Authors Electric

  Pseudonyms. That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with over the past few weeks. I’ve been writing crime fiction for many years now, and in a parallel vein (pun intended), horror, for even longer. I understand the conventions of the genres, and my books and stories are generally well received. However, starting about four years ago, I started writing Young Adult fiction as well. Not quite crime, and not quite horror (although there are elements of both in there), and with a generous helping of adventure and grounded fantasy. I now have two books completed, with a third plotted out (and ideas for a further two after that). I also have a couple of books that sit in the metaphorical bottom drawer, as neither of them are suitable for publication – I see them as my coursework in learning the craft of writing for young adults. I may revisit them, at some point, but equally, I quite like the fact they’re sitting there as an indication of how I’ve improved. And it is dif...

  'Colette' In the strange nothingness between Christmas and New Year, I watched a lot of films. One of those was Colette (2018). It tells the story of Sidonie -Gabrielle Colette , the prolific French novelist of the early 20 th century. I admit I found some of the film made me both blush and cringe, and if you are of a delicate constitution when it comes to hedonism being played out on the screen in explicit detail, you have been warned. But it was worth watching for the way it unpacked Colette’s relationship with her first husband, Henri Gautier- Villars . How he ‘forced’ her to write her semi-autobiographical stories and how he ‘stole’ the credit for the four Claudine novels published between 1900 and 1903, with his own pen name ‘Willy’ as the author. Many years later, when she had successfully proved the books were her own work, she was quoted as saying that she would never have become a writer without Willy. He in turn claimed that the books would not have been nearly ...