Authors Electric

It's sunny as I write this. I can hear my neighbour cutting her grass. Bees hover on the rosemary by my window. All I want to do, if I'm honest, is to finish this and get out there. To sit in a shady corner with a book and allow the afternoon to pass me by. I recognise that I have an ongoing conversation with the weather. It's not simply that I'm British and we can be obsessed by it. It's that the weather can shape my day. Cold has me huddled indoors, hands curled around a mug of hot tea. The rain - especially if it comes with days of endless grey - leaves me struggling to find the motivation to do anything. Wind - ask any teacher of five-year-olds how she copes with children on a windy day. I know just how those children feel - wind seems to blow through my head leaving me reeling from one idea to another without managing to grasp any of them. I know myself well enough to recognise that there are days when I need to go with the flow of the weather, and others w...

I always had trouble with the phrase pathetic fallacy . It seemed like an extremely harsh condemnation of the British obsession with The Weather, and a wagging finger at attributing any sort of malevolence to it. We Brits all know The Weather has a particular delight in ruining Wimbledon fortnight, bank holidays and test matches. So it was with some surprise that I discovered the words have changed their meaning, and when Ruskin first coined the phrase it didn’t mean stupid misconception but simply emotional falseness. What’s wrong with the occasional foray into personification, if it’s deliberate? When I’m writing a fantasy involving a desert it’s quite nice to have a callous sun with a definite mind of its own. Writing has fashions, and the fact that a Greek chorus is as yesterday as a codpiece shouldn’t stop you using one if you feel that’s exactly what your story needs.             All that was just a way of getting me in...

          The most cliched comment in the UK at present will almost certainly include the word 'ark', as we've had almost non-stop rain for about three months. As an introvert, I'm not the greatest fan of real summer, which, with its blue skies, sunshine etc, keeps pulling at me like an irritating child, but this greyness and endless rain is something else. However, it has made me concentrate on my latest publisher's brief - a challenge involving subverting some well-known and excellent texts. Work completed (or probably not - is it ever?) I really would like to sit in my garden (at present very soggy) and enjoy some sunshine.           My latest book - PRINCESS FROG - is just out, but I have yet to receive my author's free copies. Seeing and holding the actual book still feels like the culmination of the creative process, so what about ebooks where the words are everything and the material obj...