Authors Electric

I thought of calling this blog ‘Unusual sexual encounters’ to try to attract a few more punters, but on reflection…  It’s really about trying to capture a time in a particular place/ landscape. The idea was triggered by a recent challenge from the Hedgehog Press. They send out one a month and I usually manage a response, although I’ve never even been shortlisted for publication. Heigh ho. It just helps to have a nudge to my post-covid brain. I’ve written before about being inspired by landscapes, but the challenge gave me a different perspective – not so much inspiration as need to capture something   of the essence of that place, that time. Something to look back on, to invoke the same feelings as were felt then. If I had an ounce of artistic talent, I might have made a sketch – livelier and more personal than a photograph and from my own hand, but I have only words. The image from the Hedgehog Press’s challenge is of a dreary, grubby corridor reminiscent of a disused psych...

After watching the last episode of Line of Duty, when I think I forgot to breathe much of the time, I needed something to read in bed that would let me cool down and get to sleep. In the pile of re-reads by my bed is Jill Paton-Walsh’s The Serpentine Cave. Perfect.  As you’d expect, it’s beautifully written and beautifully crafted, a story of a mistaken episode in childhood and a search for a missing piece of identity – and it’s set in Cornwall, which is a plus for me. My Grandmother, Little Nan (so-called to distinguish her from Big Gran, my Great-grandmother) was as Cornish as cream.   Mar’Ellen Harvey from St Just in Penwith. She was from a poor family (tin-miners?) and was born in the workhouse at Madron. She’d had pernicious anaemia as a child and had lost all her teeth to gingivitis by the time she was fourteen. She was ‘taken up’ by a couple of early property developers she worked for, and went with them when they left St Just – a scandal still talked of...

We are moving towards the year’s turning. Time to look back – and forward. I don’t want to dwell on world events in 2016 or I might sink into irrecoverable gloom, so I’ll keep it personal and writing-focussed.      I’m still surprised to find that Including my first, Tattybogle, I’ve written 14 picture books and 7 storybooks. That’s over 21 years, though, so not exactly a fast production line. It’s been a lot of fun, with occasional bumps along the way.      The first (bump) was the icy reception by the Andersen Press team at the Carnegie/Greenaway awards, when Tattybogle was shortlisted. By the most incredible and unfortunate coincidence, another Sandra Horn had just produced a book. Andersen   had an option on my next book and they thought I had violated it. I had no idea what they were talking about until I went into Waterstones and saw ‘Kofi and the Butterflies’ by Sandra Horn. A lovely story, although not one I would have written...