Authors Electric

As the year of the Covid rumbles on we find more and more of those events we look forward to are falling by the wayside.  At the weekend just past I should have been on a panel at EdgeLit in Derby (event cancelled). Likewise events where I was intended to be on panels, or give readings, or (wo)man a book stall for Alchemy Press, are Birmingham Lit Fest, Fantasycon, Novacon, Stokercon and several other one day Lit events. Stokercon was the biggest loss for me. This had been scheduled for April and I had intended to launch my folk horror novella, A Small Thing for Yolanda, there, as well as the horror anthology Alchemy Press Books of Horror 2, which I co-edited with Peter Coleborn and Alchemy Press, and two other Alchemy titles, Les Vacances by Phil Sloman and Talking To Strangers by Tina Rath. But alas, it was not to be. The only bright spot at that times was that Stokercon was rescheduled (optimistically as it turned out) for August. But Covid had not done with us. Stoke...

Three things to celebrate this month Firstly the pARTyLines Literary Caberet on Tues 8th Oct at The Old Joint Stock Pub & Theatre.   This was organised by Writing West Midlands as part of the Birmingham Literary Festival. The range of performances was tremendous and depth from performance poetry to prose and songs You will notice I am not in the photo…    There is a reason for that. Those who know me well may recall that this is the third occasion when I have been called upon for curtain calls and the cry of ‘she’s in the bar’ has gone up.  Its becoming something of a habit! It sounds bad – but hand on heart I had one drink all evening and happened to be at the bar buying it at that very moment.  In my defence if the nerve wobbling act of reading to a full house (standing room only) and little old me being sandwiched in the running order between two professional actors didn’t earn me a large G&T I don’t know what would. But hey – no big d...

I am just coming to the end of the editing marathon for my next crime novel In Her Defence , and nervously awaiting final corrections and comments. As always the section that has been poured over and fretted upon is that first chapter. Yes, the end matters almost as much, but I am very aware, to the point of near paranoia, of the need to start with a hook. Those opening few pages are all important, and increasingly so when so many potential readers will be using the ‘look inside’ feature on Amazon to sample your wares.   So what constitutes the opening hook? The first page? Two pages? Three? Taking a quick glance at Kindle books the Amazon Look Inside function varies on how much of a taster you are allowed and depends on the quantity of prelims, but three to five pages of story available to read seems to be the average. When a page is around 300 words on average it’s a scary prospect to realise that the decision to read my many months of work will be judged by the firs...

Happy panellists: (l to r) Mary Hoffman, Anne Rooney (chair), me, Sue Limb Last Saturday I was invited back to my university college to take part in a fascinating Literary Archive Day discussing children's literature, inspired by the Rogers Collection, a wonderful treasure trove of children's books donated to Newnham College in the late nineteenth century. No other college library in Cambridge – or Oxford, I believe, though someone will probably put me right – has anything to match this. What better reason to gather together a bunch of Newnhamite children's authors? The Rogers Collection Christina Hardyment and Caroline Lawrence gave superb talks on Arthur Ransome and Mythic Tropes in Children’s Fiction respectively, while I made up a panel with Mary Hoffman and Sue Limb to discuss how children's writing has changed over the last few decades. An excellent opening speech from Dr Gill Sutherland ('A child who does not feel wonder is merely an inle...

Something I touched on in a very ancient blog post and am now thinking about a lot more, is that all writing is a performance, because like all artistic endeavours it assumes an audience, an audience whose expectations may be satisfied, disappointed, exceeded, subverted, but always taken into account. (Even if writing is therapeutic or introspective, i.e. the audience is the writer her/himself, that audience still needs satisfaction.) But this isn’t about philosophy or therapy. It’s about the writer as a performer, as in on stage . I could include Youtube and audio tapes but I’m thinking of  those times when as authors we’re asked to stand up in public and read our own words.  I admit I used to hate it, not because it involved ‘public speaking’ - I was always fine with giving talks and presentations in work situations –but reading my own work felt like presenting myself , my creations, my inner world – which sent me in to an unusually shrinking violet state of mind....