Authors Electric

In case you are worried that I'm going to go into detail here about my rather prosaic middle-of-the road Scottish family in which nobody seems to have committed a crime, been transported, ended up in the workhouse or done anything much to change the course of history, don't panic! I just wanted to run through a few options for writing up or otherwise recording family history, mostly because I've been researching for well over 10 years and I'm still not sure what to do with all the information. I'm hoping that setting out various options will make it clearer to me at least. Of course as a self-published fiction writer my thoughts immediately turn to producing an actual book, and I have probably done enough research and have enough pictures now to fill a few chapters, although there is always the urge to try and go back a bit further and find out a bit more before starting. I doubt very much whether anyone outside the immediate family will be at all interested i...

Every now and then, if you’re a writer, looms that awful thing - the author photograph.   They’re stuck on the back of your books and are supposed to seduce the reader into believing that you’d be an interesting, friendly, wildly creative, spell-bindingly addictive person to spend time with.  Ageism has crept into publishing, as with everything else, so you’re also expected to look as though you have reasonable mileage still left in the tank. Gone are the times when wrinkles, turkey wattles, fag hanging out of the mouth, professorial spectacles and bad hair were considered a vital part of the creative persona.  Alas. W H Auden could get away with it! Some authors cheat - they carry on using a shot that’s decades old.  I recently went to a literature festival to hear an author talking about her books - the photo in the programme showed a dark-haired, slim-line beauty, but on stage was a plump, grey-haired lady I would never have recognised as the same person. ...

As a serial blogger (I contribute to this blog, The Picture Book Den , Awfully Big Blog Adventure , The Hedgehog Shed and Fuelled By Hot Chocolate ) I was finding it increasingly difficult to source images to support my posts. So at the beginning of the year I decided I'd reconnect with my camera and start to create my own library of images. So for the last few months I've tried to keep an eye out for things I could use as a visual in my posts. Here are just a few of my images so far: Possible use: Time  - making time to write  or how to deal with time in your story   Possible use:  A post about reaching a dead end in your story or feeling you have come to a dead end with your writing Possible use: Perhaps a post about getting bogged down with your plot or making your characters 'journey' more difficult Possible use: Maybe a post on finding a new direction for your writing or perhaps for your character Possible use: P...

I have a box. An old boot box I think it is, squirreled away in the back of a cupboard in my study. Every few years, I find it again, pull it out and spend an hour or so reliving parts of my past. Newspaper clippings, cards from my 18 th and 21 st birthdays, medals from chess competitions (bet you didn’t know I was the under 18 Wirral girl’s chess champion on more than one occasion), concert tickets, old photographs – they’re all there. A chronology of my teenage years; things that were important to me back then. I even have a small red plastic cat – the kind you’d get out of a cracker – that I distinctly remember playing with aged about ten with my Pippa doll I bought from the local toy shop (it was 65p and it took me weeks to save up my pocket money). And I have diaries. Seven or eight year’s worth, starting from just before I was thirteen years old and about to venture out to our local youth club. It’s all in there – the boys I liked, the moments of such exquisite embarras...