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...

When it comes to ebooks, unless you sell by reputation, it’s often accepted that there’s an order of things by which people might be persuaded to buy your book. Impress your potential reader with all 3 and you’ll likely have a sale: 1.        Cover 2.        Blurb 3.        Sample A cover is what generally first attracts the reader.   For my first attempt at my first ebook,   Hamelin’s Child , I didn’t have a clue. I had a lovely image designed by a talented friend of mine which worked well as a big image but not so well at thumbnail   (Pete also did the cover for my short story collection, Maniac , which works beautifully and I absolutely love). I subbed Hamelin’s Child to Criminal-E - an interview/review site run by crime writer, agent & editor Al Guthrie. Al kindly told me the cover didn’t work, but he introduced me to his designer JT Lindroos and held my hand ...

Writing can be a lonely business. Whether you live alone or are married and/or have a large family, the act of committing your imagination to paper or computer is highly personal – just you and your words against the world. Of course I’m discounting all the people that live in your head and whisper to you at odd hours of the day – if I admitted I talked to imaginary people, I’d have even less of a social life than I do already! It’s slightly different in the 21 st century – the internet helps us connect to other like-minded people, sharing ideas and offering support across the world via facebook, blogs and even sites set up specifically for writers to share their work. These can help even the most isolated of writers to talk to people who understand what it’s like to sometimes feel you are living two lives at the same time. But you can't beat physically meeting up with other writers. Whether it's to share work in progress or just socialise, you know you are with people ...

Somebody asked on a facebook forum what else writers were doing with their lives besides writing (and day jobs for many of us). What fires us up away from the keyboard or notebook? What happens in the rest of our lives that inspires us? I took a 2 year interior design course at the local college a while back. One evening (3 hours) per week with a lot of course work to be done in our own time. It wasn't cheap, but it gave me proper "student" status with a student card which came in handy for all the art materials I had to buy. From about two dozen starters, I think 5 of us finished the course and got a proper qualification. I've made all my own soft furnishings ever since I've had my own house. Years later, we bought a Victorian cottage to renovate (thinking we weren't able to have kids - there's nothing like country air, a bit of DIY and a fairy ring for fertility...), so I took the course to find out how to do things properly. I learned a lot, made...

I took this photo a few years ago on holiday in Wales. It's a view towards the sea from Harlech Castle - a place I had many adventures as a young teenager (my friend's parents had a holiday cottage in Harlech). We'd invent whole new backgrounds for ourselves - gypsies, run-aways-from-the-circus, princesses-in-hiding, undercover secret agents - and we'd rope in any poor unsuspecting children we could find to see how far we could stretch our lies. I do wonder what the other kids went back to tell their parents. But this is a photo into another world. If you ignore the tiny spec of 21st century Britain at the bottom, then this could be a portal, The Door Into Summer , or gateway to another dimension altogether. In the photo, the arrangement of the trees, hedges and shadows looks almost like a path zig-zagging to the ocean where there'd be a ship sailing to the land on the far horizon - the Lleyn Peninsula in this case. Who knows what adventures you could have in a wo...

For me, the "inside story" is the real truth, as opposed to the spin or interpretation put on it by the person telling the tale or writing the news report. The private persona rather than the public face. In writing, it can be the difference between telling and showing - although that's a whole different ball game and not one I'm going to play here; not in this post anyway. It's also where you find out what makes your character tick, what motivates them and why they feel this way. When I first started writing my YA fantasy Edge of Dreams , I had absolutely no idea where the story was going. I really don't recommend it as a way to write, as I've written myself into more corners than a Mueller yoghurt over the past however-many years - unfortunately it's the only way I know how to be real and immediate. If I plan more than a scene or two ahead, I lose interest in what I'm doing and it shows. In Edge of Dreams , I wrote that one of my characters w...

Writing teachers in classes and books often claim that there are only five/seven/nine/pick-a-number of unique plots and that everything else is just a variation on a theme. Take West Side Story as a rather famous example of the re-telling of Romeo and Juliet . Dissect these and we have a classic romance in boy meets girl, they fall in love, overcome obstacles and live happily ever after. Except they don’t, of course, which makes the latter one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. But the “happy ending” in both cases is the hope for the future – that the warring Montagues/Capulets and Jets/Sharks will overcome their differences. Retelling old stories is nothing new. Ever since the Bible, we’ve been reinventing different ways of saying the same thing. Even before the written word, we were sitting around campfires listening to stories that had been handed down through generations. Stories that told us who we were, where we’d come from and how to survive. The Brothers Grimm brought us ...