Authors Electric

A LIFETIME BURNING   (Kindle 88p/$0.99) I've just re-published my second novel, A LIFETIME BURNING on Kindle. First published in 2006, it was one of those still-born books torpedoed by its cover and ignored by reviewers, perhaps because it belonged to that non-genre, accessible literary fiction. My publisher had no idea how to market the book (neither did I) and it sank without trace.  Well, not quite.  Readers loved it. (And a few loathed it.) A LIFETIME BURNING has only 5-star reviews on Amazon (twenty-five of them) and over the years its devotees have described themselves as haunted - even disturbed - by the book. A few have complained they were up all night finishing it and one man told me he read all 410 pages in one sitting. I started making notes for A LIFETIME BURNING even before I’d finished my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY . I didn’t have a publisher then. I hadn’t even thought about trying to find one, I was just writing to amuse myself. I'd just ...

Dorothy L Sayers Fabulous and dead "Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.” Dorothy L Sayers.   When ill health forced me to give up teaching some years ago, I used my convalescence to catch up on reading. This was 2000 and bookshops were awash with chick-lit. (Jane Austen and vampires hadn’t yet been discovered by the marketing men.) As I was forty-seven, with only a limited interest in shopping, shoes and handbags, I struggled to find commercial fiction that reflected my taste or even my life. Few novels featured women of my age centre stage. Romantic heroines over forty simply didn’t exist. Mature women appeared only as somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife and they never had sex (unless it was for comic effect.)   LINDA GILLARD Fabulous and 50-something So I gave up looking and decided to write a book for myself, the sort of thing I wanted to read, but couldn’t find: a thinki...

My father, Charles Gillard My father lost his leg at the age of 19 whilst serving in France with the Royal Artillery. His bullet-shattered leg was amputated in a field hospital and he was lucky to be one of the early beneficiaries of penicillin. From an early age, I grew up with tales of horror and heroism told as I sat at my father’s (artificial) knee, but thanks to his macabre Spike Milligan-esque sense of humour, Dad’s war stories were full of black comedy and devoid of self-pity. His own father had come home physically intact from the trenches of WWI, but of his experiences on the Western Front we knew nothing, since he never spoke of them, not even to his wife. So it was possibly on the cards that one day I would write a novel about a soldier. But the aspect of military service I’ve written about is one that, if Dad had understood, he wouldn’t have wanted to discuss. Nor would he have heard it talked about much. Dad might have referred to “shell-shock”, but he wouldn’t hav...

I don't know about you, but I think a protagonist’s first duty is not to be likeable, but fascinating . In my experience, the flawed tend to be more interesting than the flawless, yet in the world of women's commercial fiction, editors seem to be on the look-out for a cross between Pollyanna and Mother Teresa. With sex appeal. Heroines must in addition also be young, pretty and thin because - well, because popular women’s fiction is about the young, pretty and thin. Obviously . Linda Gillard Only mine isn’t. I write about spiky, awkward, real women and most of them aren’t young, pretty or thin, which only compounds their felonies. The heroine of STAR GAZING is middle-aged, widowed and blind and she’s not too happy about any of that. (In fact the Scots hero describes her as "crabbit".) Over the years my heroines’ bolshy behaviour has led to conflict as I’ve resisted attempts made by long-suffering editors to make my female protagonists nicer . It’s not just that...

Author Linda Gillard What do you like to read? Do you like to know exactly what to expect when you open a book? Or do you like to be surprised? Do you stick to favourite authors? Do you read only certain genres or do you like to try something new? The publishing industry is based on guessing what readers like to read. (I say “guessing” because I’m yet to come across any adult fiction publisher who does reader market research, apart from Harlequin, Mills & Boon.) Sales figures show what readers bought, but not what they enjoyed and there’s a difference between the two, as you’ll know if you’ve ever been disappointed by the gap between what a much-hyped book promised to deliver and what actually lay within its pages. I write fiction for a living, so I have more than a passing interest in what readers like to read. Over the years, I’ve found myself at odds with editors over this - which brings me to the thorny question of “genre issues”, a problem that has dogged many an autho...