Authors Electric

I write this in greater haste than usual, having forgotten what day it was for all sorts of reasons, some of them more convincing than others! We had an extremely busy July, which was also very frustrating in some ways, involving as it did some chaos in the garden and a series of phone calls to and from the bank because they had decided someone was trying to do something fraudulent with my current account when actually it was only that I had to pay a small fortune to tree surgeons to get rid of a tree that had well outgrown the space in our garden. You will see from the stump that remains how big it must have been. RIP the big tree The only thing that kept me (relatively) sane during July was writing. Despite all the upheaval, I stuck to my regular writing slot almost every day, between 11 am and 1 pm. Incidentally this coincides with the timing for letting the cats out, although of course I couldn't do that while the tree work was going on. Our current cats are rather wary about b...

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...

One of several virtual writers' groups I am part of is called Campers' Canteen - we first 'met' via one of the NaNoWriMo events and have stuck together now for several years, though not on the main NaNo website, which has apparently become rather toxic - not that I've witnessed that for myself, but I've received several emails from them apologising for things I didn't know had even happened, and sharing their plans and promises to do better in the future. The point of Campers' Canteen is that we mostly communicate with each other during NaNoWriMo events and share our anxieties about writing and (mostly) our regular failures to keep up with our various goals. April brought one of these events and I am happy to say my writing went almost exactly as I had hoped. I finished drafting and editing the latest book in my mystery series (book 27), and it's now live on Amazon etc - see cover pic at the end of this post. But I'm also happy to add that I foun...

Having signed up for National Novel Writing Month again for what seems like the hundredth time but is probably about the 17th, and set up the title of the novel I planned to write for it, I'm now having second thoughts. Second thoughts are of course very familiar to me, although not always about what to write in November. Quite often my November novel will feature in the so-called annual writing plan I create in December or January for the year ahead. I often reserve this spot for the next novel in a series, but I've only just published the 26th in my long-running mystery series so I don't think I can come up with another idea just yet. Instead I currently have two completely different ideas. To try and come to a decision, I'm collecting thoughts about each of the ideas in a separate document, and I suppose when it comes to the crunch I can just wait and see which idea seems to have most depth or would be most fun to develop, or whatever the secret ingredient is, and wo...