Authors Electric

In the run up to Christmas, I saw a great gift idea: a year of reading, consisting of one book per month, chosen specially for the recipient and wrapped in brown paper so that each monthly read remains a surprise. Instead, I got a cheque (always useful on an author's income) and a Lindt chocolate teddy bear (can't go wrong with chocolate, although so far I haven't had the heart to eat him so he's currently sitting on my mantelpiece awaiting his fate). But I still like the mystery book idea, so I decided to turn some of my Christmas money into a year of reading for myself. Each month, I'll buy a book appropriate for the time of year, chosen at random by browsing in a real shop... and since my post on Authors Electric is towards the end of the month, I'll aim to review it here. January yielded A Winter Wedding at Bletchley Park  by Molly Green, picked up in the Works sale for just £1. A Winter Wedding at Bletchley Park by Molly Green Bletchley Park has fascinated ...

I’m not sure how it works, but it’s happened again. The author as Captain Ahab I’ll explain. It’s embarrassing to admit that my WIP has been IP for ages. It used to take me about 6 months to write the first draft of a novel, but this one’s been crawling forward on and off for 2 years, maybe longer. It’s over the 50,000 word mark but grinding through that particular point has been difficult, and I’ve no idea why. It’s a sequel to The Figurehead , which is a historical crime novel that also became a romance. Part of the reason why I’ve been dragging my heels is that I’m still not sure how I’m going to resolve the problems of the relationship between a figurehead carver, John Grant, and Helen Anderson, the daughter of a rich merchant. The novel’s set in 1841, when attitudes to marriage and extra-marital goings-on didn’t leave much scope for … well, anything really. A perfect day But the thing that’s ‘happened again’ has, as usual, come out of the blue. As well as the...

          The 29th day of the month, and the introduction of a new page for Authors Electric.           The 30th - and the 31st, if there is one - have always been given over to Guest Posters, and that will continue, under the very able management of Debbie Bennett. Debbie, Guest Wrangler           The 29th was, until recently, Hywela Lyn's day - but we're sad to say that Hywela has had to resign, because her other commitments make it impossible to keep up with Authors Electric. Blogging is time consuming - thinking of a new subject every month, writing it, rewriting it, finding pictures, rewriting it... (Because writers obsessively rewrite: that's what we do.)           So we well understand Hywela's reasons for leaving us, and we wish her well for the future.         ...

by Bill Kirton Those nice people at Amazon emailed me recently to say there was a book they were sure would be of great interest to me. And they were right. The only problem was that I’d not only read it, I’d written it. The book in question was the fourth in the series I’d written for Pearson, Brilliant Workplace Skills , and, to try to penetrate as well as benefit from their marketing strategy, I asked myself why they decided that that was the book for me. First, why Workplace Skills rather than the others? I’m well past retirement age and, in fact, I took early retirement to concentrate on my writing, so I only share my workspace with me. Which means I have little need for the book’s insights into topics such as promotion prospects and how to enhance them, interpersonal relationships, office politics and protocols. And as for the likelihood of me finding romance in the workplace... well, really! So I have to conclude that they couldn’t have thought the content would be ...

San Sebastian, La Gomera I'm working on a new version of an old back-list novel. I began by thinking it would involve typing up the manuscript, revising as I went along, but it soon became obvious that it needed more than that. Major changes were in order. The book was originally bought by The Bodley Head and published by Random House a long time ago. I think the central story is fine, but I’ve matured as a writer. Just as well, really. When I reread it before starting work on it, my chief emotion was a sort of horrified embarrassment and NOT, I might add, embarrassment at the significantly erotic content. It was more a question of writing technique and not the other sort. What, I kept wondering, was I thinking about? More to the point, what was my editor thinking about? Happy days on board Simba When I look at the novel now, I can see so many elements of it which need work, not least a confused and confusing perception of point of view. It began as a tale told from a ...

