Authors Electric

Two of the biggest names in the world, Bill Clinton and James Patterson, are “collaborating on a novel”. But who is actually going to be sitting down and doing the typing? Will there be a ghostwriter involved? Would anyone care if there was? So where does ghostwriting end and collaboration begin? And what roles will the two “big name” editors who have been announced play in the process? I guess it all comes down to how many megawatts of star power each member of the team can muster. How far up the billing in the global media pantomime do their names appear? Bill Clinton is about as high as you can get in the international fame game. Anyone who might be a potential buyer of this thriller will know who he is. His name will give the book credibility because he actually knows what goes on behind the scenes – dare we say, he actually knows “where the bodies are buried”? He reputedly wrote every word of his autobiography, “My Life”, and unkind critics complained...

I’m a member of Juno, a women’s theatre group based around Salisbury, with a brief to work at correcting the gender imbalance in theatre.           Juno’s reach is mostly in Wiltshire and Dorset and I’m in Hampshire, but I just sneak in under the ‘within 30 miles of Salisbury’ rule. We are mostly writers, but several members have performance and directing backgrounds too. We make a lively contribution to Salisbury Fringe Festival – somehow not quite part of the ‘official’ Fringe, but there all the same, putting on our own shows alongside it. ‘Little Red Ella and the FGM’ was one such production. Several of us are also working on projects celebrating women in WW1 at present. We run workshops on writing for the theatre: site-specific, non-natural, political, comedy, for example. I’ve learned a lot.           Our most recent venture has just been on at the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis – a love...

So this is the front our house as of February 2017. They put the scaffolding up a few weeks ago, but a combination of bad weather and our roofer needing to buy a new van has prevented anything actually happening yet. The latest date we've been given is Monday for the guys turning up to strip off the entire roof, re-batten, re-felt and replace all the unbroken slates. There's a stack of new slates around the side to replace the many that are cracked and broken. The view from the top is amazing - so I'm told! You'd never get me up there in a million years. I don't do heights (a bad experience playing in derelict houses as a child - 4 storeys up and out on the roof when I put my foot through a rafter...), so I leave it to Andy to climb up these things and take the photographs! That's the Intercity West Coast mainline service you can see across the fields - we're about 10 minutes out of Crewe towards Liverpool. Both storeys and stories need structure. A...