Authors Electric

  As writers, we’re all different, and thank heavens for that. Some of us are planners, with notebooks full of plot development, story arcs and carefully researched facts, distilling each precious drop into our literary efforts. Others (and I include myself in this category, at least most of the time) are pantsers, seizing at random facts (Colchester’s Dutch Quarter is so-called because the inhabitants called anyone foreign “Dutch”, even Flemish refugees fleeing Catholic persecution).   So, let’s start with the Dutch Quarter, or at least what it represents. I’m fortunate enough to be paid for using both sides of my writer’s brain, factual and creative, spending much of my week writing for freelance clients, and the rest of it marketing my first novel and writing my second.   One of my clients is an exclusive estate agent, covering East Anglia and a little further beyond. They came up with the rather splendid wheeze of hiring a team of freelance writers (me included) t...

  Hello! We haven’t met, so I thought I’d kick things off by telling you five facts about me. Like an ice breaker. As if we were all together at a party. Remember those? I hate fresh tomatoes with a passion. I once found myself at a dinner party faced with a vast slice of the said fruit prettily sprinkled with fresh herbs. Rejecting it was out of the question, so I cut it into four and washed each chunk down, unchewed, with gulps of white wine. Bill Bailey called my baby cute (he was, too). I can recite all the books of the New Testament in order. Just sayin’. My fifteen times great grandfather was the Bishop of Gloucester, burned at the stake by Mary Tudor. I once won a Walnut Whip eating competition (it was a grudge match back in my carefree twenties). Now we’re acquainted, let’s go! I’ve been a freelance writer for nearly thirteen years, an obsessive and voracious reader all my life and a novelist since I wrote my first work of fiction last year in lock down. That book, th...