Authors Electric

I have the urge to write about adaptations today, because some of the various meanings of this word have been on my mind lately. The fact that football, general elections and Glastonbury have been taking up a lot of airtime has caused me to abandon live tv for now and to watch too much Netflix in the evenings instead, and that in turn has caused me to announce to my son, the only one who would listen, that in the extremely unlikely event that Netflix offered me a million pounds for the screen rights for my novels, I would turn them down. My son didn't think I'd be able to resist an offer like that, but I hope I would stand firm. There have been cases where I've been pleasantly surprised by adaptations, particularly the classier BBC ones which stick fairly closely to the original material - the iconic 1995 Pride and Prejudice, for instance, or the Joan Hickson Miss Marple series. I also very much enjoyed a new version of Agatha Christie's Murder Is Easy. On the other han...

  For as long as I can recall, I've been someone who likes to rush at things, trying to fit too much into the time and only getting it all done by a ruthless system of prioritisation, so that eating biscuits (for instance) always gets done and sweeping up the crumbs never does!   My mother was the same, only worse, and often quoted her own mother's motto, 'Better to wear out than rust out.' I suspect I am wearing out physically at a somewhat faster rate than she did, but that's beside the point. Inside view of a props cupboard where some things do rust out over the years, while others seem to be destined to appear in almost every show. The point is that I've recently had to modify my approach to writing in order to get anything finished, and I'm currently reflecting on whether this might actually be a good thing. Ever since I first took part in NaNoWriMo in 2006, I seem to have been operating according to its rules every time I sit down to write. This is a g...

 Did you watch the final of Britain's Got Talent on Sunday? If so, you probably noticed the very talented Eva Abley. Just fourteen years old, she performed stand-up comedy. Hard enough for any teenager but even harder when you're disabled. Eva has cerebral palsy and was more than willing to poke fun at her disability. In the semi-final, she joked that people with disabilities can learn to drive at sixteen - she can't even push a shopping trolley straight. She was utterly refreshing and reminded me a lot of Rosie Jones. In fact, the world of entertainment is an area where, hopefully, progress is being made for disabled performers. A few years ago, would we have considered a deaf celebrity winning Strictly Come Dancing? Earlier this year, blind comedian, Chris McCausland, presenting a BAFTA award with Lee Mack,was brilliantly funny with Lee having to tell Chris what to say as he couldn't read the auto-cue himself. And one of my favourite characters in Call the Midwife , i...

I have an uneasy relationship with New Year resolutions - and in fact, with New Year in general,  since I can't bring myself to enter into the spirit of it as I feel most Scots are expected to these days, particularly in Edinburgh, the Hogmanay capital of the world. Also, over the years, I've developed a strong feeling that  instead of both Christmas and New Year we should celebrate the solstice, representing as it does the start of the return of daylight to the northern hemisphere. Still, I don't think it's too late to wish anyone reading this a very Happy New Year. It has taken me a while to think of a suitable resolution for this coming year. My most successful resolution of the past was not to say 'I can't be bothered' and in fact this was such a resounding success that even now, years later, I usually catch myself in time to avoid actually speaking the words, although sometimes I can't help thinking them. So there is no point in making that...

It’s New Year’s Eve, so a moment to consider casting out the old and bringing in the new. But is casting out of the old really necessary to the creation of something new? I’ve just made a new start with something old, and that something is a story called Ginny’s Egg . I have had over ninety children’s stories published in the traditional way over the last twenty years, but I’m brand new to self-publishing. I’ve just created my first Kindle ebook: Ginny’s Egg . Ginny’s Egg was originally published by Mammoth (later Egmont), got shortlisted for Young Telegraph Book of the Year and sold well. Cover One It was reissued with a new cover some years later, kept in print for a good number of years, but finally went out of print about twelve years ago. So why, out of all my now out of print books, was Ginny’s Egg the one I’m trying as an ebook before any other? Because it’s a story that is close to my heart, and because it is the book that made me into a ‘real’ writer in my ow...