Authors Electric

Back in July, I did an author get-together at our local book shop Cover2Cover in Northwich. The weather was beautiful and it was artisan market day so good footfall in town and we had a great day. Didn't set the world on fire - although fantasy author Danny Williams did well. But we had a great time and it was good to meet other local authors. Cover2Cover has been great at getting us all together. I know many local writers and I go to a writing group, but these are mostly people I've never met before and I honestly didn't realise there were so many of us! The shop is also fantastic at promoting our books - we don't have shelf-space, we have an entire bookcase for us all! And there are frequent talks too. Pretty sure I posted a while back about the one I did. The old ... But one of the things I did get out of a Saturday morning sitting outside a bookshop was inspiration! It was refreshing that - for once - we were dealing with physical tangible paperbacks and not eboo...

Below is the opening to my very first (unpublished and unpublishable) novel. It was lovingly hand-written in a fancy binder in about 1978 when I was fourteen. No computers back then and nobody even had typewriters at home. I got a manual typewriter when I was seventeen or so, as I recall. It was (is) a crime novel, inspired by a dream I had, and was written in the evenings when I wasn't particularly happy at school and didn't have much of a social life. I don't think I ever showed it to anybody except perhaps a girl at school who did type some of it up for me - although that may have been novel number two when I was seventeen. Neither novels have ever been edited and I've never attempted to submit them or self-publish. They're nowhere near good enough and being only fourteen would not have cut it! So I’ve typed this up exactly as it appears in my binder, which I still have in the filing cabinet. Every missed comma and dodgy sentence structure! I don't think I...

Buttons and fasteners. Connections. Things that hold things together. Or just an embellishment?  My daughter bought me a long fluffy cardigan for Christmas a couple of years ago. She’s very tuned into my dress style and knows what I like. It’s one of those cardis that thinks it might be a jacket, or even a dressing gown in the right circumstances and at this time of year, it’s rarely far from me. But it needed buttons. Not that I like to button it up fully, but it can get annoying when it constantly slips off your shoulders.  No belt and no buttonholes. And it was machine-knitted. Handy as I am with a sewing machine, I’m not competent enough to make holes in a knit without the whole thing unravelling. So I bought some fasteners I could sew on to both sides and now it’s perfect!  Fast forward a year or so and I’m mooching around one of my favourite charity shops while killing time in town. And I find the most gorgeous deep red velour winter coat. In a charity shop but bran...

Last September, I wrote about tidying up my website and realising that a good percentage of links went precisely nowhere. It was very frustrating, realising that people I'd helped out clearly didn't feel the same way, and I lost a lot of work that I stupidly didn't have copies of, including a series of blogs I wrote for what is now called the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival . Don't you just love the power (and money) of commercial sponsorship? Back in the day, It was the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival and I occasionally wrote for their blog for 4 years between 2011 and 2015, figuring it gave me some exposure amongst the big boys of crime fiction. I linked my own web site to each post and only discovered these links didn't work when I was doing my housekeeping last summer. Did I have copies? Of course I didn't. Why would I need them when any reader could just go to the link ... I tried restoring email archives, to find my original submissions, bu...

A couple of weeks ago, we had  an unusual day - a first for us. Early start to the day and we were were off to Prestbury in East Cheshire, where Andy gave a talk on the history of stained glass. at a Probus group. This is one of the offshoots of  his small business  Moulton Glass , and he gives short (45 minute) presentations to community groups. Moulton Glass makes and repairs/restores leadlight windows, plus we have a presence at various craft fairs in the area, selling decorative items. We even run wiorkshops! But since he's been visiting the local WI groups, word has got out and he's now being contacted by the National Women's Register, Probus and the U3A. He's a good speaker and people seem to enjoy listening. We're currently booked throughout this year and into 2027 and branching outside Cheshire now. There wasn't that much wine! Then later on in the afternoon, it was my turn. Northwich's new local bookshop Cover2Cover invited me to host a talk about...

Last month I went to an author event in my local town of Northwich. It was held at our new local bookshop Cover2Cover , which sells an eclectic mix of new and second-hand books, including an impressive array of classic science fiction and fantasy. Think Forbidden Planet in the late 1980s with all the American import paperbacks that you couldn't get anywhere else - remember we were pre-internet back then. So who was there? This was hosted by the very talented speculative short fiction writer Nemma Wollenfang . I've known Nemma for several years and her stories are superb - I can't wait to read her first novel.  The weather was appalling. Strong November wind and rain and I was remembering when I ran an sf writing workshop in Oldham several years ago in similar weather, and despite the tickets being sold out, only one person braved the elements to actually turn up! Always remember that the value of a 'free' ticket is precisely nothing. He did get lucky though, in tha...

I’ve been editing my website/blog recently. I thought it was time to update pages, since I’ve recently retired, and maybe prune a lot of stuff before thinking about moving over to Wordpress, as blogger just gets more and more difficult to use. It looks like pruning might be easier than I thought since at least 50% of the links no longer work!  I don’t check this kind of thing regularly – maybe I should – but I admit to being surprised. Some of the links to bigger and more commercial sites are gone, and I’ve learned a huge lesson here to keep copies of blog posts as I suspect they are gone for good. I blogged on and off for several years for the Harrogate Crime Festival – and it was a good ten years ago, but I didn’t expect the whole online You’re Booked ‘community’ website to simply vanish without trace, especially since the festival is bigger than it used to be. Annoyingly, while I’d reposted on my website, I had only posted the first paragraph with a link to the full article el...

