Authors Electric

I'm going to be honest here and say I was fresh out of ideas for this month's blog. The more I searched my brain, the more it said, "Get lost, I'm having time off." No amount of cajoling would make it change its mind. So here I was with blank page syndrome on steroids. I thought I would turn to previous posts from my own blog - Bookaholic. This one from 2016 immediately leapt out at me and I just knew I had to riff off that. It's perfect as the world is just opening up to travel again. Original Blog Post - The Joy of Constant Travel I've been flying around the world recently as well as chasing around the UK. Life as a writer is so busy and often I think that I don't have time for any of this. It's getting in the way of me actually doing any writing. But on a number of occasions I have discovered that travelling can also broaden and enrich my abilities as a writer. This morning I was on my way to The British Library. To get from where I was staying ...

Life was a ride on the wild side when I was just a Hell's Angel. But the morning I found myself as Wyatt Earp approaching the OK Corral....life grew confusing and scary. While we gear up for the thirty-second gunfight, let me check on my Harley and try to explain. It all began, you see, with a WIP that I thought would be a cakewalk. Easy-peasy. For the fifth entry in my Seattle BOP mystery series, I wanted something simple after mountains of research that I'd had to climb for the fourth novel. Bingo: I'd send the two lead characters, Chief and Ammy off on a two week vacation. And on the way, to make this a mystery, they'd solve a simple pro bono. I couldn't stop thinking that a two-week motorcycle vacation would be perfect for the couple--though neither they nor I had ever set butt on a chopper. That didn't daunt me any more than my never having been to Arizona, where I thought to send them to deliver a pair of bikes while exploring the Southwest. Day by day, my...

This month on the blog I was going to write about researching your books in the real, rather than virtual, world, then realised my podcast on the topic was coming out the same day. If this interests you then you can listen to The Nuts and Bolts of Researching Your Novel . As well as being out and about doing research and having lots of fun in the process, I have also been doing a lot of reading and having lots of fun in the process. I feel this leant itself to a blog post about reading widely, not only for enjoyment, but to help you get background for your book and to steep yourself in the world of your characters. Whether fact or fiction, there is always something to be found in the pages of a book.  My character, Thomas Graham, having sailed around the world in the Royal Navy, found himself in China in the early to mid 19th Century where he died and was buried. So, some of my reading has been about China to get a flavour of both China and Hong Kong during that time. When reading ...