Authors Electric

I wrote something here about my work in progress, a kind of alternate history mystery, a few months ago, and it is still in progress today.  This is not because it's ridiculously long - nothing I write will ever exceed about 80,000 words, and ideally I like to wrap everything up way before that - but because in more or less every chapter there is something I need to research, and the things I imagine I need to research have now descended to a level of fine detail that is actually anathema to someone like me. When I studied history, some years ago now, I realised I didn't want to know any of the detail, as I was very much more interested in broad generalities - the great sweeping movements of history, not where the Duke of Wellington had his hair trimmed (I leave that kind of thing to Georgette Heyer). Of course there is no escape from some of the fine detail when you're writing a novel, and when researching almost anything it's often by building up the layers of detail ...

I had two conversations not long ago that made me wonder whether I should have put a map at the front of my mystery series books. One was an electronic conversation with one of my small band of keen readers in which she (apparently casually) asked me if I had ever drawn a map of the fictitious town where most of my action takes place. Trying to conceal a guilty start, which is easier in electronic form than in real life, I told her I hadn't. I also resisted the temptation to say something like, 'If I'd wanted to spend my time drawing maps I would have been a fantasy writer'.  Actually, I had often thought a map would have been a good idea, if only I had realised at the start of the series that it would go on for such a long time and that there was so much scope for me to create so many geographical misconceptions. The second conversation took place in real life, just before Christmas in the café of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. It was with a friend ...

It's about the time of year when I start the often lengthy process of planning my holidays. When I was younger this would involve negotiations with others in the family and a fruitless quest to try and please everyone. Nowadays, it turns out that pleasing myself is even more difficult. Or at least, there are too many options and not enough time, and I can't make up my mind what to prioritise. I also now have to accept that the physical limitations mean I will not always enjoy the kind of things I would have wanted to do previously. Oddly enough, though, I still managed to have an excellent time at Alton Towers last year, and was able, more or less, to spend whole days on my feet without too many after-effects. It just shows that it isn't only time that flies when you're enjoying yourself! The options for this year fall neatly into categories, as follows: (a) Places I need to visit for research - including some places I didn't even know existed until I started m...

I have written horror and crime for some years now and I do have a reasonable library of books to fall back on but sometimes those little details need to be checked, and it is so easy to do that online.  It occurred to me this week, however, that the browsing history of the average writer must ring bells somewhere on some watcher-server in some secret place.   It goes as no surprise to those who know me that I own up to being a compulsive researcher, spending hours looking into small details that are a sentence – nay half a sentence.  Now on occasion that could be classed as classic displacement activity  -  but then again it never hurts to check. In a recent read the female protagonist catches her skirt on the mistletoe. That sentence pulled me up sharp. Was she tiptoeing through the tree tops? Not that I could see.  A quick search confirmed that mistletoe varieties native to the UK are to be found growing on trees.  A minor p...

My favourite childhood books are the Moomintroll series written by Finnish author Tove Jansson. She was an artist and she illustrated her own books.  For me, as the reader, the illustrations were a big part of the magic because they worked so well with the text. Moomin Valley was a very real place, maybe because I was seeing it just as the author had created it. The Moomin house in Moomin Valley I was quite grown-up before I realised that Tove Jansson and her partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietila, had also created maps, tableaux and an actual five-story model of the Moomin House which was in the Moomin museum in Finland.   The big surprise was that the house they  made was different to the illustrations - it was square rather than round as it appears in the books and this puzzled me. The reason seems to be that it was specially made for a biennale of illustrations in Bratislava and was going to be exhibited in a corner.  The only way that Tove could make...