Authors Electric

What a place to brew beer! Happy is the man, someone once said, who can make a living out of his hobby. I think people who know me well might want to emend that to “Why can’t he take things more seriously? He turns everything into a cause for smiling, lucrative or not. He’s a disgrace.” Which is a pretty tortuous introduction to a series of not-very-well-connected thoughts about the process of bringing a book into the world. Or bringing it into the world again, to be fair, because it’s a rejig/refocusing of the first novel I ever wrote. And as I blogged about it last month, I’ll take a completely different tack to help you not to doze off. The book is called Wild Wood, and Julia Jones’s imprint, Golden Duck, is publishing it. And I’ve been enjoying myself immensely in the process, possibly because Julia and my son Matti Gardner have been doing most of the work. I only wrote the thing, and for the pain of that I refer you to my first paragraph. Now one of ...

          One of the most galling things about being a writer (apart from the fact that people think we whinge too much; sorry) is that it doesn’t sit too easily with being political.            Despite the fact that some of the most massively effective works of literature over the years have been nakedly political – let’s cite The Grapes of Wrath as exemplar to avoid too much argument – the word has been used as a handy catch-all pejorative since time began (so to speak). The only one to get away with it scot free was old Bill Shakes, naturally, because almost by definition He can do no wrong. I’ve never heard of Richard the Third being ‘merely’ a political play, although it was arguably a piece of twisted propaganda for the Tudors.           Bertolt Brecht was the opposite. He wrote some of the greatest plays ever put to paper, bu...