Authors Electric

Ever since discovering a copy of Stephen King's On Writing  in my goodie bag at a British Fantasy Convention way back in the 1990s, I've admired the man for his no-nonsense approach to writing. I'm not especially a horror fan - those familiar with my work will know I'm more into fantasy and legends with a bit of science fiction mixed in. But I enjoyed the screen adaptations of King's books, such as writer's nightmare Misery , where the author of a popular series finds himself incapacitated at the mercy of his No. 1 fan, who forces him to write another book in that series. Having someone smash your ankles with a sledgehammer must concentrate the mind, I suppose, and makes me wonder how autobiographical that book was when he wrote it. After all, Stephen King's No 1 tip in his tips for writers published recently in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/30/ten-things-i-learned-about-writing-from-stephen-king  is "Write whatever the hell yo...

It's taken me a long time to realise this, but now that I've been 'writing with the expectation of earning money' for over 15 years, it's increasingly obvious that a creative career is not the kind of career you can plan in a linear fashion from your first stumbling steps until some time in the hazy distance when you get your pension... that is, starting on the lower rung of an imaginary ladder and climbing to the top, where you hit the dizzy heights of your chosen career path, buy yourself a big house and a yacht, and lord it over all the minions eagerly scrambling up after you on the same worn old rungs. Ladder of Divine Ascent About the only time the ladder image might apply to a fiction-writing career is in the beginning, before you publish your first book, when there is (or at least used to be) an accepted path to publication. Many industry professionals will still tell you that it's the only ladder available, and you'd better start climbing it i...

Earlier this month I attended the Society of Authors Children's Writers and Illustrators Group conference at Bath University. I have never been to this annual event, despite being a member of the Society since my first book Song Quest was published in 1999, so thought it about time I checked out the business side of things. Also, I was a student at Bath in the early 1980's and was curious to see how much the campus had changed. The answer is quite a lot, to the point of being unrecognisable when I got halfway up the drive. The original Parade had almost vanished behind sleek new buildings, and the campus now has wonderful sporting facilities as well as hi-tech student accommodation. I spent most of the first night playing with the coloured light display above the bed-shelf in my "Quad" pod, and a fair bit of time working out how to lock the door from the inside with my non-touch keycard (which, it turns out, you can't do unless you open the door first and tell...