When I was a child, I wrote lists. Huge, long lists. I would have been about ten or so and I was the kid who handed in ten pages of story at school, when everybody else had written one or two. I liked writing, even back then. I'd even ask for extra homework if it was story-writing. But those lists. They were names. Made-up girls’ names – class registers for imaginary schools, and I’d painstakingly create all these little girls and then put the list in alphabetical order, miss one out and have to start all over again. I went through a lot of writing paper back then. I don’t know why I did it and I can’t even claim these were story characters as I never did anything else with them other than sort them into lists. But I was obsessed with them. I'd be teacher, reading the class register aloud. My parents used to take my brother and I around stately homes and castles when we were children. Now this did fire my imagination as I could be living there, coming down that staircase, eatin...

Me: Write me a paragraph in the style of the crime author DJ Bennett  ChatGPT: Sure! D.J. Bennett is known for her gritty, atmospheric style, tight prose, and psychological depth, often weaving suspenseful plots with flawed but compelling protagonists. Here's a paragraph inspired by her tone and style:  The city breathed a low, oily fog that curled around the streetlamps and slid between the cracks in the pavement like something sentient. Detective Ava North leaned against the rusted rail of the overpass, cigarette forgotten in her fingers, eyes fixed on the pattern of blood just below—a smear like a dragged brushstroke, vivid against concrete. No witnesses, no weapon, just a girl with secrets stitched into her silence. And Ava, haunted by the same hunger that kept her up at night: the need to understand why people break, and how far they’ll go once they do.  Would you like me to write a few more paragraphs? Me: Yes, please  ChatGPT thinks for a few seconds and pr...

Once upon a time, before the dawn of the World Wide Web, the internet was in its infancy. Some of us had computers with modems – those little boxes that sat next to your pc with whizzy lights and beeps that kidnapped your telephone line and charged you money for every minute it took to upload/download emails and read a few online text-only forums.  I’m talking late 1980s into the early 1990s, when monitors were green-on-black and gaming involved answering simple questions and hitting <RETURN>.  I had an email account that was linked to a site (not a web site, they hadn’t been invented yet) called CIX. It was American, I think, and had several interesting forums – the most active one for me being Cult TV. Remember, this was way before the age of digital streaming, when TV shows were broadcast once, maybe again if you were lucky and after that you had to see if it was available on VHS video somewhere. Cult TV was a discussion of all things sf and nerdish. From Doctor Who t...

Here's Aunty Debbie trying out her mother-of-the-bride headwear! What’s new on the internet Problem Pages? Aunty Debbie’s been seeing a lot of posts recently about the great God Amazon blocking or pulling books and terminating accounts. It seems the bots are on the rise and the use of AI isn’t helping.  So why would Amazon want to terminate your account? After all, when you sell books, you make money. And when you make money, Amazon makes money. Not much on each transaction – a commission on the sale, maybe a delivery charge for the ebook, a profit on the cost of printing and shipping physical books – but if you multiple that for every one of your sales and then every account on KDP, and it all adds up to a significant amount of money in Amazon’s coffers.  So there is no reason for Amazon to rain on your parade, is there?  Is there?  Well yes. You see when you set up your Amazon account, there are pages and pages of those pesky little terms & conditions . You kno...

I hear other writers talking about how they always/never re-read their own work. Of those that do – many say they cringe as they see their mistakes, or worry that it’s all rubbish in hindsight, and no wonder they never sell any books as who would want to read it anyway? And I don't understand the mentality of those writers who never re-read their books - why would you not do this? I have a confession to make. Not only do I constantly re-read my own books, but I actually do on occasion (actually, frequently) pat myself on the back for a particularly well-executed turn of phrase, or a paragraph that resonates perfectly, or a character that I’m still slightly in love with. Yes, of course I see the odd typo that escaped both mine and my agent or editor’s eagle eyes – and I do kick myself for word repetition and a clunky sentence I really should have caught on one of the many editing passes I do. But by and large, I’m happy with much (most?) of what I have written. Sometimes I even thi...

Dear Aunty Debbie. I’m so happy!  (utterly deadpan) Why’s that then, Happy Writer?  HW: Because I’ve had an email from a company that’s going to make my book into a film!  AD: That’s amazing news. Which book is that?  HW: The one I put on Amazon last week. The one you told me needed editing and I couldn’t afford an editor, so I published it anyway.  AD: Okaaay. So what will this company do?  HW: Well, they found my book and they must have loved it so much, they told a producer friend who wants to make it into a film.  A D: They just came across it on Amazon?  H W: Yes – isn’t it incredible?  AD: (Totally incredible. As in not remotely credible …)  HW: And they won’t charge me anything.  AD: I’m sure they won’t. Yet. But this is what will happen:  The company’s representative – let’s call him John – will email you a few times, telling you how much they love your book (but oddly never mention anything specific to your story ...

A blonde, a brunette and a redhead walked into a bar. They really did. I was the brunette.  It’s November 1991 (I think – give or take a year – it was a long time ago) and we’re in Earl’s Court, London at a fantasy convention. I’d met the blonde (Jan) and the redhead (Lindsey) six months or so earlier at a writers’ conference – we were among the dozen or so writers whose work wouldn’t be pigeonholed into romance, or memoirs or even thrillers. We were fantasy, science fiction and horror writers and affectionately dubbed the weirdos by the late and lovely editor Carolyn Caughey , who took us under her wing! Carolyn was a senior editor at Hodder & Stoughton and she made an effort to keep in touch with me over the years – even as far as making sure I got an invitation to the Stephen King party in London in the late 90s (Storm Constantine and I asking Mr King to dance is a whole other story …)  Jan and Lindsey knew each other already, and I lived only 20 miles or so away, so w...