Authors Electric

  Puma Three and a half years ago I had two cataract operations. I wasn’t happy with the first one, but was told I was worrying about nothing, it would resolve itself in a few weeks,  so I went ahead with the second op on the right eye, which was fine. My left eyelid was drooping, and cutting out light, which meant I could only read on a Kindle as I could alter the brightness and the size of the font. You can’t enlarge illustrations, or tables, or maps, which becomes increasingly frustrating and has a real impact on your understanding of certain books. My optician diagnosed ptosis, but warned me that consultants do not listen to opticians. How true that became. commissioned illustration for playing cards, that never went on sale Consultant after consultant told me I was imagining my poor vision, as if I forced my eye as open as wide as possible I could see perfectly well. Keeping it open was a different matter altogether. The worst response of all was from a consultant renowne...

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...

          Parody is enormous fun, and I teach a class on how to write it each term in my creative writing courses Malden Centre and Surrey Hills Onward Learning   because the students enjoy it so much. It doesn't seem as daunting as starting something from scratch. It’s actually a very good way of finding out about other writers’ styles, although you have to choose someone with a distinctive voice. Hemingway is an excellent subject, with his absence of adverbs, and reasonably easy to do as a consequence. Chandler and Spillane are good targets as well. Probably the most famous parody of all is Cold Comfort Farm , by Stella Gibbons, which took the mickey out of the accounts of rural life by writers such as Mary Webb, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, concentrating on sexual undercurrents, muddy fields and inheritances. This is one of my favourite passages: …He looked up as Judith entered, and gave a short, defiant lau...

There are lots of reasons for re-illustrating a previously published book when you’re converting it for the Kindle. The originals, drawn by someone else, may not have been to your liking. It may simply be a matter of style – or the illustrator may have got some things fundamentally wrong, like the age of the protagonists, or whether one of your fantasy creatures has wings/horns/sharp pointy teeth. The best illustrations I have ever been sent were those of Miho Sataki, in the Japanese editions of The Divide , who read everything so carefully that each tiny detail was absolutely accurate. Her sense of design was wonderful, too. If the book was first published some time ago the drawings may be out of date; the shoebox-sized mobile phone of 1995 bears no resemblance to the smart phones in use today. There’s also the question of royalties – this way, you avoid those complexities altogether. The actual mechanics are remarkably easy. Make sure your illustration is a jpeg, and cent...