Authors Electric

 Hi, I thought for my first post here I’d share some of my life changing books. They all show the power of stories! The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey Tey’s Inspector Grant is confined to a hospital bed after  a nasty fall (and it was set some time ago! They’d have him on his feet and out now!). Grant is renowned amongst his colleagues for having an eye for criminal faces and he is brought a picture of someone he discovers is Richard III.  The only thing Grant knows is what everyone thinks - Richard killed The Princes in the Tower to take the throne. Grant decides, with the help of a research assistant going to the British Library for him, to investigate. Whatever your views on Richard III, this is a great detective story. (Colin Dexter uses the same  premise when his Inspector Morse is confined to hospital - see The Wench Is Dead ).  The book made me change my views on Richard III. It is renowned for being the catalyst for many joining the Richard III Societ...

The original blurb, for a short book by Gelert Burgess. Although it's also claimed that the Germans had already invented it four years earlier - Karl Robert Langewiesche being the creator ...            Okay, so you have a fabulously eye catching cover image and the title you've chosen couldn't be more perfect ... but don't forget the blurb for your masterpiece. That's pretty important too. It may only be a few hundred words or so, but often it can be harder to write than the book itself.           It has to encapsulate what the book is about, and make your potential reader want to download a sample - after which they will hopefully be hooked and buy the book. If it's factual, it needs to outline the information contained within. Bullet points are helpful in creating a list - as well as a bit of text explaining just why your book is so brilliant, a list will be easier for the...

Six Eyes, Eight Legs, One Sword Mirkwood was murky as murky could be Murk lurked in each glade and each glum shrubbery With cobwebs and shlob-webs that swagged every tree In loomings and gloomings of dark sorcery. No sunbeam could slip through those corpsickly pines No glow could untangle the strangulous vines There wasn’t a glimmer! There wasn’t a glim! Oh, never had Bilbo seen forest so dim. The dwarves all were grumbly with rumbling tums For most of their food was now chowed down to crumbs. The hobbit was famished with ravenous fam Their poultry was paltry, they’d finished the ham. They tried shooting squirrels as black as coal tar But which tasted the same, and one doesn’t go far. Those thirteen-plus-one had no lunch, not the least – When suddenly – wondrously! – there lay a feast! A shizzling of torches blazed out of the wood Which moments ago had been black, and a good Smell of cooking, and singing! came winging this way And “We’ll...

Last month I wrote about the sweet success of having a first book published.   This time I’m moving on the story by fifteen years.   During those years, as befit a child of the sixties, I did the hippie thing, moved to the countryside from the city, grew vegetables [not very well], baked bread in a solid fuel stove, collected cats and dogs – and five children.   I also taught myself to weave, and made cloth, wall-hangings and rugs. Then suddenly I found myself heading for my forties, the mother of five children under the age of eleven, including a new baby. And despite all my busyness, an overwhelming sense of emptiness settled like fog upon my life.   Who was I really?   Was I the person I seemed to be, or someone else? Where was I going?   Where was the person I used to be? That little girl once called Pauline Fisk who had so longed to be a writer when she grew up – where was she? For more than a decade, Dave and I had lived in a cottage in ...

Does my bum look big on this? And do you really care? How much information do you really need - or want - about an author? When I was much younger, if I'd just finished a really good book, all I really wanted to know was whether the author had written any more, so a list of titles was all I wanted. Sometimes though, reluctant to put the book down, I'd read the bit of bumph about the author found at the front of the book in paperbacks, and on the dustjacket if it was a hardback still in possession of one. Occasionally it offered tantalising little snippets of information: my Narnia books informed me that the young Clive had lived in Belfast (where I was living at the time, instantly making me feel there was a special bond between us) and had decided to write the sort of books which he would have liked to read when he was young. I learned that Gillian Baxter, who wrote some brilliant pony stories, had written - and got published - her first novel when she was fifteen; there'...