Authors Electric

I never thought I would equate myself with the 'lady from the provinces' on the Lord High Executioner's 'little list' in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. But circumstances have conspired to make me. The last two months have been really rather extraordinary. Up till then, my writing life had proceeded like it has for the last four years. There's been perilously little new writing. Two big projects , the completion of the Ellen trilogy and The Second Man from Porlock, my Coleridge novel, keep being put off partly because other things persist in turning up and partly because I sometimes think that, deep down, I'm a bit afraid of them. Instead I've been preparing, and, twice, almost rewriting, books for Kindle, making selections of short stories from over the years on Createspace and at last publishing new work both on Createspace and for educational publishers. And there are two books nearly ready to go on Createspace, which I blogged about before....

'HEAD AND TALES' by Susan Price: cover by Andrew Price           The first story in my new e-book collection of folk-legends, HEAD AND TALES, is ‘ The Boy and The Blacksmith’ .           In short, the story is of a blacksmith challenged to a trial of skill by the King’s goldsmith.  On his way to the trial, the blacksmith meets ‘a raggedy navvy-boy’, who tags along with him.           Before the king and court, the blacksmith makes mundane horse-shoes, a scythe blade and a ploughshare – which will, he claims, ‘feed people’.  The navvy-boy visits the goldsmith’s shop and reports that the goldsmith is making wondrous things – a living apple-tree, a living fish, a corn-wreath, all of gold.           With the boy’s help, the blacksmith creates an iron deer, which kills the gold tree; an iron o...