘Telling the Sea’, experienced ...

I usually take it to the wire when it comes to writing Authors Electric posts.   The closer to the twenty-first of each month it gets, the fresher and more immediate I reckon my post will be. Last month, however, I was hiking in Canada’s Algonquin National Park on the designated date and - surprise, surprise - failed to find a nearby McDonalds or service station with internet connection in order to post my piece, which I feel is still worth reading so, with a few slight updates, here it is now. It’s on the subject on the life and times of Arthur Granville Bradley, a writer none of you, I confidently predict, will ever have heard of unless you’ve read about him on my website. An author who, you may well think - given that he was born in 1850 - has nothing to contribute to any debate on electronic books.   But read on.   A.G. Bradley was an historian and a travel writer in similar vein to George Borrow, though I personally prefer his style and scope of inte...