Authors Electric

Sometimes I get stopped in my tracks when something I am currently reading has an unexpected to connection to something I see on the news, or on TV or in a play. You may remember a couple of months ago I wrote about The Great Divide , a novel I listened to which resonated because the Panama Canal was in the news at the time. A couple of months ago while perusing my to-be-read shelf (I have more than just a pile) I picked out a novel called A Song for Kitty by Angela Cairns . I had bought it at a local author event over a year ago and it is a signed copy. The titular character, Kitty, is a real person - Katherina Maria Schäfer born in Germany in 1871. Her stage name was Kitty Marion and she performed in the Music Halls before the first World War. She was also a prominent suffragette, standing up for women’s rights by participating in civil unrest, including arson. She was arrested and went on hunger strike on more than one occasion for the cause. Kitty Marion She isn’t the main char...

I’ve just been to see Bridget Jones’ Baby , which was never going to be as good as the original film(s) but was still good fun and had updated pretty well, even if  some current cultural references were possibly lost on older members of the Monday tea-time audience. (Unlike my companion I at least recognised Ed Sheeran!) However, this film has also marked the end of an era, that era being the one in which I have lusted and/or romanticised at varying times and in varying degrees over Colin Firth: the original Fitzwilliam Darcy of the wet shirt, Mark in the original Bridget and of course Jamie in Love Actually.   Photo by Geroges Biard * Because he is a fine actor and can turn that kind of charm off and on at will, I didn’t romanticise over Mr Firth in The King’s Speech or other roles, but it did come as a shock to discover that, as far as I’m concerned, as Mark Darcy he has entirely lost his je ne sais quoi. In fact if I had been Bridget choosing between him and Pa...

          Every year the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction Awards ‘draw attention to the crude and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.’           This year’s award went to Nancy Huston, an undeserved winner, I fear, although I note with a certain satisfaction (albeit of the purely cerebral kind) that Guardian readers voted resoundingly for the ‘big generative jockey’, while I myself also favoured the ‘elfin grot’ reference, but there you go. These things are very personal. Earlier this year, John Grisham endeared himself to me no end by describing how he had written an explicit sex scene and given it to his wife to read. She had collapsed into so much helpless laughter that he had decided it wasn’t his forte. Would that a few writers of literary fiction had so much insight, but perhaps their spouses are so overawed by their genius that ...

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...