Authors Electric

I've been meaning to write an alternate history novel for some time now, but I have been put off, quite rightly in many ways, by the amount of research I thought I would need to do for it. Somehow unravelling things that did happen in real life and taking everything in a new direction was more daunting than inventing something completely new from square one. The initial idea for this was sparked by a conversation I had with a friend some time ago, which started when, for some reason lost in the mists of time, she told me that Edward VII, before becoming king, had fondly imagined his older sister Princess Vicky would inherit the throne, and when someone told him it would be him instead, he burst into tears. I began to speculate on what might have happened to international relations if Princess Vicky had inherited the British throne as well as becoming the empress of Germany, and I had been turning over this idea in my mind ever since. My initial thoughts on the subject, which were b...

I was invited to be a speaker on a few panels last weekend at the California Creative Writing Conference , one of which was on world-building. I'm old. I admit it. And back-in-the-day I don’t remember us calling it world-building. Part of that is, I think, because all authors of all stories world-build to a certain extent. For me, the world begins within the character. And, crazy as it may sound, I think of that when I look around me, right now, at my little desk in the corner of my bedroom. And there is the Brownie doll my brother gave me for Christmas when I was six. And there is my movie poster from  The Darjeeling Limited.  And there is my orange cherub lamp, on my wooden desk with the pipe legs, and I sit in a wide-backed wicker chair like a minor Bond villain. It is my world. It exudes from me, which sounds slightly gross, I know, but it does. I have moved house a fair amount of times in my life, and, once in a new place, tend to shake the whole thing up at l...