Authors Electric

We find it relatively easy to write about what we see and what we hear – and smell and taste are important when it comes to food. C.S.Lewis was well aware that food is the way to a child’s heart before puberty strikes. But what about sensation? Touch, temperature, proprioception? When you're so numb you don't know where bits of your body are in relation to other bits? It’s very important as far as pleasure is concerned, and also pain if you’re writing a torture scene, but describing extreme heat and extreme cold need a bit of thought. How easy is it to remember what it felt like, when you’re sitting at your computer in a centrally-heated room? Jumping into a pool whilst on holiday somewhere hot brings immediate relief, along with cold drinks and ice cream. I’ve found it’s quicker to cool yourself down than it is to warm yourself up. Wrists and ankles are key – run your wrist under a cold tap and you can feel the cooler blood travel down your fingers. The fad for leg warmers in ...

Foreign travel has always been an invaluable source of inspiration for me, and I have used icy settings on more than one occasion – Jinx on the Divide , and Ice Feathers in particular. Covid-19 meant several cancelled trips abroad, and about ten months ago I looked for the place least likely to present problems. Greenland has a population of just over 56,000, so no danger of massive crowds anywhere, very few cases of coronavirus and no deaths. There were a lot of hoops to jump through to get there, and although we booked the holiday last March, thinking there was very little chance of it going ahead, by sheer chance we managed a small window of opportunity between when Greenland would let us in and whatever changes the new Omicron variant may bring. And what a source of inspiration it turned out to be. We didn’t manage to see the Northern Lights, due to cloud, but that was the only downside. We were based at two centres. Two nights at Kangerlussuaq, which is where the main airport i...