Authors Electric

In response to popular demand (thanks, Griselda!) I’ve decided this month’s post will be a sequel to the one published here last month, when I was wrestling with various ideas for presenting something about my suffragette great-aunt, Janet McCallum (‘Auntie Jenny’) at an International Women’s Day event. Extract from a Daily Mirror report (1908) First of all, my session didn’t go entirely as planned. Not that I had planned it exactly, since I wasn’t at all sure how many people would turn up or what the technological facilities might consist of on the day. Or perhaps I might be kinder to myself and claim I had planned for all eventualities! One thing I hadn’t anticipated was that people didn’t really understand the programme for the event, which lasted just over half a day in all. There were some things such as ‘crafts and coffee’ that ran throughout the whole event, and some things that theoretically only lasted half an hour or so. What really happened was that people wandered from on...

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...

 At the moment I have a novel project well under way, so naturally I am prey to various other distractions, such as watching a tv series I like to think of as 'Climbing Amazingly Colossal Buildings', writing up the minutes for a meeting from a couple of weeks ago in time for the next meeting which has arrived more quickly than I expected, and setting up a new youth page on my local community centre website. So of course I've also volunteered to take part in a local event for International Women's Day. I didn't really intend to do this, but I talked myself into it because my suffragette great-aunt has been on my mind lately, which in turn is because her name has somehow got on to the shortlist to have a new school named after her. I had better not mention where the school is or what the exact circumstances have been, as her shortlisting has turned out to be somewhat contentious for various reasons.  When I volunteered, I suppose I had imagined giving a presentation...

I love the adventure of writing a novel. I've heard it said that it is like driving with dipped headlights: enough light to see for the next few yards, trusting that, if you just keep going, there will be road enough ahead to take you to your destination.  When I first tried creative writing, I expected to be able to produce some short stories and a poem or two, maybe some memoir stuff. But not a whole novel. 'I could never imagine a whole plot,' I said to my writing tutor. 'You don't have to,' said she. 'Create some characters and they will tell you the story.' I thought this highly unlikely - and I accept that it probably is so for some authors - but was amazed to find that it does work for me. A few weeks ago, I started my fifth novel. I knew it was going to be a time travel one, with some modern characters and some from a hundred years ago. I knew the name of one of the characters because it was finding out about her (my great-grand...

I suppose as a writer I think about terminology quite a lot, and in fact in my day job as a database manager and general data wrangler I do this even more, although mostly when trying to prevent other database users from creating lots of different terms for the same thing and thereby making it impossible to search the database with any hope of success. In the past few days, events have conspired to make me look more closely at the words 'suffragist' and 'suffragette', and the difference between them. I don't think I had given much thought to this before, having accepted the usual story that suffragettes were the militant ones whose desire for the vote caused them to set fire to things and annoy people, while suffragists wanted the vote but weren't prepared to die - or kill - for it. There was also the fact that men could be suffragists, but not suffragettes. When I consulted some online dictionaries, I found that the word 'suffragist' dated from the 1...

This month marks the centenary of the first policewoman appointed in Scotland . She was Emily Miller who was appointed to the City of Glasgow police force on 6th September 1915. She remained Scotland ’s only official policewoman until 1918, when the City of Dundee appointed Mrs Jean Thomson. The history books and records are often loath to acknowledge these early women were policewomen. Depending on what source you research they can be described as statement takers, court sisters, police sisters, and a variety of other titles. However, the statistics firmly record them as policewomen, as does the Baird Report, an official government review into the employment of women for police duties, which reported in 1920. Scotland was a bit behind the times in accepting a woman into the police, because the first women’s police service came into being a year earlier in 1914, and many of the first policewomen were former suffragettes. The two main suffragette organisations, the WSPU (W...

When I researched my new novel The Death Game which is set in 1919 Dundee I came across some interesting facts. The main character of my novel is the first policewoman in Dundee, and in the process of researching the origins of women police I came across many fascinating details. Did you know? 1 – The first women’s police service was formed by the suffragette organisations in 1914 when they abandoned their militant actions on the commencement of the First World War. 2 – There were two women’s police services in London at this time. The first of these was the Women’s Police Volunteers which later became the Women’s Police Service. The second service was the Voluntary Women Patrols. 3 – Between 1914 to 1918 the women’s police service was voluntary, although they worked closely with the official police forces. 4 – In 1918 the Commissioner of the Police, Sir Nevil Macready, appointed one of the voluntary services as an official women’s police force. Interestingly, h...