Authors Electric

Maybe it's a post-pandemic desire for escape from my own four walls, but I find myself increasingly drawn to TV series such as Kate Humble's Escape to the Farm,  and Ben Fogle's  New Lives in the Wild.  These series build on the formula of old favourites like Escape to the Country , where home buyers (with normally healthy budgets) seek an idyllic country pile as an antidote to urban living. But they go a step further, in that they feature a whole lifestyle change that ties in with a desire to protect the planet and its wildlife, and the people featured are not always those you would expect. I was particularly fascinated by a recent New Lives in the Wild episode, where presenter Ben Fogle stays with Lynx, who once lived alone with only Stone Age technology, and is currently setting up a community project to "rewild" humans called Lithica. https://lithica-rewilding-humans.org/ The aim of this project seems to be to secure large areas with natural resources where p...

This summer, I've been thinking about different kinds of prisons and the various ways people find to escape them. Of course, first you have to recognise you are actually in a prison, since many are gilded cages in disguise. Apparently, we will all soon be living in a virtual Panopticon, whether we love gold or not... and how did THAT happen without anyone noticing? But I'm not attempting a dissertation on social engineering in this post; I merely write fiction to entertain the inmates. So before you all rush off to Google 'panopticon', here is a (very) short tale of mine from the 1990s, first published in an alternative women's fiction magazine called QWF. This story was inspired by ancient Greek/Turkish legend and, although I never name the characters, you should have little trouble guessing who the famous husband is. * The bars at the window were gold. The bed was gold. The single chair was gold. A golden blanket flowed stiffly to a golden floor. T...

As a writer, when things get too difficult, I can escape into another world. Recently I have spent a good deal of time with Letty Parker, in an alternative Victorian Bristol. Like its nineteenth century model this is a place of stark contrasts between rich and poor. The Downs are lined with the mansions of the rich, while the threat of the workhouse looms over those who can barely scrape a living to feed themselves and their families. Letty starts off making a living selling pies. She is twelve years old and prides herself on being an independent business woman. Her friends are the street children. They are the pickpockets, the burglars, the runners for the criminal gangs that are operated by Miss Liddy and The Bear. Having divided the city between them, the gangs keep to their own territory. To stray over the boundary is to risk a stabbing, or to be thrown into the river for the eels to devour. The eels that slide up from the river to coil in dark corners awaiting th...

Two things to blog about this month, one run-of-the-mill, the other a bit special, which fully deserves the adjective 'inspiring'. First, the ordinary. While I'm sorting out the final draft of   The Nightmares of Invasion, the second in the Bright Sea Dark Graves trilogy, I'm also putting together another collection of short stories, some already published, others new, for my private JOSLIN BOOKS imprint. This is one of the many, many things I like about independent publishing. It's almost like being a poet making a retrospective New and Selected, something it would be really, really foolish to ask a publisher to do unless you are incredibly famous. And to make Createspace paperbacks out of them as well as ebooks gives the whole project a sort of three-dimensional quality, a mark of permanence. Even if nobody buys them, they are still there to be had and that in itself, is a great comfort. So this time I'm taking two already commercially published storie...

'Telling the Sea' by Pauline Fisk Three weeks ago I went down to Pembrokeshire complete with film crew to make a film about my writing life in general, and one book in particular – ‘Telling the Sea.’ We moved into the same cottage in which the book was set, and spent two and a half days filming it and its surroundings, which included  boggy marshland, pot-holed tracks, muddy cliff-paths and beaches that might be fabulous in the summer - and relatively easy to pick a way down to - but were perilously inaccessible in November at the end of a rainy summer.  Even so, we managed to get down to them [though it has to be admitted that the film crew weren’t quite as healthy by the end of the shoot as they were when it began] and the results were worth it.  Looking at the footage afterwards, I was thrilled by the view it presented of a wild and rugged coastline faced with remorselessly grey days - which is exactly how Nona, the heroine of ‘Telling the Sea’, experienced ...