Authors Electric

It was birthday earlier this month. Here's my birthday present from my younger brother and sister: Adam the ambulance worker and silver-smith-cartoonist and Patti, the cat-scan, x-ray and MRI scan operator, camera-woman and charming hostess. There's an unexpected use of vinegar and hard-boiled eggs. Creating the Sterkarm Badge The pesky new posting board for Blogger won't, as far as I can find out, allow me to preview the video. If it won't play, follow this link:-- https://youtu.be/noTUQ42zNgw Haven't managed to meet up with Adam and Patti yet but I'm delighted with my birthday present and look forward to being able to display my gratitude to the Sterkarm Riding Family whose reiving has kept me in whisky for a good many years. The Sterkarm Trilogy by Susan Price Susan Price has won the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Fiction Award and has twice been short-listed for the Whitbread. Find out more at her website.

A year ago I wrote a rather contemplative blog post about a new venture I’d embarked on – editing an anthology of short stories by a dozen authors inspired by the subject of my own two books , namely King Richard III . Demonized particularly by Shakespeare (following St Thomas More and other writers keen to pander to the dynastic requirements of their Tudor overlords), King Richard wasn’t of course much like the grotesque portrait that’s long been painted of him – and many modern writers are keen to provide their own take on his life and character. My blog post can be found at https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2018/11/dotting-is-editors-role-alex-marchant.html and focuses in particular on the process of editing other people’s fiction writing – something that I found very different from the more practical style of copyediting I’ve long practised in my day job. But it was a process I enjoyed – together with collaborating with a number of other authors with similar in...

One of the great things about the self-pubbing revolution is the re-appearance of many out-of-print books and the opportunity to get reacquainted with past favourites without breaking the bank by having to pay through the nose for battered seen-much-better-days secondhand copies … Equally exciting, is when the enthusiastic response to the re-appearance of those books then leads to some terrific new fiction being produced – Caroline Akrill’s The Last Baronet being a great example of this. Like many other readers, I was a huge fan of her teenage and Young Adult fiction during the seventies and eighties, and rather sadly assumed that since then she had more or less given up writing activities. Well, the good news is that she is not only back, but on top form – and at least a part of the reason is down to self-publishing. To cut a long story short, a couple of years ago, after finding that her books weren’t available as eBooks I contacted her asking (well, demanding really) that she...