Authors Electric

Not long ago I wrote here about opting for fiction rather than non-fiction in my latest book, but recent events have made me wonder if I achieved what I set out to do, since I’m delighted that In the Blink of an Eye is listed for the People’s Book Prize but a bit disconcerted to find it in the non-fiction category! I daresay the competition may have its own reasons or its own criteria and I guess it’s too late to ask for a ‘reassignment’. Nor is the book so far from the facts for the classification to worry me unduly, although it does feel odd to be alongside (and up against?) books like Understanding BRCA or Rock and Pop on British TV which I am sure are entirely laudable in their respective ways.  A trip to an indie bookshop on Saturday which had lots of genre fiction also made me wonder again about where my book lies in the scheme of things. I couldn’t help feeling it looked more at home in the biography section than next to Robert Harris, Karen Maitland and Sim...

My hero D.O. Hill, by permission Preus Museum, Norway I may not have said much about my latest project here on Authors Electric, so in case you haven't heard, I have a novel coming out in April called In the Blink of an Eye . I was inspired to write it by the real story of one man's journey through art and photography and the women who fell, in different ways, under his spell.   The accepted term for  a life-story written as a novel  is 'fictional biography' , but t rawling through some older posts across at https://alibacon.com , I remember that for quite some time I wasn't sure what kind of book In the Blink of an Eye   was going to be.   While I explored the shape of the story on the page, I was aware of keeping as closely as I could to ‘the facts’. And new facts were popping up all the time. If I included them all  surely it would be non-fiction, or perhaps more correctly 'narrative non-fiction'.   Had I really only plumped f...