Authors Electric

A haunting atmosphere doesn't cover gaping plotholes. Chatting to a friend about books over Christmas, I mentioned that I rarely read modern literary fiction anymore. Not because I don’t love fiction – of course I do, I write it for children! – but because it’s nearly always a disappointing experience. There’s something about beautiful writing – the chief characteristic of literary fiction – that seems to give the writers a pass when it comes to plot structure. Or even believable characters.  Instead, finely crafted, often poetic prose and the power to conjure up a haunting atmosphere propel many a slim, pastel-teared-jacketed volume up the prize shortlists, with nobody seemingly noticing the gaping plotholes in the story. Or not caring about them if they do.  But I care. If I can’t completely trust the world the author has created, what’s the point of reading on? If the letdown comes right at the end of the book, as it so often does, I’m left with a dispiriting sense of being...

It’s been a week of firsts for me. Well, not really, but it feels like it, after the last couple of years. Firstly, I went to my local pub for a quiet drink with my wife and in-laws; I worked out whilst there that it was two years to the day since the last time I’d set foot in a pub. It was a pleasant afternoon, and the conversation ranged back and forth over various topics but as we are all avid readers, we spent some time discussing books and comparing the recent titles we’ve read. What was interesting was the way all of us had read outside our usual genres; myself, I’ve dabbled with the classics in addition to my usual diet of crime, science fiction, and horror. Some of them I liked; some...not so much. What did become clear was what I really wanted, regardless of genre, was story: I wanted something to happen to the characters, good or bad, and for them to change during the course of the story. I’ll not name the books I didn’t get on with. (My policy is to either give a positi...

Big books from monthly book-clubs (growing dusty!)  In my childhood everything- even Mallory Towers! -  was in hardback, and in my early married life I indulged in a book club (remember them?) which delivered a chunky novel once a month.           I think I can pin down my change of heart over hardbacks  to when I asked my young teenage daughter for a copy of the newly published Donna Tart ( The Little Friend ) for Christmas, on the basis it wouldn’t be too big a drain on her pocket money. Being out of the book-buying habit at the time, I'd missed that it was only out in hardback and was filled with guilt as I unwrapped the unwieldy and expensive brute.           From then on, I have never chosen to buy fiction in hardback. (Non-fiction, poetry and illustrated books are a different matter). A novel in my mind is either e-book or tree-book, and a tree-book is a paperback. A ...

My latest book, ‘Incident on the Line’ is now published in paperback and as an eBook / iBook on Amazon, so what comes next? Incident on the Line by Valerie Bird Starting again, a new novel, and, as before, all the questions and worries crop up. It began with a scene, an image so clear in my head that it transposed into words with relative ease. What has happened and how it will reverberate into a story is clear. I know the reason who did what to whom and why. I have an outline of a plot.       The characters are coming alive, they’re doing what they want, taking me to places, with thoughts and conversations I hadn't originally envisaged. Apart from the old problem of lacking confidence, fear that I cannot do this, and how do I stay focused and calm to keep writing, I am excited.       This is a love story which should not have happened. It will not be a romance though; happy endings seldom convince me. Even in Ja...

Freebie alert! Anyone who comments on this post from August 22nd - 24th 2016 will be entered into a draw for a free copy of Everything Love Is, the new novel   by Claire King published by Bloomsbury, July 2016 I ran into author Claire King a few years ago on Twitter when her novel Night Rainbow (which I really enjoyed) was accepted by an agent and then a publisher. Since then Claire has not only had her second novel published but also moved from France to Gloucestershire, and so on a  sunny Saturday in July, I met her at her book signing in Stroud (complete with luscious macarons ) and came home to bury myself in Everything Love Is. As expected the writing was gorgeous and the opening had a hint of intrigue in the narrative voice.  Fifty pages in I wasn’t so sure. The main character, Baptiste, a therapist who lives on a canal, was lovely and I wanted to know what was happening to him. But what was happening? The second voice (or was it more than ...

First of all, just to say how pleased I am to be back on the Authors Electric team. I was a regular contributor for about a year when Authors Electric first began, but chose to leave when life became demanding and my writing hit a slump. I’m pleased to say that things are back on track, pretty much (though see below) – and it’s great to be here again. My first post is from Ros-the-Reader rather than Ros-the-Writer – and a somewhat jaded reader at that. For what may be the first time in my life (and that amounts to about fifty-seven years of mostly high-density reading), I can’t find anything I really want to read – anything that grabs me in the gut and won’t let go. Sure enough, I’m finding books that are okay… both new ones and ones I’ve read before. My usual tastes are literary fiction, comic fiction, crime and science fiction, plus literary biographies and popular science (cosmology, psychology, genetics, neuroscience, etc). There’s plenty of all this stuff about, but nothing tha...

e-book or printed? During a recent weekend spent with writers old and young, I was in the company of a well-known novelist (no namedropping) and mentioned I was enjoying reading Gone Girl. (I was about half way through at the time).  She said she had like it too and like me had read the e-book. She also happened to say that it was ‘the kind of book that was good for Kindle’. This perplexed me but I let it ride until later in the weekend by which time I had finished the book and  we talked about it again. I wanted to know which novels she considered good for Kindle. I might have misunderstood, but I gathered that she considered the e-format better for quick reads, genre fiction or page-turning thrillers. I was surprised that she felt this need to differentiate in this way. She has, by the way, been published in both formats and is working now on something that will go straight to e-book, so we are not talking Luddite or literary snob. I went off to think about my ...

A strange thing has been happening recently. The bookish blogosphere has been talking about literary fiction. This is a fire it would be perverse of me not to stoke, so here is a little light mix of oxygen and fuel. It started with an excellent piece by Roz Morris about why literary novels can’t just be churned out. As if to prove her point, this coincided almost to the day with the announcement that after years of writing, arguably our greatest living literary novelist, Vikram Seth, had just missed the deadline for his follow up to A Suitable Boy, A Suitable Girl, and was being pursued for his seven figure advance. Now Roz’s piece was balanced and thought-out, and made no disparaging comments about genre fiction. Nonetheless it caused a considerable flurry of ruffled feathers. This in turn led to a superb piece from Porter Anderson in which he made some excellent points about genre-paranoia and the oppression of the “business-is-business” mentality. Yesterday one of m...