Authors Electric

Writing as a writer (is there any other way?) I sometimes feel an irksome dissatisfaction that I’m just not getting enough. Enough exposure, if you know what I mean. I feel I should be, well, putting it out there a bit more than I do. I made the mistake of reading some statistics online. Apparently, most people in my peer group are managing it around two to three times a week. Some even more. A few energetic, dedicated souls are getting down to it every single day, for far longer and with more satisfying results (you can tell by the number of comments they get). But I’m among the growing number who find that they’re just too tired at the end of the day, or too busy, or just too disillusioned with the working relationship, to bare our souls on the internet very often. No, once a month is about as often as I can manage to write a blog post. There you were talking about sex, I thought you were talking about holidays. WALKS! I mean walks. Blogging can be an uncomfortabl...

Phenomena like the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy are a constant fascination to me. What they seem to show is that no one has any idea at all why some books take off and some don’t. Quality doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it at all. Crap novels become best sellers, wonderful novels become remainders. The big publishers throw money at some of their titles, and they still bomb. Word of mouth is meant to be king, yet everyone I know who has read Fifty Shades etc (or claims to have done so) is lukewarm. How many sold? Twenty million? Thus I now crave your indulgence as friends, real and virtual, to name two books by two authors you won’t have heard of, and give you tasters of their work. This is done, naturally, with their full permission, and I have absolutely no commercial interest in either of them. One is a friend called Margaret, the other a friend called John. John’s book is a police procedural called No Place for Dinosaurs, and the other a weird and wonderful shor...

I've just been re-reading Linda Newbery's post on editors and editing, and I think that, on the whole, I've been very lucky. For my earlier books with Walker, I worked with Wendy Boase, Anne Carter and later, Mara Bergman, and in nearly every case, the process of editing brought added richness to the stories. A really good editor is like a midwife (sorry, guys, but even you can be pregnant with a good story which might have to be eased into the world in the most appropriate way). For one YA book, THE GAME, the introduction of a new character was suggested. I kicked, screamed and objected, finally capitulated, experimented - et voila! Something  amazing happened (thank you, Anne). The next of my out of print YA Walker books to become available as an ebook  will be WOLFSONG. It's set in a big, ancient house in Brittany, a real house which played an important part in my own life - its name, 'Chanteloup', translating satisfyingly into WOLFSONG - the song of th...