Authors Electric

    Scully Ashes and the Highwayman  A couple of weeks ago, I finally published Scully Ashes and the Highwayman and Other Stories. The book began, before lockdown, with a publisher's brief. They wanted a book, so many words long, for children aged roughly 8-10. But, specifically, they did not want the entire story spelled out in the text. T o test and develope children's comprehension of a piece of writing, some aspects of the story were to be unmentioned, so the readers had to work out for themselves what exactly had happened. Usual in writing for adults, but not so much for 8-10. Not the easiest of briefs, I thought. Aynock and Ayli The Black Country An idea for one story came to me immediately. I come from the Black Country and, growing up there, was often told 'Aynock and Ayli' stories. This is the Black Country pronunciation of 'Enoch and Eli' which were once typical Black Country 'chapel' names. The stories were of a kind which were -- probably sti...

Yes, says Claudia Myatt, "being an artist" is a way of viewing the world. Claudia is a marine artist who lives on a Dutch tug and has her studio in a boatyard. She provides illustrations for yachting magazines, drew a major series of instructional books for the RYA (Royal Yachting Association) and it was a happy day for me when she agreed to be the illustrator for m y Strong Winds stories. Because I do not think that anyone can draw boats. In fact I think most people can’t. Not boats in action; boats responding to the pressures of the wind and the resistance of the water; boats at the centre of a complex interplay of forces determined by the shape of their hulls, the set of their sails, the skills of the sailor. One of the children’s books I most enjoyed, years ago, was John Ryan’s The Battle of Bunkum Bay when lovable idiot Captain Pugwash conceived a master plan of sailing into the bay between the English and French fleets (to collect the treasure of course) protec...

          Last weekend I arrived bright and early at the Orwell Hotel, Felixstowe, Suffolk expecting to put a few handouts on seats, deliver an optimistic box of books for sale, shove a memory stick into a laptop and waltz away for coffee with a friend before returning to spend a happy hour talking about 'Boats and Books' whilst flicking contentedly through my Power Point presentation.           It wasn't quite that simple. This was the first Book Festival event of the day in the wonderfully named 'His Lordship's Library,' and the sound engineers were hard at work. They were perfectionists; the rest of us were a trifle ad hoc  and possibly de trop . The festival organiser had loaned us her laptop and it needed to be woken from deep slumber before it could be persuaded to link to the projector. There was a wireless mouse which would only squeak in one direction – either I could go forw...

          And not only available on Amazon , but also on Barnes & Noble's Nook , and on Kobo too, thanks to Draft2Digital , which is a great boon to the self-publisher.           Nice ad, eh? It was put together by my brother, Andrew, from one of his own illustrations for the book. This one:-             At the moment we're battling through the problems of turning The Wolf's Footprint into a paper book, with Createspace. The pictures in the paperback will probably be black and white, because of the expense of colour-printing - but in the e-book they can be as colourful as we like.            I asked the artist who produced the illustrations, Andrew Price, about the size the images needed to be. He said that the images in Wolf's Footprint are 1563 pixels wide by 2500 pixels high. This is a good s...