Authors Electric

  Murder in the Highlands: a Sophie Sayers Cozy Mystery by Debbie Young. p/b Boldwood 9.99 / Kindle 2023   A Perfectly Good Man by Patrick Gale p/b 4th Estate 2012 It’s said that writers should read widely. Over Easter, I’ve been reading in two very different genres, but both stories are set in a village and take advantage of the resulting restricted cast of characters. Cosy mystery, often, if not always, takes place in a lovely quiet village, and is solved by a female protagonist, who is an amateur sleuth. For a writer who has lived in a beautiful Cotswold village for at least half her life, it’s the obvious choice. Author Debbie Young has created a wonderfully wide-eyed young female sleuth, Sophie, a new arrival in her cottage home, and a complete contrast to Miss Marple. And this village boasts something rare – a real bookshop! Quite how Hector, the young man who owns and runs it, made ends meet before Sophie arrived is unclear, but nowadays, she’s not only his shop assis...

  Empty window reflects the age of change.. People fleeing Twitter in response to Elon Musk’s purchase, and in the same week, though not for the same apparent reason, a number of fellow writers warning their readers that they are quitting blogging.    Change. Not for the same reasons, though possibly change in one area of social media may influence some to think of changes they might make in another where they advertise their books? Mostly, it seems, either in order to develop some other aspect their writing, or because they feel their blog is making less impact on sales.   Meeting each other and joining this conversation in the group’s News Feed, these writers were agreed that ‘it’s time to move on’ from blogging, because, as everyone knows, nobody bothers to read blogs any more.   Whether that is true of ‘everyone’, I’m not totally convinced: but of course a blog post takes time to write, and if the readership is unknown, or if followers are few in number, t...

In 2006, I started writing seriously again (‘seriously’ in the sense of aiming for some sort of goal; ‘again’ in the sense that I used to write in my teens and early 20s, but was sidetracked by that annoying thing called ‘life’). Little did I know at the time that I was embarking on an example of what was then a newly coined genre of fiction. Or in fact, not yet quite coined, as I discovered this week. That newish genre is ‘climate fiction’, or ‘cli-fi’ for short – an abbreviation that is rather apt as often cli-fi appears as a theme within science fiction, although it can be found within many other genres. The term was apparently coined in 2007 by journalist Dan Bloom, although it didn’t take off in the literary mainstream until 2013. Climate change was a theme within fiction for many years before either date (for example, Jules Verne’s  The Purchase of the North Pole (1889) and Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) – it was just that by 2013 it was recognized as...

by Bill Kirton One of my slush piles My earliest ‘publications’ were parodies, written as school exercises and put into the school magazine by a teacher, so I suppose from the start I was something of a prostitute when it came to style or genre. In other words, I was anybody’s and wrote whatever the style demanded. I still love parody and I think we learn lots from trying to write like others – not all the time, of course, but as occasional writing exercises. As a teenager, I wrote poetry – truly awful stuff about love, broken hearts, lust and all that time-wasting but so painfully-felt angst. But my first real genre, when I began to realise that writing was what I wanted to do, was drama. I wrote stage plays for adults and children. My first real taste of ‘being a writer’, though, was when the BBC accepted one of my radio plays. They broadcast several more, mostly serious, dramatic stuff, but some comedy too and finally, skits and songs for revues. Those days, I was prai...