Authors Electric

 As we near the end of the school holidays I’m wondering if summer scrapbooks are still a “thing”? I used to enjoy collecting tickets, stickers, tourist leaflets and other paraphernalia with my children to document the fun we had over the six weeks creating a permanent keepsake. A collage of summer scrap! Once or twice, there were competitions at school for the “best” scrapbook after the holidays, but as with most of these things it is impossible for all parents to compete especially with the families who jet off on lavish foreign holidays and generally have more disposable income for more exciting activities.  It’s not a level playing field when the only excitement you have to write about is … the local playing field! https://www.flickr.com/photos/w9ned/3883245679/ And yet making a scrapbook, as the name suggests, can be a very inexpensive activity. It is just a patchwork of ephemera. When I was a very small child, I had several scrapbooks which I filled with random pictu...

In case you are worried that I'm going to go into detail here about my rather prosaic middle-of-the road Scottish family in which nobody seems to have committed a crime, been transported, ended up in the workhouse or done anything much to change the course of history, don't panic! I just wanted to run through a few options for writing up or otherwise recording family history, mostly because I've been researching for well over 10 years and I'm still not sure what to do with all the information. I'm hoping that setting out various options will make it clearer to me at least. Of course as a self-published fiction writer my thoughts immediately turn to producing an actual book, and I have probably done enough research and have enough pictures now to fill a few chapters, although there is always the urge to try and go back a bit further and find out a bit more before starting. I doubt very much whether anyone outside the immediate family will be at all interested i...