Authors Electric

Cover by Claire MacLean Because this novel is going to be part of the Authors Electric grand Christmas Sale, I've been looking back over various things I've written about it over the years, and wondering why it's still so dear to my heart. It wasn't me who called it a Polish 'Gone With The Wind' though. I wouldn't dare. That was my agent at the time. She loved it. She couldn't sell it. The first draft was written more years ago than I care to remember. I'd had a novel bought by the Bodley Head and published by Random House. This was back in the days of the big takeovers and I fell victim to one of them, but really, I was a Bodley Head kind of a writer. For my next novel, I had been crafting this big Polish historical saga, or a version of it. I had cut my teeth with a couple of radio plays and some poems and stories. I had done a lot of research. These characters were in my head, itching to tell their tale. We had high hopes. A string of acq...

San Sebastian, La Gomera I'm working on a new version of an old back-list novel. I began by thinking it would involve typing up the manuscript, revising as I went along, but it soon became obvious that it needed more than that. Major changes were in order. The book was originally bought by The Bodley Head and published by Random House a long time ago. I think the central story is fine, but I’ve matured as a writer. Just as well, really. When I reread it before starting work on it, my chief emotion was a sort of horrified embarrassment and NOT, I might add, embarrassment at the significantly erotic content. It was more a question of writing technique and not the other sort. What, I kept wondering, was I thinking about? More to the point, what was my editor thinking about? Happy days on board Simba When I look at the novel now, I can see so many elements of it which need work, not least a confused and confusing perception of point of view. It began as a tale told from a ...

When you write with a strong sense of place, as I think I often do, there are some settings which prove to be more inspirational than others. You just can’t leave them alone. They gnaw away at you and you feel compelled to write about them in different ways. For years, I’ve written about the small Scottish island of Gigha, off the Kintyre Peninsula, a place I know well and love dearly. I’ve set several radio plays and a novel called The Curiosity Cabinet on a fictional Scottish island called Garve, which is like Gigha in size and appearance, although not in location. God’s Islanders is a detailed popular history of the real place and its people from prehistoric times to the present day and now I’ve set my new novel, Bird of Passage, on a vaguely similar (but this time unnamed) Scottish island, although the landscape focuses on a single hilltop farm called Dunshee and a tree-shrouded ‘big house’ called Ealachan, nearby. The novel shifts between the two locations, with oc...