Authors Electric

I decided to start this before I went back to Morocco, so that my initial memories are untainted by new impressions. I was eighteen, in between the sixth form and art school and I have used the experiences I had in many pieces of writing since. My mother had taken out an insurance policy to send me to secretarial school if I couldn’t do anything else, and when I got into college she asked me what I wanted to do with the money instead. Travel, of course. I had been to Poland and Austria with my father, but I was hankering after something really different, and when I saw this holiday advertised in a teenage magazine I simply drooled. Three weeks, driving through France and Spain in two Land Rovers, travelling round Morocco, and then returning by train. This was 1967, and Morocco was not yet a tourist destination. Pure adventure.             I remember seeing my first group of date palms, and being slightly surprised that they r...

One day in 1986 I opened the Writers and Artists Yearbook, shut my eyes, and stabbed at the agents’ section at random. It came up with London Independent Books, which sounded like a nice unpretentious title. I’d had a number of short stories published in magazines, and five radio plays broadcast, so I wasn’t a novice. But I’d always dealt with those concerned direct.  It didn’t seem like the way to go with a book. I sent off my manuscript, and that was the start of a relationship that lasted thirty years until Carolyn’s death on the 17 th June this year.  Carolyn Whitaker Things were different in those days. Everything was done by post, which took time, and agents didn’t get you to sign a contract. They just read your work, suggested some alterations, and then sent whatever it was off to probably no more than three publishers. After that you waited. It was, in fact, seven years before Carolyn sold a single thing I wrote, and then it was a short story, which agents...