Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Images of the north-east coast of Scotland were taken by me, Allison Symes.   By the time this goes out on Authors Electric , I would have just returned from a wonderful week away on the beautiful north-east coast of Scotland, which is somewhere I am always pleased to head. Going here makes me feel as if I have got right away from it all.   But how would our characters have the change of scene which does them the world of good and can be a pivotal story point? Would they have to literally get away from where they are based or would the right conversation with a mentor like character be enough to give them a change of scene in terms of seeing what they now have to do when before they could not? A change of scene doesn’t need to be for something as dramatic as for a quest story, though it is the obvious route to go. A minor change can often be enough to get the character through something.  For example, ...

So, last month I promised to be boring about my new book. Today, as a woman of my word, I deliver: you can tell I'm not a politician. I thought for the sake of brevity I’d interview myself: we’re in lockdown who else is going to do it? So, Nicky, where do you get your ideas from? This particular idea came from reading far too many stories of global warming. I love dystopian and apocalyptic fiction and JG Ballard’s Drowned World has been in my head for years as has Pullman’s Gyptians.  I live near the Thames and walk on the tow path most days. There are a number of old barges moored on the Twickenham side. They are covered in plastic and odd bits of timber, but in all the apparent chaos there is order: herb gardens and strange solar panels, half-built inventions put together from scrap. The boats got me thinking about surviving in a drowned London.    Ollu my heroine is one of a group of respected bargers. She lives on ‘the Ark’ a matriarch boat built before The Chaos, wi...

  From BBC archive Churchill Theatre's Cinderella. When I was a child my grandmother would take me to the  panto in Cardiff each Christmas. I would squirm with embarrassment at the audience participation, but I adored the transformation  scenes when the lights would change to flood the stage with magic; a pumpkin became a coach, a servant girl  a princess, and the beast  the handsome prince. I’ll be honest Panto is not a great preparation for life - don’t get me started on frog kissing, or on lying around on a bed of thorns waiting to be rescued -  but it fed my imagination as a writer.  Everyone knows that writing is all about transformation. Words on a page transform into story, the story transforms into a book and the humble scribe, by dint of performing a set of obscure magical tasks, is, with publication, transformed into a real writer just as surely as Pinoccio becomes a real boy. Once I accepted the logic of this, as I accepted that a...