Authors Electric

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...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pleasures and pains of handing one’s work over to someone else. I’ve enjoyed writing for performance ever since I was a child. We lived in a cul-de-sac   then, and the blind end had a street lamp over it which made the perfect evening performance space.   I can’t remember much about the scripts, although one play involved costumes made of raffia knotted round string to make ‘hula hula skirts.’ I wrote and directed them and carried on doing that through school, devising my own versions of My Fair Lady, Snow White, and a something Shakespearean with someone playing a recorder, for which I wrote the music. I can’t write music. When the hapless player asked me what key it was in, I said, ‘C’ because it didn’t have sharps or flats (what?) She gave me a funny look. Maybe I had/have a control-freak streak, but I knew how I wanted the parts to be played, my words to be spoken. I've gone on doing it intermittently ever since. Writing f...

A most delightful primary school near Gloucester will be performing Tattybogle the Musical for their Easter show, so they invited me to spend a day with the year 1 and 2 children, reading stories and answering questions. Year 1 had prepared written questions   – very impressive for such small people!   Year 2’s were spontaneous. My favourite was ‘What’s your daddy’s name?’ One smart little girl also worked out how old I was by asking how long ago I’d written Tattybogle and how old I was then. My absolutely top part of the day was a Year 1 written question: when did you becom the Other? It set me thinking about how much of ‘the other’ we are as authors. Are we a breed apart? A series of sub-species, rather, since there are several distinct types of writer? Or, can anyone and everyone write stories? The short answer is, I suppose, yes, anyone can, but whether or not they should, and then put them out for public consumption, is another matter entirely. I’ve been thinking a ...

So, after twelve up-and-down (mostly up) years, the Clucket Press is winding down. This year, we will re-publish The Silkie with beautiful new illustrations by Anne-Marie Perks, using PoD. That will fulfil a promise I made to myself a long time ago. We also plan to bring out Rainbow! A colour-it-yourself picture book with glorious pictures by Bee Willey, and that will be it.   The other surplus books have already gone to Book Aid International and I can now walk round my workroom again. Hooray!  What now, then? Scary freedom... I may have mentioned before (ahem!) that I’ve always had a yen to be a poet. When I did mention it, and my shortcomings, someone responded that they thought poets were born rather than made. Gloom! Was I doomed, then? Wrong genes? Also, I’d once sent a tentative poem to a friend who is a well-known poet and her response was ‘Your gift is other.’ Boo hoo. But lately, thinking about it, what we are born with or without isn’t the be-all and en...