Authors Electric

 Just listened to a programme about Bob Dylan and realised yet again that if I could choose another life on earth, I would want to be a musican/composer/performer/songwriter or some combination of all of these.  Now please, if you know me, don't laugh. Or try not to, anyway. I'm  not sure whether these unconsummated longings were at the back of my mind when I wrote Alexa's Song. I suppose they must have been, because Alexa, the heroine of the book, is all of these things. Not that they seem to bring her much happiness, confused creature that she is - her composing career stymied by a bad experience at music college years ago and her personal life rather a mess, too. Having abandoned her lover Jake to marry his brother Steve, Alexa now seems not to want either of them and she's off to America to follow a dream of starring in a TV show where the contestants compete to write songs. And while there, she meets an ageing rock star and they have a fling. Just to complica...

Following on from yesterday's post about book covers from Sue Price, I should say I'm delighted with the cover designed for me, at a very reasonable price, by designer and photographer Rob Tysall of Nuneaton.   Rob did an excellent job of bringing alive my somewhat blurry vision of the character Charity from Charity's Child - imbuing her with a wonderful mixture of scariness and vulnerability that for me exactly captures her persona in the book. So huge thanks to Rob. I'll be asking him if he'd like to do some more work for me soon... and that brings me to the topic of my next book... This one is for adults and it's called Alexa's Song. The publishers of my first novel for adults, Low Tide, Lunan Bay , made encouraging noises at first but then decided that Alexa's Song  was 'too depressing'. (Gosh, I'm being my own worst publicist here. Though I actually quite like 'depressing' books...) Not that Alexa really is depressing...