Authors Electric

I moved the blog I’d previously scheduled for today to make way for what I thought was going to be a merry, envy-provoking account of a weekend in Paris with my daughter and her daughter on the occasion of the former’s 50 th birthday. It was a lovely weekend and Paris delivered up all the ‘April in it’ clichés. The only problem occurred after an afternoon sitting in the sun in the Place des Vosges . We got to the Gare du Nord in plenty of time for our Eurostar. Just as well because, while it’s always a busy place, I’ve never seen it quite as jammed as it was then. Taxis, cars, buses, all nose to tail, with hundreds of people squeezing between them. We sat at a terrasse but, as I searched for my wallet to pay the bill, I found nothing. It was in a zipped up pocket of a light jacket thing I’d been intermittently wearing and carrying. Except that it wasn’t. We went through the ‘when did you last use it?’ routines, and I knew it had been in my pocket all the time because I’d kept...

When I wrote my novel 'My Mate Shofiq' all those years ago, the race relations problem seemed not too difficult to understand. We had invited many people into Britain from our former colonies, because we needed the labour. When I was a young reporter, the Minister of Health came to the Royal Portsmouth hospital to explain why he was recruiting nurses from the West Indies. The young hopefuls were predominantly black, and he addressed them thus: "You are all wonderful. You are caring, hard-working people. Tell all your friends back home in the Caribbean that we want them here, we need them here. Our welcome will be unequivocal." Loud applause, from everybody in the room, black and white. This is not a quiz, so I won't ask you to guess his name. It was Enoch Powell. The headline on my story read something like "Health Minister urges West Indians: 'come and save the NHS.'" In they came, of course – why wouldn't they? – and duly sa...

Recently, my excellent (indie) publisher, Diane Nelson, with great reluctance, had to wind up the company and so I decided to bite the bullet and republish all my books myself. With help from Diane and Sessha Batto, who designed the covers, I spent a few days formatting the manuscripts for republication on Kindle and as paperbacks through CreateSpace. While I’d still rather be with a publisher who knows what she’s doing and was a great supporter of her authors, I couldn’t help thinking how great it was that, unlike in the old days, not having a publisher was no bar to getting the books out there on the shelves, virtual and real. Ebooks are liberating. On the other hand, while I get a lot of pleasure both writing and reading them, my residual romanticism would still like there to be some aspect of them that had actual substance. I’m a sucker, for example, for signed copies. Whenever I visit Paris , I always try to make sure I walk past and dawdle in front of a wonderful sh...