Authors Electric

Scary stories read out loud late at night in a big old barn. Yorkshire, middle-of-nowhere, halfway down the valley at the end of a steep lane. It’s late November and the weather forecast is for high winds and snow tonight.  Sounds a bit of a cliché, doesn’t it?  Go to bed after a few glasses of wine. Get woken up by big bangs in the distance somewhere. It’s windy. Get up at 3am for a wee – light switch – nothing. No power. Okaaay…. A few hours later and even the security lighting has failed. Look out of the window and it’s snowing. Even more of a  cliché?  (c) Ariell Cacciola There's no power, no heat, no light. By the morning, I could at least see, so I wander downstairs, wondering which one of the 14 of us will be the first body to be found in this classic set-up for a murder-mystery! Still no power and no gas here either, so can’t even make coffee and we have to wait for somebody who knows about these things to lay and light a wood fire in the sitting room, so we ...

  *When this goes out on 20 th , I should be in the Lake District, the latest covid restrictions permitting. Who knows? Of the group of old friends we meet there every year, two are shielding and two are effectively in lockdown in Northumberland. If we get there at all, we could well be rattling round in the converted barn on our own and eating at home if the pubs and restaurants are shut. Still, we’ll be in a place we love; a place full of memories. The cover of my book Passing Places was developed from a favourite photograph Niall took some years ago – a view across Ullswater at the Glenridding end.   We don’t go in for heroic driving these days; we’ll have an overnight stop in delightful Sandbach on the way, and then grit our teeth for the horrors of the motorway, until we are past Preston and at some point the traffic eases dramatically, the landscape changes, we spot the first drystone walls and then look out for the heart-lifting first sight of the Howgills. I grew...

L ast weekend I was asked to join a fellow author in an event at a local library. I’m a member of a group called Promoting Yorkshire Authors (PYA, https://www.promotingyorkshireauthors.com/ ), which is exactly what its name suggests: an organization of authors working together to promote their books. The ‘Yorkshire’ part covers both authors born in the English county of Yorkshire and those who currently live there. The event in question was to be two children’s authors talking about and reading from their books. And the theme was ‘A Yorkshire Childhood’. It has to be said I was a little uncertain whether this was really an event for me. I come under the latter category of membership of the PYA – I wasn’t born in what the locals call ‘God’s Own County’, although I recently realized I have now lived here something more than half my lifetime. (I was once told I could qualify for my Yorkshire passport after about fifteen years, but I’m still waiting…) But that ‘half a lifetime’ has bee...