Authors Electric

I can always remember when I bought my first 'word-processor', a clunky Amstrad, because I was then  working on the final rewrites of Ghost Drum. The book had already been accepted for publication by Faber. These edits were something like the twelfth or thirteenth rewrite. Before I'd even sent it to my agent, I'd rewritten all of it from beginning to end, several times, and different parts of it, many times more. As my brother once said, "Writers don't write. They rewrite." The latest Ghost Drum cover Oddly, the opening paragraphs, often one of the most difficult to get right, were almost unchanged from the start. I'd 'written' them in my head during long walks and bus-rides, learning them by heart, before I ever began writing the book on paper. Through all the rest of the rewriting, they hardly changed. In a place far distant from where you are now, grows an oak-tree by a lake.  R ound the oak's trunks is a chain of golden links. Tethere...

  This month I will finishing “The Ice Angel” the last book in my series “The Adventures of Letty Parker.” Aimed at readers between 8-12 and set in an alternative Victorian England, the stories were originally intended to be a trilogy. As time went by and I became more and more absorbed in the world I had created , Letty and her Associates ended up having so many cases to solve and missing persons to find that what should have been three books became six. I have, however, finally come to the end. Right from the very start I had decided that there was a point at which I was going to stop and that was when Letty got to the age when she would fall in love. I didn’t want to write romance, but I knew that my readers would want to know what happened on an emotional level to Letty and her friends in their future and as the books went on I seeded enough hints as to who would eventually end up with who without specifically saying so. In “The Ice Angel” some narrative threads come to an ...

Because of all the endings mentioned in my January 2021  post here, I found myself wondering what to do next, having decided not to write anything in my very long mystery series at least until the current UK lockdown had finished, or around Easter, whichever comes first. I do have November's National Novel Writing Month novel draft all ready to edit, but I thought perhaps it would benefit from being left for a bit longer than usual. A path through the Black Wood of Rannoch Early in January I wrote a quick short story suggested by someone on Twitter, just to fill the gap, and then I looked around for something else to work on. I browsed through some previous efforts and remembered I had a whole novel lying around that I had written years ago, called 'The Tree Museum'. It had never quite fitted any genre but when I had sent it for a professional critique part of the advice that came back was that it might make a good murder mystery if only it had a murder and/or a mystery i...

Long ago (it must be 25 years – help!), when I was writing my PhD thesis, one of my supervisors gave me a piece of advice I will never forget. Not because it was full of timeless wisdom (it may have been, but if so it passed me by) but because I didn’t understand it and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. She advised me to ‘Rewrite Chapter 3 from the inside out’. As though writing Chapter 3 hadn’t been difficult enough, in the conventional ‘start-at-the-beginning-define-your-terms-adduce-your-evidence-express-your-arguments-draw-your-conclusions’ kind of way. But no, apparently that wasn’t good enough, and my much-sweated-over chapter now had to be turned inside out like a grimy t-shirt having to be worn a second day because you lost your luggage. Partly, I feared that the turning inside out would expose all the messy loose ends I hadn’t tied off quite as neatly as I should have. Perhaps that was the idea? Or maybe my supervisor simply thought my chapter needed some restructuring and ...