Authors Electric

 We've just had the de-clutterers round again, and I think they've at last finished with the front room. After a couple of sessions earlier in the year they had got rid of most of the complete rubbish, so this time they reached the far corners of the room and retrieved some treasures, relatively speaking. Old photographs and holiday souvenirs, a bit of family jewellery, more sheet music, and what seemed like thousands of letters from my mother. To put this in some sort of context, the front room had started out as quite an organised sitting-room, had morphed into my bedroom for a while and then into a store-room which as well as our own family clutter had accommodated whatever was left over when we cleared out first my mother's house and then my brother's some years ago. While I was in hospital having my hip replaced, family members had pushed things into the corners to make sure I had enough space to walk about in safely, and then the next time I was in hospital, havin...

Before I start: hello! This is my first post as a member of Authors Electric and very delighted I am to have been accepted into the group. Thanks to everyone. In a few months, I'm releasing the ebook version of my very first teenage novel - Mondays are Red, which was originally published in 2002 and is now out of print. I'm doing it jointly with my ever-supportive and patient agent and the question we have is a rather basic one: do teenagers buy ebooks? I hope so! Today and tomorrow, I'm going to be asking them. I'm speaking at the Appledore Festival in Devon, with a family event on Sunday and school events on Monday. This won't be the first time I've asked teenagers this question but it's the first time the answer is going to be terribly important. Here's what I've learnt from the few (probably too few to be significant?) times in recent months that I have asked: When I ask a mixed group whether they have ever read a book or part of an eboo...

I wonder how other authors feel when their books are finished? For me, each time a book is submitted to the publisher after the final revisions, I have a sense of parting with it, knowing that I’ll never again “live” in that book as I did while writing it. Reading the published book isn’t the same at all; in fact, if I do so at all, it's with trepidation, fearing the discovery of some toe-curling mistake, or at the very least something I want to change. Preparing The Damage Done for its e-edition gave me the rare chance to live in a book again, and one of my favourites. I revised it for things that have become outdated (Kirsty listening to her Walkman; people smoking in a pub or waiting for dial-up internet connections) but also made numerous small tweaks, taking a word out here, adding a few there, all so surreptitious that probably no one but me will ever notice. Doing this, I experienced the enjoyment of writing all over again. Especially, I had fun with Kirsty’s father, G...