Authors Electric

AI-generated image of Katherine Roberts by media.io Katherine: Write a bio for children's author Katherine Roberts. ChatGPT Title: Katherine Roberts - Enchanting Worlds and Magical Words Introduction: Step into a world where magic dances through the pages and adventures await around every corner – that's the enchanting realm created by the beloved children's author, Katherine Roberts. With her boundless imagination and gift for storytelling, Katherine has woven tales that transport young readers to wondrous lands and spark their own creativity. Katherine: I’m rather enjoying it so far :-) ChatGPT Early Beginnings: Born with a twinkle of magic in her eyes, Katherine Roberts grew up in a charming village nestled between rolling hills and whispering woods. As a child, she was a curious explorer, always seeking hidden treasures in her backyard and weaving stories about the mystical creatures that might inhabit them. Little did she know that these childhood adventures would lay ...

This month on the blog I was going to write about researching your books in the real, rather than virtual, world, then realised my podcast on the topic was coming out the same day. If this interests you then you can listen to The Nuts and Bolts of Researching Your Novel . As well as being out and about doing research and having lots of fun in the process, I have also been doing a lot of reading and having lots of fun in the process. I feel this leant itself to a blog post about reading widely, not only for enjoyment, but to help you get background for your book and to steep yourself in the world of your characters. Whether fact or fiction, there is always something to be found in the pages of a book.  My character, Thomas Graham, having sailed around the world in the Royal Navy, found himself in China in the early to mid 19th Century where he died and was buried. So, some of my reading has been about China to get a flavour of both China and Hong Kong during that time. When reading ...

My hero D.O. Hill, by permission Preus Museum, Norway I may not have said much about my latest project here on Authors Electric, so in case you haven't heard, I have a novel coming out in April called In the Blink of an Eye . I was inspired to write it by the real story of one man's journey through art and photography and the women who fell, in different ways, under his spell.   The accepted term for  a life-story written as a novel  is 'fictional biography' , but t rawling through some older posts across at https://alibacon.com , I remember that for quite some time I wasn't sure what kind of book In the Blink of an Eye   was going to be.   While I explored the shape of the story on the page, I was aware of keeping as closely as I could to ‘the facts’. And new facts were popping up all the time. If I included them all  surely it would be non-fiction, or perhaps more correctly 'narrative non-fiction'.   Had I really only plumped f...

Some years ago, a friend defended a film version of Mansfield Park that portrayed sexual abuse within Fanny Price’s birth family by saying, ‘Oh come on, don’t think that kind of thing didn’t go on in the nineteenth century just as much as today.’ It didn’t matter that the film showed something that never appeared in the book; according to my friend, if Jane Austen could have written it in, she would have done, and that was good enough for her. Jane Austen; gagged by 19th C taboos While this made no sense at all to me, what I found shocking was that this person was by profession a historian; someone who deals in fact, not fiction. Yet here she was, happy to discount the integrity of a classic novel because it didn’t fit her historical view. Perhaps that was her point: Mansfield Park is fiction, not history, so it really doesn’t matter what you do with it. For her, ‘would have,’ in Jane Austen’s case, glided easily into ‘did’. It is difficult for historians. Novelists can ...

It's there, (in illegible white type) & I was Julia T then So what’s the difference between a life-writer and a biographer? As far as I'm concerned the difference is rooted in the words.  Life-writing comes from Anglo-Saxon: biography from Greek. They mean the same but the first has a sense of something unadorned and fundamental: the second is distinctly arty. Last Saturday, in an upstairs room in Felixstowe’s Orwell Hotel, life-writing met biography in conditions of great amity -- appropriately so. Whenever I come to Felixstowe, which is at least annually for the Book Festival and more frequently for agreeable connected matters, I think of it as the Happy Place – a reassuring combination of the Latin felix  (happy) and Old English stowe (place). Last Saturday's occasion had initially been prompted by biography. When I first wrote about the detective novelist, Margery Allingham, all those years ago in 1991, I wasn’t allowed my preferred title of “Adventures” th...

I have known what it was like to be on the front pages of newspapers, or the subject of a double-page spread inside the Independent .  Television interviews, radio shows – my 15 minutes of fame.  It was fantastic being chauffeur driven across London, with a huge bouquet of lilies and roses on my lap, to a champagne reception. The reviews were glowing and I’ll never forget the experience of walking into WH Smith and seeing my book, in hardback, at number 8 in the best-seller lists.  The six figure sums of money being bandied about were head-turning. ‘You’ll never have to worry about money again in your life,’ my agent said.  I should have known! The doomed hardback It was a story of luck and also of danger. I was commissioned to write a biography of Catherine Cookson just after she died, for a very modest sum. The estate wanted a northern author and, as a respected literary biographer, they thought I was eminently suitable.  But I’m also a natural detec...

London coffee-house 1674 ‘On the first day of this month, I met Mr Hooke at Child’s coffee house in St Paul’s Churchyard after he had addressed the new Philosophical club within the Royal Society. We stayed until 11 pm, eating meat and drinking chocolate.' (1 January, 1676) From  John Aubrey My Own Life by Ruth Scurr . I challenge anyone to find a better way of spending New Year’s Day. It has everything: a lecture from one of the founding fathers of modern physics, an evening spent in conversation with the great man, sustenance – how well-cooked isn’t mentioned, but the dinner sounds solid enough – accompanied by, oh joy, a steady supply of hot chocolate. Somehow this last detail sharpens the immediacy of the scene (though that may say more about the place of chocolate in my own life than in John Aubrey’s or Robert Hooke’s). I belong to a very small book group. There are three of us. So disorganised are we that managing four meetings a year is good going; agreeing ...

It isn't just politicians and celebrities who have to think about their image - if you're publishing a book you have to be very conscious of the way it's going to be marketed.  Your cover, front and back - the design and the blurb - are the advertisement for the content and it has to be exactly right, otherwise the reader will feel cheated. My latest book is a travel journal; part memoir, part social history, part adventure - an absolute nightmare to pin down. Finding a cover has been very difficult.  Poor Neil, my designer, has been dragged from photo-shop to photo-shop, figuratively speaking, in an effort to realize the vague image that I had in my mind. Several early sketches were rejected by a daughter in publishing sales, who thought it looked too like a novel. 'The cover has to say what the book's about,' she said sternly.  So I gave Neil another brief and some images of what's in the book and he came up with two covers that I put up on Facebook for...