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...

The Summer Reading Challenge, set up by the Reading Agency, has been running annually in UK libraries for over twenty years since 1999. Its purpose is to encourage primary school children to read 6 books throughout the summer holiday. For their efforts each child is rewarded with such delights as stickers and bookmarks. Finally, if the challenge is completed, they receive the ultimate prize of a medal and a certificate. This summer there is a sporty theme with the title Ready, Set, Read! Co-incidentally I found some medals in the draw recently for the Reading Planet. Reading Maze and Reading Rollercoaster. These are some of the earliest medals given out in 2002-2004 when my children were just beginning their own independent reading journeys. Visiting the library with my small children was such a delight, even when our home was already full of other books to read. The library had a copy of Chicken Licken which we didn’t have, it was probably the most frequently borrowed book for a tim...

Novelist Debbie Young shares thoughts from a country garden Have you ever been surprised at how few people know a word that you've always taken for granted? That happened to me this week when I was working my way through suggestions and queries raised on my current work-in-progress by my extremely helpful team of beta readers . Oh, and before we go any further, just in case you've never come across the term "beta reader", that's the book's equivalent to a test pilot - a pre-publication reader who offers feedback on a book prior to publication. A Harvest of Words Autumn story now available to pre-order The work in question is the second in my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries series of lighthearted classic cosy crime novels, Trick of Murder? This series will run the course of the village year from one summer to the next. Trick or Murder? spans October to November, thus incorporating both Halloween and Guy Fawkes' Night, and the tail end ...