Authors Electric

The sort of place which Dib might inhabit Let me tell you about Dib Gringe. It’s not a small, eerie village, with cowed residents slinking about, fearful of what new horrors may be inflicted on them by their evil landlord from his dank castle on the hill overlooking the swamp on which the village was built. It’s not the swamp itself, some modern equivalent of Conan Doyle’s wonderful Grimpen Mire, into which strangers have wandered to disappear with a gurgled scream, only to reappear at Halloween with dripping rags of flesh still clinging to their skeletal forms, moaning their souls’ agony into the echoing night. Nor is it a wasting disease with a much more impressive Latin name but with symptoms too nauseating to describe, brought back from the southern ocean in the late 1700s by the crew of Captain Cook’s barque Endeavour and transmitted to the inhabitants of the brothels of British ports and from them on to the towns’ residents. No, Dib Gringe is not an ‘it’, he’...

When I first started writing professionally in the mid 1990's I produced non-fiction features for magazines. I still write non-fiction; in fact I had a title published last year, this being The Greatest Guide To Green Living . Research has therefore always been part of the writing process for me. Although I know the subjects I write about there are always new things to learn. So when researching for non-fiction I know what I need to know and research until I fill that knowledge gap. But when it comes to researching for my fiction I have discovered a weakness. I love researching. I mean, I really enjoy the process of learning new things, getting side tracked and discovering something completely unexpected. Take for example my latest early readers eBook Maras and The Fairy Rings ( Amazon.co.uk - Amazon.com ). I've always been interested in the natural world and had often wondered what produces the dark circles in the grass on our local playing field. Imagine my...

I've had over 20 books traditionally published, so when I decided earlier this year to self-publish some of my books as eBooks, it came as a bit of a shock and an enjoyable challenge to take on tasks I'd not had to do before. One of these tasks was to design the front covers of my planned eBooks. As with my previous book ( Anansi The Trickster Spider ) I decided to create the cover for 'Maras and the Fairy Rings' using one of my own photographs. This meant I had the exact image I wanted. It also dealt with any copyright issues I might have had if I'd used an image created by another photographer. It also greatly reduced costs. Knowing what I wanted I planned the steps I needed to take. The first was to collect sticks from the back garden, rummage through drawers for a ball of string, cut the sticks to size and create a fairy wand. The trickiest step was creating the star however the wrapping of the string was very therapeutic. The next step was to wait for a day wh...

I once read a book by Gwyn Thomas called The World Cannot Hear You. I can’t f o r the life of me remember much about it (except that I loved it), but the title has always lurked in my mind. I t seemed to me to epitomise the writer’s (or writers’) tragedy. You write, or read, these wonderful books, somebody reads them, or maybe not, and then they are gone. I used to drone on about Gerald Kersh, whom I thought was fantastic. Nobody else had ever heard of him, which I bitterly resented, more on his behalf than my own. Before and during World WarII he was enormous. And now…? But sometimes, out of the blue, things get jogged. My phone rang not so long ago , and I was asked to take part in a Radio 4 programme about the writers considered to be in the van of the “new realism” in children’s books. My Mate Shofiq was mentioned, and Albes on and the Germans. Good God, I thought - I wrote them! And suddenly remembered being rung up by the headmaster of a school in Peckham to cancel my invitatio...