Authors Electric

Apart from scribbling stories and stuff as a kid (to which I probably subjected my poor siblings), and then doing essays at school and university, writing wasn't ever really part of my grand scheme of who I intended to be or how I'd spend my time. (To tell the truth, I had no scheme.) I graduated, got a job, started a family and was already in my thirties before I started 'writing' and, even then, there was no burning ambition or seeming purpose about it. It certainly didn't earn me a living. I suppose most of it I did just for myself, to try to understand things. Putting stuff into words, filling foolscap pages with spidery ink marks made stuff manageable, creating characters made them accessible, understandable, perhaps helped me to understand why 'real' people said and did the things they did. I’m not certain about that; it's just speculation. In retrospect, though, that's what happened. (Not that I pretend to 'understand' people now, ...

Somewhere recently, (the fact that I don’t offer you a link to who and where it was is down to my laziness), I heard or read an interview with an actor who talked about needing to have a ‘dual consciousness’. In crude terms, he meant inhabiting the consciousness of the character he was playing but simultaneously being aware (as himself) of the mechanics of what he was doing – the director’s instructions, the audience’s reactions and so on. And I’ve frequently said the same sort of thing about how writers operate. It applied particularly strongly as I was writing the last few pages of my most recent novel (‘recent’ as in 2016. See above: laziness). Those pages covered the resolution of the relationship between the two lovers in my story. I knew and know them well. They’d already lived through my novel The Figurehead , where they met and their love started to grow, and part of the reason for writing its sequel was that some readers had actually said they wanted to know what happe...

On the surface, this will seem to be blatant marketing, but it isn’t. Honest. As I’ve probably said before, my marketing skills are as finely developed as my belly-dancing (which I’ve never tried). No, this has been triggered by the discovery of some notes I made (intended for a blog) before beginning to write The Likeness . The latter now exists, has been well reviewed and won a couple of awards, but when I wrote what follows it was a dull gleam in my eye. The notes, (suitably tarted up to make them easier to read), ran as follows: ‘I’ve been researching various aspects of life in 1841-2 to fill in details of the lives my characters lived. The cogitations have so far produced four main threads to the narrative. Since it’s a sequel to The Figurehead , it’ll naturally be concerned with the making of ships and all the carvings that involves, so the setting for the action is Aberdeen harbour and the business that goes on there. ‘The first thread is part of that business...

I'm about to order Jan Needle's: RUMP OF RUMP HALL - THE RISE OF RONALD T RUMP.   Having always loathed "THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS" (all the animals seemed to be middle-aged or elderly clubbish gentlemen - not my scene) I love Jan's satires, and know I'm going to enjoy this one. Having said that, I do, accidentally, own a copy of one of  Kenneth Grahame's lesser-known works: THE GOLDEN AGE, first published in 1899, with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish ( I believe he went on to p ro duce biscuit tin lids which are now collect ors' items). Here is Graham's lost childhood in idyllic English countryside. I n parts, i t's a funny book, with small boys' fantas y games along with inscrutable aunts and amusing elderly gents, but it's also sad, full of nostalgia for a world that was rapidly vanishing, and as with everything written around that period and later, there's the shadow of the First World War just around the corner ...

I realised that I would probably feel uncomfortable about Julia being able to see my face as I worked. I am an actress and in seven years of narrating audiobooks there had never been an author present at any time. Recently I have been asking to have all the lights turned off in the studio so I could turn the iPad screen up to its brightest, but this made my eyes blur after about seven hours so now the lights are on again. And this meant my face would be lit. So I placed myself rather carefully at the microphone on the day I invited Julia to the studio. The Salt Stained Book is a wonderful adventure story with a strong theme of sailing and with references to Swallows and Amazons . I was very happy to be the narrator for the audio version as I knew the author Julia Jones, and had already read and loved the book. But I had not really anticipated how anxious I would be about her listening to me interpreting her work. I had already phoned her to check up one or two things...

For about twenty five years from the mid seventies to the turn of the new millennium, I wrote for radio. I have more than a hundred hours of produced radio drama to my name, including many original plays, series and serials as well as dramatizations of classics like Ben Hur, Kidnapped and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Because most producers want the playwright to be there for the duration of the production – studio time is always tight, so you’re expected to do rewrites on the hoof - I’ve spent weeks in radio studios. Kidnapped and Catriona in ten hour-long episodes involved so much time in a small, stuffy Edinburgh studio with no natural light, that the producer pinned up a quote from Kidnapped on the wall: day and night were alike in that ill-smelling cavern . We knew how poor David Balfour felt. Although the hot scones sent up by the canteen at tea time were excellent! I’ve worked with some wonderful producer/directors and equally good audio technicians. I’ve seen huge changes...