Authors Electric

Two things to blog about this month, one run-of-the-mill, the other a bit special, which fully deserves the adjective 'inspiring'. First, the ordinary. While I'm sorting out the final draft of   The Nightmares of Invasion, the second in the Bright Sea Dark Graves trilogy, I'm also putting together another collection of short stories, some already published, others new, for my private JOSLIN BOOKS imprint. This is one of the many, many things I like about independent publishing. It's almost like being a poet making a retrospective New and Selected, something it would be really, really foolish to ask a publisher to do unless you are incredibly famous. And to make Createspace paperbacks out of them as well as ebooks gives the whole project a sort of three-dimensional quality, a mark of permanence. Even if nobody buys them, they are still there to be had and that in itself, is a great comfort. So this time I'm taking two already commercially published storie...

This will be a post in two halves. I'm tutoring an Arvon course next week (last week, by the time you read this): "Writing for Teenagers", at The Hurst, deep in the Clun Valley in Shropshire, with Celia Rees as co-tutor and Gillian Cross as our guest. My blog post will be due just two days after I return home, in a state of exhaustion and excitement if previous courses are anything to go by, so I'm getting some thoughts down now. First, a bit about the Arvon Foundation, for anyone unfamiliar with the organisation. They own four centres: Lumb Bank (once owned by Ted Hughes) near Hebden Bridge; The Hurst (the last home of John Osborne) near Craven Arms; Totleigh Barton in North Devon; and Moniack Mhor near Inverness. Courses run throughout the year, each lasting from Monday until Saturday, with a maximum of sixteen students. The format is generally similar: workshops, discussions, one-to-one tutorials, a guest reader, and group readings; course subjects include screenwr...

I went to a charity folk festival last week (as Teresa May might say, I'm not making this up) but not, for once, to play slow Irish airs on my whistle. I donated my "services" as a children's author to help raise funds to save the Barlow Memorial Institute in the Lancashire village of Edgworth from the cuts. It's Cameron's Pig Society, innit? Good fun it was, too - worth every penny that I didn't get. The assembled children were suitably shocked and delighted by the adventures of Wagstaffe the Wind-up Boy, and some of their parents were suitably horrified by some of its content, as well as Roy Bentley' s wonderfully gruesome pictures. {Above and below you can see Carl Grose as Waggie in Kneehigh Theatre's lovely version. I'd have done captions, but computer says no, due to my technical incompetence, no doubt.} Anyway, the Edgworth folk festival started with a specially written poem, and - inevitably - I was featured in it as a woman. An...