Authors Electric

I come to you today from the depths of my editing cave. I've been here for two weeks now, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel - and therefore the reason you're having any contact from me at all. Before writing my books, I worked for an in-house magazine as assistant editor for eight years. A weekly magazine, and a team of two, we designed the layout, interviewed the staff, wrote and edited the articles. What I do now has a very similar set-up, and that's what I had in mind when I started this process in 2015: I can handle all aspects of my writing career, after all, I've done it for many years. How wrong could I have been? And yes, editing, I'm looking at you. What I didn't appreciate was the amount of editing I'd have to do in one hit. Gone are the few hundred word articles, replaced by the hundreds of pages and thousands of words. The paragraphs are no longer factual events, coloured with interesting quotes from employees, but are the inner ...

                                      POETRY FILM: APOPTOSIS, or CELL SUICIDE Sometimes we have to lose bits of us. It’s called Apoptosis: some of our cells have to self-destruct, instead of living on and multiplying by splitting in two. They do this for our benefit. My animated text poem in the video above undergoes apoptosis to tell that story. An example; the foetal hand is a paddle – many of the cells between the finger bones kill themselves, to free our fingers to gesture, point and grasp things. Things like books. 'I don't think I lost enough cells to grasp this book.'  Writing, in any genre, is as much about taking words out as putting words in. Poetry is about losing as many words as possible without losing any meaning, so that the remaining words also contain homeopathic amounts of the ones that went, concentrated and rich like a reduced sauce. Plays and novels, e...

I am currently writing my seventh Sprite Sister title. Here are some of the things I’ve learned about writing a series for children. One chance to make a first impression Your series stands or falls on the strength of your first book. It’s your starting point and everything comes back to that. It defines the characters and their world, and sets up an expectation of what is to come. You have to get it right. If your readers don’t like it, they won’t bother with the second story.  A series relies on the strength of its characters It’s the characters you come back to. What’s going to happen to them next? They are your friends: enjoy them and listen to them. Their voices become familiar. You know what they will say and how they will react, but, like your friends, your characters are not static. They need to grow through the challenges you have set them – and you need to move with them. Continuity Between 2007-2009, I wrote five Sprite ...

If t wo writers move house, by far the worst job is transferring the books. When we did we hired two guys who cheerfully manoeuvred unwieldy items while we took the small stuff. Finally it came to our books. Hundreds of boxes of books, 20 years' worth of greedy collecting. It was like one of those biblical epics where slaves build the Great Pyramid, block by block, all day. For the first hour we joked with the cheerful chaps about how boring it was. For the rest of the hours after that, we wore lobotomised stares. Publishers are well aware that moving books takes time and money. That - and hundreds of other factors including the size of book that looks good in a shop - means there are certain book lengths that aren’t profitable. As I found when I wrote Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books an d How to Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence . Why I wrote a writing book For years I've critiqued novels, helping new writers to polish their books to publishable stan...