Last week, a colleague remarked on the variation in what I write. 'Every book seems different,' he said. But I reckon that's been the rock I've perished on as far as traditional publishing is concerned. I could never settle down to writing within any single marketable genre. I was always going off at a tangent.  So maybe acquisitions editors were right when they declared time and again that they loved the work but couldn't possibly carry Marketing with them. It's true, though, that I often write about love in all its strange and wonderful manifestations. And I often find myself writing about people who are damaged in one way and another. Perhaps by past trauma, as in Bird of Passage and more recently in Ice Dancing .  Perhaps by a betrayal of friendship or family, as in the Curiosity Cabinet and a new novel called The Physic Garden. Perhaps by circumstances of birth, as in The Amber Heart . Put these two predilections (obsessions, some might call them) toge...

One of the fiction writer’s jobs is to create characters, and I’m sure we all do it in different ways. Some writers create a biography for their character before they ever put pen to paper to write their story. Some writers may model their characters on people they know, taking a little bit here and another bit there and amalgamating them into a new character. Some writers start the book first and let the character grow out of the narrative. I could go on and on.   However, it was something Cally Phillips said in a recent blog which was ‘walk a mile in their shoes’ in order to understand someone, and this applies to characters as well as people.   Anyway, Cally’s comment got me to thinking, because when I’m creating characters I like to get inside their heads, and I like to walk in their shoes. Oh, I do all the other things as well, but there’s nothing quite like getting inside someone’s head to really get to know them.   Mind you, a lot of my writing can be scar...

My love affair with ice hockey goes back a great many years: to the late 1970s in fact, when I spent a couple of years teaching English Conversation to adults in Tampere, Finland. My students mostly worked in the large paper mills of Tampere, which is a long, thin and rather beautiful town, sandwiched between two lakes. I taught engineers, management, secretarial staff. Sometimes I went out to the factories by bus and sometimes students travelled to the language school which was above a department store in the middle of town. There were a few other people - all ages and stages - doing evening classes for various reasons. When we weren't teaching, we clustered in the cafe downstairs, chatting, drinking coffee and eating rice porridge with milk, a fabulous creamy, sticky version of yoghurt called viili or piirakka munavoi, the cheap and cheerful Finnish equivalent to scrambled eggs on toast. Finns are friendly but - on the whole - quite shy and private people. Teaching conversa...

From the Roman de la Rose - possibly the earliest romance! Let me say right from the start: there's absolutely nothing wrong with romance. Some of my good friends write romances, and they do it beautifully. And a lot of what I write certainly has romantic elements. But if somebody reads my books expecting them to obey certain romance conventions, he or she may be doomed to disappointment, and that's one of my reasons for becoming an independent 'writer as publisher'. I don't fit many of the genre specifics. Traditional publishers were never very sure where to place my novels. When I'm uploading them as eBooks, even I don't know quite where to place them and swither between contemporary women's fiction, historical fiction, (I write both) literary fiction and - you've guessed it - romance. Specifically, though, I don't really do happy endings. Or at least I don't do happily-ever-after endings. I do my best to make the endings satisfyi...

I'm currently busy on the final draft of a new novel called Line Dancing, set in a small Scottish village, of the kind I have lived in for many years. I've been working my way steadily through a print-out of Line Dancing, correcting and rewriting as I go. I always like to do these late corrections on paper and then type them up afterwards, even though I write the first draft straight onto the computer, and follow that up with a great number of on-screen rewrites. While I've been doing this, I've been thinking about a previous novel, Bird of Passage . I suppose there are vague similarities, although Bird of Passage is much more of a family saga; a twentieth century historical novel  spanning some 50 years. On the other hand, if I had to place Line Dancing into any category, it would be 'contemporary women's fiction, romance with a literary twist'. It's a love story which tackles serious issues in a rural setting. And perhaps that's one reason why...

Astonishing 100 year old colour picture of the Ukraine by Prokudin-Gorskii It was May 2011.  I still have the email. My epic Polish historical novel, The Amber Heart, had finally been sent out by my agent, and he forwarded the first rejection. It went like this: 'With real reluctance, I am going to have to pass on this. I loved it, while thinking some editorial work needed to be done. But the one other person who did read it just didn't really love it - infuriating. I am sorry, but you can't fly solo in publishing.' It was, as rejections go, quite heartening, although it was followed by a deafening silence on all fronts. But it was also - as it turned out - the straw that broke this particular camel's back. The email came soon after a BIG birthday. One of those birthdays that make you sit up and take stock. I duly took stock. Firstly, I was sitting on a huge inventory - lots of finished or almost finished but unpublished work, in the sh...