Authors Electric

Stig of the Dump by Clive King Last month something happened to me as a children’s writer that filled me with delight. Something that would have been unthinkable even a generation ago. When I was young, few children’s adventure stories had heroines. In most of the books I loved – Stig of the Dump, The Land of Green Ginger, The Phantom Tollbooth, Tom Sawyer, Peter Pan, Jack Holborn – it was a hero who drove the action. Jack Holborn by Leon Garfield I’m not in the least complaining about that; I loved Barney, Abu Ali, Milo, Tom etc. And of course there were many superb – if less obviously adventurous – stories with female protagonists: The Secret Garden, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Charlotte’s Web, Carbonel…  But here’s the rub. It was a well-known truism that girls would always read stories with boy heroes, while boys wouldn’t dream of returning the compliment with ones that featured girls. As a writer, if you didn’t want to halve your potential audience, it made sense to...

Master Mariner (Cally & Hetty) As a writer of sailing adventures where the main protagonists are older children and young teenagers (with a seasoning of redoubtable geriatrics) I wonder sometimes whether I’m stretching credulity too far as I put them through the trials and tribulations of my somewhat melodramatic plots. It was immensely reassuring therefore to spend a few days in late July at the Cadet World Championships in Bodstedt, Northern Germany in the company of approximately 242 young sailors in my target age group.           The Cadet is a granddaddy of a dinghy. Commissioned by Yachting World magazine from legendary boat builder Jack Holt in 1947 it was a rapid success in the more family-friendly, less class-divided world of postwar Britain and soon went international. As a 1950s child learning to sail in a classic 12’ clinker-built dinghy with plenty of room for Mum or Dad, I looked with awe and envy at my contempor...

by Sheridan Winn It’s an up and down life, this writing business: feast and famine, highs and lows, and the constant pull between nurturing your creativity and producing what pays the bills. My rights in the Sprite Sister books have been reverted: now there is no Piccadilly Press behind me. I have to navigate my own way. Ahead are the huge, and potentially choppy, waters of digital publishing: few 7-10 year old readers – my market with Sprites – are yet buying e-books. Still, I wouldn’t swap it, this writer’s life, and the freedom of sailing one’s own little boat. My summer has been spent re-editing the first five Sprite Sister titles for publication as e-books for Kindle, along with a second edition of print-on-demand paperbacks. I have found it a relatively restful experience to focus on stories that are already written, and to further refine them. I have also reconnected with the plots – have been able to pick up the thread once again. That itself is useful wi...