Authors Electric

What sort of transport is there going to be in your book? How is your hero/heroine going to effect an escape when the odds are stacked against them? There are so many things to consider, and being both believable and original can be a tough call. The genre and the age-group are the most important things to consider at the outset. Children are the easiest, as suspending disbelief comes naturally during play. Adults are a bit harder. I’ve divided things into categories, to make things easier for me as well as everyone else! So I’m taking the UK and the US as standard here, and then I’ll deal with the rest of the world. Many categories overlap, as the entertainment industry has borrowed from a multitude of sources. I’ve excluded transport which is regarded as more of a sport, such as skating, hang-gliding, wind-surfing, scuba-diving, etc., although they may be relevant when you’re trying to find a way of getting someone out of a sticky situation. Ordinary everyday Underground or subwa...

As I seem to be stuck for ideas this month, I thought I'd post some photos I've taken of places I've been and things I've seen, and link them to particular books I've written. I'm quite a visual person, having gone to art school, and pictures do tend to evoke memories for me, and one idea leads to another... This is the photograph of a feisty eleven-year-old in Mongolia, the best rider I have ever seen, herding her goats. She was the inspiration for a reluctant reader story called Lost in the Desert , about a boot camp for difficult kids. This is the foot of a phorosrachus, an extinct bird that features heavily in Ice Feathers , a book set in prehistoric Antarctica. I saw this in the Tring site of the Natural History Museum. This is the ballroom of a castle in Prague. During the depradations of the Mongols, they took it over and rode their horses in there for war conferences. I mention it in Beware of Men with Moustaches , a story about a poetry group who are in...

The fourth leopard   I am going to be totally self-indulgent with this, as I had a number of comments about the last post, and I’ve recently been a winner in the Exodus travel writing blog competition. I had my first piece of travel writing published in a local newspaper when I was nineteen. I’d been on a Land Rover trip to Morocco, an unusual destination in 1968, and we’d camped in a wadi – just the way my geography teacher had told me you shouldn’t – and after innocently watching a spectacular lightning display in the Atlas mountains and not putting two and two together it flooded in the middle of the night. I didn’t speak up when the campsite was first suggested; when you’re nineteen you always assume your elders know better. We were all okay, but only just, and I’ve carried on camping in dodgy places ever since. It’s addictive.             So. Wild camping in Botswana. Wow. It was one of the most exciting holi...