Authors Electric

My mind drifted into fantasy land at a very early age, and stayed there, more or less. Like my mother, I’ve never really thought of writing as a proper job, and the highs and lows of earning from it (which for most of us are getting lower all the time) never had much concrete reality. When I needed proper money I did a proper job (or worked on the grotty tabloids at least) until the financial choke-chain eased a bit, and for the rest of it – well, who wants to be rich anyway? Enough is as good as a feast; did any of you ever meet a rich man/woman who was happy? Me neither. Lately, though, my life’s been more grounded in reality, and I haven’t enjoyed it particularly much. People very dear to me and mine are falling gently to pieces, and I’ve been a minor part of the hands-on caring process. It’s made the idea of knocking off another novella or two, or taking much part in Cally Phillips’s Edinburgh ebookfest (both of which I actually want to do) seem a wee bit too much. Despite t...

What a place to brew beer! Happy is the man, someone once said, who can make a living out of his hobby. I think people who know me well might want to emend that to “Why can’t he take things more seriously? He turns everything into a cause for smiling, lucrative or not. He’s a disgrace.” Which is a pretty tortuous introduction to a series of not-very-well-connected thoughts about the process of bringing a book into the world. Or bringing it into the world again, to be fair, because it’s a rejig/refocusing of the first novel I ever wrote. And as I blogged about it last month, I’ll take a completely different tack to help you not to doze off. The book is called Wild Wood, and Julia Jones’s imprint, Golden Duck, is publishing it. And I’ve been enjoying myself immensely in the process, possibly because Julia and my son Matti Gardner have been doing most of the work. I only wrote the thing, and for the pain of that I refer you to my first paragraph. Now one of ...

One of the strangest things about being a published, or accepted, or arrived author is the possibility of earning a living. I guess most of us discovered early on in our 'careers' that there is often more money to be got from talking about it than actually doing it, and lots of schools (for instance) would far rather spend a fews tens, or even hundreds, of pounds on getting an author in than they would in buying his or her books. I have actually visited educational establishments (God spare the mark) that happily admitted they didn't have any of my books on the premises, and didn't know if any of their victims had ever read one. I've mentioned before how many of them don't even bother to check my gender. What's the idea, then? Usually the answer is something on the lines of 'encouraging the children to write.' I did go to a school in Sheffield once where an extremely chippy (on the shouldery) young teacher told me that it was an easy way of making a ...