Authors Electric

Jan Needle - Baxter Ferret or Boddington Stoat? * Reposted from 9 May 2014 * In memory and appreciation of Jan Needle, 1943--2023 When I was making  plans for a party to celebrate the new edition of Jan Needle's Wild Wood  I began to fantasize about asking all the guests to arrive dressed as the character who most closely resembled their secret self.  The male guests would have had a generous choice: the Big Four from Wind in the Willows -- Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad ( and perhaps Otter for the more elusive spirits) and then Wild Wood 's dour ideologue Boddington Stoat, flamboyant champagne  socialist,   O.B.Weasel, geriatric Harrison Ferret and any number of old sea rats and enthusiastic volunteers. I would be Wild Wood 's Daisy Ferret, the tyrannical illogical mother, always ready to lash out with her ladle at any furry offspring within range while dimpling at O.B.Weasel's waistcoat and raising ...

And now folks - Rump of Rump Hall! Somehow or other this blog appeared briefly on Weds, then just as mysteriously vanished. Hillary to blame, or Mr Trump - the choice is yours. Maybe the blonde bombshell himself will evaporate. Trump. Ooh, what a disgusting thought... Is it possible to watch the world events of today without despairing just a teeny weeny bit? In England the whole concept of truth is being redefined by the day, with political integrity leading the van. Men and women who pride themselves on their probity (they are honourable and right honourable members, for God’s sake) now talk about a ‘post-honest society’ as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Brexit battle buses festooned in blatant lies are now passed off jokily as rather neat examples of how to game an unimportant argument, while our new and unelected leaderene insists that she has an unshakeable mandate to do what most thinking people look on with growing apprehension. Ian Duncan Smi...

First it's ME ME ME, then a plea for more deserving cases, being helped by the amazing Mark Frankland, who I've written about before. He helps run a charity in Dumfries called First Base, and they need cash. They help people - mainly ex-servicemen - to survive  and now they need help to survive themselves.  MARK WRITES: One donation stands out of course. £5000 from Mark Jardine. Unbelievable generosity. I am pretty sure Mark won't want me to write much about this. He's not that kind of guy. Well, tough. Mark is a funeral director and all too often over the last thirteen years he has buried clients of ours. Average age? Maybe thirty. How? The usual. Drug overdoses. Or the gradual physical disintegration Class A's bring to the party. Or the slow inexorable drip, drip poisoning that is alcoholism. Or suicide when life has just gotten way too dark. Or the sharp end of the violence that stalks to streets of addiction. When young people die from drink,...

Mallard in all her glory at the the National Railway Museum at York. Picture by Rich Bacon  Research has always been one of the bugbears of writing. In the old days, if one was doing a book based on factual matters, part of the process was finding out where you could find out things that were important and germane. This, as you all know, could take hours, days, weeks, months – it was a pain. Rich and Muava with Adam Fozard in museum colours It hit me hardest when I was writing one of my historical naval fictions. Because of a misspent youth I knew a vast amount about the technicalities of square rigged ships and how to sail them. But suddenly, well into a novel set in the mid-eighteenth century, I wanted to investigate some of the nuts and bolts of gunnery at sea. Simple, I thought. I'll find a book. That in itself wasn't easy, as it turned out. Or even possible, in the area that I was specifically after. And many of the volumes I needed were either in obs...

Weird thing being a writer, I've always thought. Two things have happened in the last couple of days that made me think of synchronicity (among other things). Firstly, out of the blue, a comment popped into my inbox about Wild Wood, my comic subversion of Mr Grahame's mighty masterpiece. It was appended to a review in Awfully Big Blog Adventure from last April, by a man I don't know. Easiest thing to do is to reproduce it: BRIAN BERKE said... On January 1st, 2015 I decided to reread The Wind in the Willows sixty years after first having it read in class at school and then reading it myself. Later, and by chance I decided to see if any books with the work of William Rushton were available on ebay. What a joy to find Wild Wood. It compliments 'The Willows' wonderfully, and it was published to encourage children to read! 12 March 2015 at 05:54 That was good enough in itself, but the synchronicity comes in this wise: the same morning, I trundled down from ...