Authors Electric

In the olden days, when typewriters and carbon copies and sending everything off by post was the way things were done, getting an agent was comparatively easy. It wasn’t something you could do by simply pressing a computer key; it took time, effort, nice plastic folders and a lot of typewriter ribbons. Not as many people bothered. I sent three short stories off to an agent, and was taken on straight away. She wanted me to write a book and so, full of confidence and the conviction that I could do something really different I went for speculative fiction, and my main character was an intelligent vegetable that could move and was used as a form of transport. I probably had some sort of plot, but I can’t remember it now. Astonishingly, she didn’t like it. I didn’t learn my lesson because, many years later, although I’d had a lot of short stories published and several radio plays broadcast I was still trying to do something radical. That time I set it 5 million years in the future; evolutio...

Since the advent of digital photography I’ve been an addict – and I’ve used a lot of the photographs I’ve taken in different books. Here are a few, with extracts from the book concerned. The Divide I decided to open this book in the most magical place I had ever visited, which was the humming bird garden in Monteverde, Costa Rica. …the humming birds returned to the sugar-water feeders that were hung around the outside of the Study Centre. They used their beaks as rapiers, fencing in mid-air as they tried to knock one another away from the rim. The ones that won looked smug, and the ones that lost zoomed around the garden pretending they didn’t want a drink after all. Back to the Divide Although this description comes from The Divide, lot of the action in the second book is set in the library of my alternative world. I based it on a café in Bristol. This one was made of wood, with asymmetrical window-frames and doorways. Pear-shaped windows, kidney-shaped wind...

Jinx on the Drivide Pitcher Plant There have been many times that I’ve needed something for a particular purpose in a book, and when it’s something you can look at, touch, smell or rattle it makes a huge different to the way in which you write about it.      In the third book of the DivideTrilogy , I invented a malign magical object called a jinx box, which was a shape shifter. Once opened, it starts to cause mischief and it manifests itself in many different guises, simultaneously appearing to one person as one thing, and to another person as something else entirely. I did use photographs as well, but they were ones I’d taken myself, so I knew what the original was like. The jinx box first appears as a pitcher plant. When I was in Borneo I saw the largest one of all, Nepenthes rajah , if I remember correctly. As plants go, it’s pretty unpleasant. Most pitcher plants catch insects – I have one in my conservatory, Sarracenia purpurea , which attracts flie...