Authors Electric

I can't quite believe I'm writing this - it's one of those situations that 'happen to someone else'. Well, buying and selling property is something many of us have to do from time to time. We don't have to like it, but sometimes we do have to do it. It is, we are told, one of the most stressful processes - but mostly we just get on with it, with the help of a whinge or two to friends and family. Last year I tried to sell my house and buy a flat. It was time to downsize. Buying the flat - that was the easy bit. I found somewhere lovely, the offer was accepted ... so all I had to do was sell the house. Maybe I should have been better prepared for the house to not sell. But, after a few sleepless nights counting pennies, I boxed and coxed money, bought the flat and found a tenant for the house. That, at least, gave me breathing space. And all was hunky dory. My lovely tenant renewed her contract, I had an income and a lovely new flat. But - out of the blue -...

We moved house a year ago. It doesn’t feel that long and yet it does.  People have stopped asking if we are ‘settled in yet’, and after twelve months I think we can probably say we feel comfortable here now.  Certainly I feel able to write here - which took a while. It is not just the change in house but the uncertainty of having things to hand. That unpacking of your world - Virginia Woolf's  room of one's own where you can feel sure of creative flow with interruption. Okay - there are still spouses and telephones and door bells to deal with, but that scrabbling about for simple things like pens and research materials is no longer an issue. There is an old adage that you have never truly moved house until you have unpacked the last box.  Now I suspect on that score we have ‘unpacked’ most things in that we have opened all boxes and inspected the contents. But what about the boxes that were repacked and migrated to the attic? Or the shed? Do they count? I ...

I’m a founder member of this blog – ever since Katherine Roberts invited me to join her way back in  June 2011 . And I’ve blogged on the 6 th of every month since then, without fail, and never missed a slot. Until last month. July 2018. For the first time, the 6 th came and went and there was nothing from me. I haven’t even blogged on my own page since the  New Year  – and back then I said this:   2017 has in many ways felt like I’m treading water, marking time. 2018 will be the time to move forwards again. Who knows where I’ll be by this time next year? Which all turned out to be very prophetic. In February we finally put our beloved house of 22 years on the market and went from  this  to a much smaller 3-bedroomed house . We moved in late June – hence the missing blog post last month as I barely had my computer unpacked by then. It’s been hard. The plus point is that we are now mortgage-free, with a nice solid little detached house in t...

If you ask writers why they write most will say tell you it is a compulsion, or, as Terry Pratchett once said, ‘writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.’ If we manage to make a few bucks in the process all the better. If we come to be recognised as a writer of some merit, better still, but to do that the writing needs a reader.   So how do we get noticed? During September I had quite a few changes going on around me on a personal/family level. Moving house and also the marriage of my step-son Graham to his lovely wife, Anna. In addition there was Fantasycon, an event that I have haunted for the past 25 years, either as an organiser, a bookseller, a book editor,  an author (and sometimes all at once). For the uninitiated, Fantasycon is the annual convention organised on behalf of the British Fantasy Society at which the British Fantasy Awards are announced. This year’s event was held in Peterborough  between 29 th September to October 1 st So many people w...

I have spent the past few months house hunting in Cornwall. I thought I was looking for a new home, but actually I'm finding a lot of sad stories, any one of which expanded into fiction would make the basis of a good novel. People splitting up so the house has to be sold to split the equity... people who love their small home but have to move on because of a growing family... tenants who have lived there happily for years, but are being evicted because the landlord wants/needs to sell up... death in the family... infirmity forcing older people out of their much-cherished cottage into something more practical... redundancy. And then those strange places where the estate agent seems reluctant to tell you anything at all, and my writer's imagination starts working overtime... What exactly does "ready to go" mean? Are the neighbours horrible/drug dealers/axe-murderers? Truth is, a new home is not the easiest of things to find, even (I imagine) if you are looking f...

I grew up with books. I remember my dad bringing home a Famous Five book every Friday – I used to be ready and waiting for him to come home from work and I’d have finished the book by the end of the weekend. The newsagent would deliver my comic on a Saturday and I’d lie in bed listening for the clink of the letter box; I’d scurry down and take my comic back to bed to read. These were the days when kids’ comics and magazines contained serialised picture stories – these days it’s all fashion and make-up and gossip. Do ten year-olds really want to “read” that kind of thing? Or do they have no option these days? I remember being surprised when I realised it wasn’t normal to visit the library at least once a week. Not all my friends had bookshelves in their bedrooms and buying fourteen paperbacks over the course of a family holiday wasn’t what other people did. I began to check out friends’ houses – I still do – to see whether they have Books. Books with a capital B. Cherished books, odd...