Authors Electric

Book 1,  'The Raven Boys' by Maggie Stiefvater   I've never had a book recommended to me by Pinterest before. I don't know why Pinterest started sending me regular emails. I didn't, to my knowledge, ask for them. Maybe I accidentally toggled some toggle or another. Whatever the reason, for some months now, Pinterest has been sending me emails every few days, featuring 'fan art.' I'm fine with it. I didn't ask for them, but I rather enjoy looking at the cartoons, fan-art 'book covers', portraits of favourite characters and illustrations of favourite scenes, while trying to pick out the real art-work from the AI. I've never read, or even heard of, most of the books mentioned but that's okay. There are an awful lot of books in the world. As the emails came in, it was soon obvious that a great number of them featured a series of books called 'The Raven Boys Cycle' by Maggie Stiefvater. Judging by the number of fans doing art for ...

  If that's the view from the front door, I'm staying in. That Storm Goretti was some storm.    And that's the view from the back door. It weighed down and broke my rose arch.            Still....   The Ghost Drum My story is set (says the cat) in a far-away Czardom, where the winter is a cold half-year of darkness.         In that country the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice. The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky! In the north of that country all the winter is one long night, and all that long night long, the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight.      In winters there, the cold is so fierce the frost can be heard crackling and snapping as it travels through the air. The snow is so deep that...

I grew up writing fantasy. I say that literally – I wrote my first novel aged 15, and by 18 or so, I was well into a fantasy novel. I remember at about age 10 or 11, finding a paperback of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land on the bookshelf of a family friend; I borrowed it and I was hooked. That and a passage from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in English at primary school gave me a love of everything fantasy and science fiction, and in my teenage years I worked my way through all of Heinlein, Wyndham and most of the Robert Hale yellow-covered hardbacks in the library.  My first short story sale was fantasy. Fairly mainstream fantasy that was ‘normal’ enough for Bella magazine in the early 1990s. Most of my short stories after that ranged from outright horror, through dark fantasy and into science fiction – I have a collection of stories available in Maniac & Other Stories . The lead title story is the one from Bella magazine. It won second prize in their twist ...

King Arthur's daughter... Rhianna Pendragon Four Lights stand against the Dark: The Sword Excalibur that was forged in Avalon, The Lance of Truth made by the hands of men, The Crown of Dreams that hides the Jewel of Annwn, And the Grail said to hold all the stars in Heaven. This series for young readers begins with a famous sword named Excalibur, which according to legend was thrown into a lake at King Arthur's request while he lies dying of wounds gained in battle against his evil nephew Mordred. It would have been a lot easier if he'd told his knights to keep the sword safe for his daughter Rhianna, but she's hiding in Fairyland and they aren't supposed to know anything about her. Besides, if they just gave her the sword there wouldn't be much of a story, and then we wouldn't get to meet Nimue, mermaid of the lake (who is not quite as sweet as you might think). Mordred, crippled in the duel with Arthur and plotting his revenge, soon finds out where the gir...

The Carpenter and Other Stories  Years ago, more than forty of 'em, I landed a year as a writing fellow at a teaching college in Scarborough. I apologise to the college. Young and inexperienced as I was, I didn't shine as a fellow. In fact, I think the only reason I got the place was because as soon as I saw the calibre of the other applicants, I gave up all hope of getting the job. (One was, for instance, Authors Electric's very own Jan Needle, who would have made a far better fellow in every way than me. Sorry, Jan.) Knowing that I had no chance took all the pressure off and I decided to just practice my interview technique. When called in to meet 'the board,' I was relaxed and chatty and rather looking forward to a cuppa at the train station. Only towards the end of the interview did I start to read the glances the interviewing board were shooting each other and realised, with cold horror, that they might actually choose me. I knew I'd be no good but, if...