Authors Electric

Cover image, courtesy of Glasgow Museums I wrote this piece for a local (Glasgow) writers’ newsletter, but since I know a great many people who enjoy reading and writing historical fiction, including bloggers and visitors to Authors Electric, it seems worth while reblogging here, with a few tweaks and additions, especially since I’ve just agreed to tackle historical fiction for this year’s eBook festival. I’ve always written a mixture of historical and contemporary fiction and plays. My first degree, from Edinburgh University, was in Mediaeval Studies and then I went on to do a Masters in something called Folk Life Studies, essentially a form of social history. I still love research of all kinds and that can be a curse as well as a blessing for an author. You have to know when to stop. But you also have to know when you need to know more and you have to learn to ‘give yourself permission’ to fictionalise something that may well be an unwieldy collection of miscellaneous facts spi...

Cover by the excellent Michael Doig By the time you are reading this, my new novel, the Physic Garden, will be published on Amazon's Kindle store, here . The book is finished, revised - many, many times - and now I'm formatting it, at the same time as looking for last minute glitches and the typos that will have got away from a handful of readers as well as myself. And writing a blurb. The cover artist is  Michael Doig.  Once again I have to say what a pleasure it is, as a writer, to be able to work with an artist to reflect the contents of the book so closely. The Physic Garden is the story of a close friendship and a betrayal so shocking that it pervades the whole novel, like the memory of a nightmare. The tale is narrated by William Lang who was once a gardener at the old college of Glasgow University. Now, William is in his seventies and widowed, but living with his family. He has spent most of his life as a cautiously radical printer and bookseller in the growing cit...