Authors Electric

You know that feeling of finding some coins down the back of the sofa? I was clearing out a drawer recently and came across an unused £10 National Book Token from ages ago... so long ago, in fact, that it had expired. "Ah well," I thought, "it was obviously a gift at the time, so easy come easy go..." and then I discovered that you can actually renew one of these tokens if it has expired. So I sent the details online to National Book Tokens, along with a photo of my expired card, and they emailed me a replacement. I could probably have spent this online too, but decided to enter into the spirit of olde-worlde book shopping and buy my gift-book from a local independent bookseller. I also decided it should be non-fiction, and so I chose the wonderful Arcturus Books in Totnes. Turned out I pretty much wanted to buy everything in the shop, but my token (being rather devalued over the 15 years or so it spent in my drawer) would only buy one book. In the end, I allowed th...

Since living in my current house in a densely-populated urban area, I seem to have developed an allergy to Wi-Fi*, which (quite literally sometimes) is a pain. Wireless technology is pretty much everywhere you go these days... show me a cafe that doesn't offer free Wi-Fi along with its expensive cappuccinos that are no doubt helping to pay for your 'free' connection. I can visit such a cafe and enjoy the cappuccino, and I can stay long enough to have lunch with my friends if I'm not sitting right next to the router, but I would not like to try sleeping there. And it seems I am not alone. According to the  Electrosensitivity UK website , " Surveys suggest 30% of people are slightly allergic to radio exposure, usually without knowing it. " If you sit next to your Wi-Fi router for too long, it can make you sick. Possible symptoms include: headaches, brain fog, concentration issues, anxiety, depression, nausea, insomnia, tinnitus, thyroid changes, heart prob...

In 2006, I started writing seriously again (‘seriously’ in the sense of aiming for some sort of goal; ‘again’ in the sense that I used to write in my teens and early 20s, but was sidetracked by that annoying thing called ‘life’). Little did I know at the time that I was embarking on an example of what was then a newly coined genre of fiction. Or in fact, not yet quite coined, as I discovered this week. That newish genre is ‘climate fiction’, or ‘cli-fi’ for short – an abbreviation that is rather apt as often cli-fi appears as a theme within science fiction, although it can be found within many other genres. The term was apparently coined in 2007 by journalist Dan Bloom, although it didn’t take off in the literary mainstream until 2013. Climate change was a theme within fiction for many years before either date (for example, Jules Verne’s  The Purchase of the North Pole (1889) and Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) – it was just that by 2013 it was recognized as...

Five of the six books I’ve converted for the Kindle have been books that were conventionally published in the first place, and the rights have reverted to me. The sixth, Beware of Men with Moustaches , was one that had been accepted for publication and then the whole series was cancelled by the publisher. So my latest book is the first I’ve dared to do without the security of a previous history.             I wrote it eight years ago, and my agent handled it. It got very close to acceptance several times, and then fell at the last hurdle. The main reason seemed to be that accountants don’t like birds – they’re not cuddly enough. It’s aimed at the same audience who read The Divide, so I’m hoping to pick up readers that way. How come a talking griffin is acceptable, but an intelligent parrot isn’t? They’ve both got beaks and wings…             I’ve always been interested...