Authors Electric

2024 is a leap year, which means we all get an extra day in February to write our next masterpiece. This extra leap day, proposed by Julius Caesar more than 2000 years ago to keep our calendar in sync with the seasons, is traditionally added at the end of the month on February 29th. I make no apology for mentioning it now because there is a rare open submission event happening on that extra day at Chicken House, the original publisher of my debut novel  Song Quest . For 24 hours only, debut authors of fiction for young readers are invited to enter their (finished or unfinished) first novel into Chicken House's Open Coop. Open Coop 29th February 2024 Although there wasn't an official Open Coop back when I submitted Song Quest (Chicken House itself was still an idea in an egg at the time), I followed a similar route to publication by sending in the early chapters of my book myself. In those early days I had no agent and knew nobody in the business, so I simply worked my wa...

The fifth anniversary of the ‘worst day in the worst week of my life’ is rapidly approaching. Next month’s blog will be posted the day after the anniversary, but because I prefer not to mark the date itself, I thought I would write about it now instead. Some sort of advance catharsis perhaps, so by the day itself I can be a little further on the way to ‘moving on’. Moving on is a process that has been accelerating over the past three to four years, thankfully, so now it’s relatively rare that I think, let alone speak, about it all. For the first couple of years my conversation, particularly with my immediate family, but also with good friends, was liberally punctuated with the acronyms BF and AF – ‘before the fire’ and ‘after the fire’. Kolo the Cat in happier times Yes, I’ve lived a pretty charmed life so far. This ‘worst day/week of my life’ was caused by just a fire. A housefire in which no one died or was badly hurt – not even our cat, who was caught up in the suffocating...

In a few days’ time, I’ll be setting off southwards for a few days with family. Having been born in Surrey in the south of England, but lived for more than two decades in Yorkshire in the north, this is a journey I undertake several times a year. My parents still live in the house where I grew up, and my sister and her (rapidly increasing) family live half an hour away, so it’s easy to kill lots of birds with one stone, so to speak. This time I’ll be meeting a new addition to the family so there’s plenty to look forward to. Not an East Coast train - the Flying Scotsman visits Haworth Just a couple of years ago there were two options for the journey – either my partner would drive us down, or I would take the train (with or without my own children in tow). With ever-rising train fares in the UK, the latter sometimes seemed an expensive luxury – until I began writing again a dozen years ago, and discovered that the two hours spent in the ‘quiet carriage’ was the perfect opportu...