Authors Electric

The Amber Heart: eBook version .           Most writers who have been published in the conventional way will have stories about good and bad editors. My worst experience was with an editor who rewrote substantial sections of my novel without using any kind of track changes software. It was only when I read through the manuscript that I thought, 'I didn't write that... or that ... or that.'           Because this was a novel which had started life as a series of plays, and was set on a remote Scottish island, I had a very precise idea of how my characters would speak, and what would work. This wasn't incomprehensible dialect. It was more to do with the rhythm and musicality of speech which is such a feature of the area. She had ironed out these differences. When, at a key point in the novel, my Hebridean hero says to the heroine, 'I think I will just have to keep you!', she twice chan...