Authors Electric

Though these women look quite pleased with themselves, I must admit, it's not myself and Mel This time last year, I would never have believed that I could say I am a self-published author. If I was also told I’d be embarking on a new crime series with New York Times Bestselling Author, M.A Comley, I’d say you were pulling my leg. But look at me, it’s happened and it’s a dream come true.      After speaking to a variety of authors online, I’ve come to realise co-writing isn’t for everyone. Some even say it would be their worst nightmare. And I can totally understand that. Having someone grill your work, edit it and not agree with your ideas could be frustrating. But look at it from a different perspective and it could mean that person is enhancing what you’ve written and enriching your ideas.      I find myself in a lucky position. I am working with an experienced author who has published over 35 books in five years and definitely knows her...

Writers who get their evil on. Bwahahahaha! Just musing, should I murder my ex? Hmmm. A fellow-writer, fictional but then aren’t we all one way or another, Richard Castle in the eponymous TV series, says ‘ There are  two kinds  of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill  people : psychopaths and mystery writers. ’  I’m a crime writer (and not a psychopath at all, honestly. No, really.) And I suspect that quite a few authors have bumped off or tormented in print those they have reason to dislike in ways the law of the land unsportingly refuses to sanction. Advice for writers ‘I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.’ Thus DH Lawrence, and it is obviously true, he must have felt malevolent when he saddled us with his whiney novels and cluelessness about female orgasms. But perhaps writing for spite is more common than gamekeepers shagging posh birds? (Oops, unfortunate kinky image conjured up there! You’re welcome!) ...

I was recently asked to adjudicate a competition for crime stories, and the entries turned out to be a mixed batch. Some stories were a good fit for the crime genre, but others were of a more general nature, probably a better fit for the general or literary short story with a crime as part of the plot. It had me thinking again about the nature of crime fiction, and what diffentiates a crime story from other types of story, even if they include a crime. For the purposes of the competition I decided to use the broadest, most basic definition which was a short story which included a crime. However, my mind kept ticking over on the conundrum of what constitutes crime fiction, and I recalled a similar problem when I was researching for my nonfiction book CrimeFiction and the Indie Contribution . What I found out when doing this research was that defining crime fiction was not such an easy task as I had assumed. Before I started writing the book I thought I knew what a ...

Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits - oops no, hares hares hares as it's 1st March. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been driven as mad as two March hares, beginning the process of putting my Kindle ebooks on all the non-Amazon platforms I can find. Encouraged by other AE luminaries, I’ve gone with Draft 2 Digital for most of this, and I can announce that my Kindle comedy novel LYDIA BENNET'S BLOG is now on Nook, Kobo, PageFoundry's Inktera, Scribd and Tolino (links below). However the process hasn’t been totally straightforward even with D2D who have a simple to follow method, and Apple/iTunes is a whole other vale of tears not yet put behind me. My AE colleagues have had to put up with my howls of anguish on Facebook and I don’t see why any of you should be spared so here is the tale of occasional woe. Lydia Bennet, shameless as ever, now more widely available. So I scrubbed and polished a nice clean version of LLB in Word. D2D supply front and back matter, but I adde...

Slippery stuff, Time.  Aarrgghh it’s my time of the month again! No not that one, shame really as I rather like waterskiiing, being towed on skates by dogs, parachuting and all the other pastimes enabled by the purchase of a box of Tampax. I mean my monthly Authors Electric blog post day, viz and to whit, today. It’s frankly terrifying how quickly that day comes around, and it’s speeding up all the time. Tampax are wonderful - you can do stuff like this! Time is funny stuff, infinitely flexible – unlike most things, it speeds up as we age. On Christmas night, as a child, it seems like a lifetime until Christmas day will come again, but now, it hardly seems worth putting the decos back in the attic before they’ll have to be lugged down again. Weeks fly by. It always seems to be Thursday. Time sprints when we have a lot to do and a tight deadline, or something fabulous happening, but then it drags, such as when you are waiting in Accident and Emergency. Note to sel...