Authors Electric

  Recently I have been doing some research for a novel. I write historical fiction so I like to mention real people, real places and real events. Anything to help give my historical setting authenticity. It was while searching for some of these ‘real’ people – as in people whose names and deeds are recorded in history – that I came across some intriguing names. My books are set in medieval Wales so that does explain some of the unusual spellings and meanings I have come across. The first that caught my interest was Gwenwynwyn ap Owain Cyfeiliog (d 1216). It bothered me because his first name sounded rather soft for someone who was regarded as quite a formidable ruler in his day. Too many ‘wyn’s for a start. And then my Welsh speaking   son informed me that Gwenwyn means poison. Ah, makes more sense, I thought! Incidentally, he was the son of (ap) Owain Cyfeiliog who was apparently a poet as well as a ruler. I guess he named his son?! My favourite find was Rhys Gryg, or in ...

We had a new addition to the family the other day, and something happened that made me consider the topic of people's names and what we expect from them. When I heard the name given to the new arrival, for some reason I immediately pictured him in 40 or so years' time as a professor, probably of archaeology. His mother, on the other hand, told me she saw him more as a sportsman. Apart from the fact that she was probably joking because she knows how much many other members of the family excel at sports, i.e. not very much, this started a train of thought that led to various different destinations. My grandmother (top left) and her birth family As a family history researcher I find people's names very interesting, especially their first names. In many Scottish families there was quite a structured naming pattern in place, perhaps for centuries. I think I was one of the first children in our family not to be named after some ancestor or other. But it used to be le...

When I first started writing (many hundreds of years ago), it never occurred to me that I would want to use a ‘pen name’ (nor indeed that I would ever see my stories in anything but a real, tangible, paper book – how times change!)  Having graduated from short stories published in magazines, to writing a draft novel or two, several years elapsed during which writing took a back seat to my other passion – horses and endurance riding in the beautiful Welsh mountains. Not that I stopped making up stories. The back of a horse is a wonderful place for mulling over current plot lines and dreaming up new ones.  Eventually, after I married and moved away from my beloved Wales to England, I dug out my futuristic romance ‘Starquest’ from the drawer where it lay hidden, and after revising it to within an inch of its life, and suffering the usual rejections from agents and publishers in the UK, I decided to submit a query, on-line, to a small  press in the States, I was deligh...

If you’ve been following this blog over the past month, you might have noticed we’ve changed our name! So this is a warm welcome to the new-look Authors Electric, now at http://authorselectric.blogspot.com/ and http://www.authorselectric.co.uk/ . Our old domain name www.kindleauthors.co.uk will no longer bring you here and might take you somewhere else… somewhere more amazon-flavoured, maybe... in future. There are some nitty-gritty practical problems involved in changing domains, but the biggest challenge for me as an author has been adjusting to our new identity. But maybe I'm strange. Perhaps you, reading these posts, won't blink our change of blog name? Perhaps you haven’t even noticed? After all, we are still the same authors, writing the same books. We haven’t changed underneath, just as an author doesn't really change when they adopt a pseudonym. Maybe what you call something doesn’t really matter all that much? As Shakespeare said, “a rose by any...