Authors Electric

My young granddaughter Daisy started school – proper, full-time school, in reception class – last month and, I’m glad to say, seems to have settled in very well. There’s some reassuring continuity in that one of her former nursery teachers is now her class teacher, and she has a number of friends who were at nursery with her. Apparently she loves school dinners too, and probably eats all kinds of things there that she would never dream of eating at home! I can’t help thinking back to my own, now very distant, memories of starting school. My first school was an odd one, to say the least. I’d been to a fairly standard nursery school when we lived in Cornwall, but we had now moved up to Yorkshire and I was still getting used to a new home in a new town, and my dad being far away in Singapore. The strange little private school they sent me to was my grandmother’s idea, and I believe she paid the fees. We were not a wealthy family by any means, but she had savings and wanted to giv...

Jenny Alexander As a new self-published author I’m always interested to hear of others’ experiences and when I found out  Jenny Alexander  was looking for a guest blog spot, I jumped at the chance to learn from hers. Particularly when I found out the book she’s launching this week is on a subject that links well with my own books and is clearly close to my heart. Earlier in the summer, when invited to talk to two Year 6 classes in Barnard Castle (when presenting them with copies of my book donated by a local community group: see  the-best-laid-plans-by-alex-marchant ), it struck me that  The Order of the White Boar  wasn’t just about King Richard III, but also about the transition from primary to senior school. In this case, the transition from York Minster song school to ‘page school’ at Middleham Castle, but it’s effectively the same. And my other two books (neither historical fiction) are also about the same subject – and all three tackle the issu...

Sometimes when submitting my work, I get a question that stumps me: what’s the theme of your story? It’s a story, I want to reply, it doesn’t have a theme. Which isn’t strictly true, but to expect a writer to sum up the   complex interweaving of character, purpose and plot that makes up a novel in one word feels to me like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I don’t know about you, but I don’t sit down and decide to write a book about human relationships, or loneliness, or the abuse of power, bullying, courage in the face of danger, overcoming difficulties or redemption. A story forms itself in my mind which will have all these elements and more, but it won’t be about any single one of these. It will be about an unconfident, friendless 12 year-old girl who finds herself on a journey to the bottom of Hell ( Ante’s Inferno ), or a keen, geeky 13year-old boy, driven by desperation to make a pact with a demon ( The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst...