Authors Electric

Here is my annual garden surprise - the poppy we planted years ago, and which, once it's made its grandiose statement, dies back completely to near-invisibility until the following year. This was how it looked last year, but it doesn't look much different now. The difference is in me, because I can't yet risk walking round to the place where it grows in order to photograph it, due to what feels like a never-ending convalescence from ankle replacement surgery back in February. I never expected it to take so long to get back to normality. It was major surgery, so I knew the deal - two weeks in bed with a heavy leg cast, followed by six weeks in a much lighter cast, then the dreaded boot, and then, at last, the thrill of being able to walk to the shops. Yes, the website said it would be a year before things would be really approaching that stage, but I didn't take that too seriously. My health was good, I wasn't sedentary, I ate properly, so hey! after the longest th...

Well, the secret I've had to hold back on for two years is now out, as, if you follow me on Facebook, you'll already know. The modest film deal I've referred to from time to time was based on my first children's novel, THE TIME TREE, published by Walker Books in the early Nineties, and a first for them, too, as it was the first time they'd published a children's novel. The book stayed in print for ages, and seemed to grab people in a very special way. It's a time-slip story - a magical encounter, via an ancient oak tree, between two contemporary eleven year old girls, and a profoundly deaf Elizabethan girl of the same age. It's a book that grabbed a very close friend who works in the media, and who had always seen it as a film (I didn't) so she pushed me into writing a screenplay with a number of plot extensions and developments, which was challenging and exciting. Writing for the screen is SO very different from writing a novel, because the who...

Isn't there something missing? I'm sure most of you reading this will be as relieved as I am that I'm not going to be scratching around for new things to say about Wild Wood. We had a wonderful launch party in the Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road, another in the Albert Club in West Didsbury, and a third last night at the Conservative Club in Uppermill, near Oldham. Now, still slightly hung over from Ma Ferret's Special bitter, I intend to lie back and wait for the money to roll in. In case my fellow authors assume that that is just a normal part of writers' fantasy, let me tell you of something rather wonderful that happened today. I opened a letter and found a cheque from sales of my cut-down and edited version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. (Pleased to see that my voice recognition engine did not put in a hyphen. Like me, it assumes that that unnecessary, and technically incorrect, punctuation mark was stuck in by a junior printer while Herman...

Perfect December weather - I love it - freezing temperatures, spectacular sunsets, strangely wonderful skies, and darkness at four, twinkled by all the Christmas lights in my north London suburb. But the other, symbolic aspect of win ter can also be old age and dying. My husband, David, had a mini-stroke four weeks ago, and was (happily) whipped into hospital and operated on within a few days. During his convalescence, the partner of a very close friend died, so my attention, this month, has been somewhat focussed on a combination of death and dying, along with the irrelevance of constructing some kind of Christmas. The tree is our first ever fake one. It came from Tesco, and contained IKEA-like instructions for setting it up, which were, unexpectedly, a perfect distraction from what was going on in our lives. We built it. We covered it with our decades-old baubles. Forget the plastic tree - the baubles look fantastic. All that was missing were the dropped needles and that wonde...

I've just been whizzing round my local shops and have come home with a small treasure - two reels of Gutermann thread. We have at least six hairdressers, four shoe shops and a nail bar, but nowhere to buy threads, needles, fabrics etc (and I speak as a fabric junkie) so when someone told me that a tiny dry cleaners had bought in a range of Gutermann to fill the gap, I was there in a trice. Which makes me wonder - do shopping centres create people, or do people create shopping centres? Are all our prospective young dress designers and our knitting aunties and grannies now queuing up in the nail bar? This morning I read with great amusement a blog about the problems of using swear words when writing for children and Young Adults. It seems that at least one library in America refused to stock a book containing the word 'damn'. A way around this is to invent words that stand in for the real thing, but how offensive is the real thing? Most of our current swear words have lost...

At present, the UK riots are still uppermost in my mind. So many of them happened in my city, and they started off in what's just down the road and around a few corners from us - Tottenham. And oh, the rubbish they stole... TVs? phones? jeans? trainers? And for junk like that they destroyed people's livelihoods and homes? This materialistic, vacuous and celebrity-focussed culture has a hell of a lot to answer for. It must change. It has to. The emotional deprivation was real - most notably the absence of any family or community involvement. Illiteracy seems to have played a major part too - the statistics are horrifying. This morning I received the Arabic editions of two of the little books I did with Franklin Watts some time ago. It was unexpected, and I was thrilled. My much longer books have been translated into German, Japanese and Danish, but seeing these short illustrated books in Arabic was quite fascinating. They're quite rude and funny stories, too. Collectively,...