Authors Electric

Below is the opening to my very first (unpublished and unpublishable) novel. It was lovingly hand-written in a fancy binder in about 1978 when I was fourteen. No computers back then and nobody even had typewriters at home. I got a manual typewriter when I was seventeen or so, as I recall. It was (is) a crime novel, inspired by a dream I had, and was written in the evenings when I wasn't particularly happy at school and didn't have much of a social life. I don't think I ever showed it to anybody except perhaps a girl at school who did type some of it up for me - although that may have been novel number two when I was seventeen. Neither novels have ever been edited and I've never attempted to submit them or self-publish. They're nowhere near good enough and being only fourteen would not have cut it! So I’ve typed this up exactly as it appears in my binder, which I still have in the filing cabinet. Every missed comma and dodgy sentence structure! I don't think I...

Last New Year I was in Sydney - apocalyptic fireworks! HAPPY NEW YEAR! This post should go live at midnight, some time after which my boyfriend and I will be heading back from our friends’ house party. When we arrive home we shall deploy the motley collection of objects I shall take with us or previously place near the front door step: a box of matches/lighter, a bottle of drink (usually whisky but could be wine or juice), some salt, a piece of wood/coal, and bread/something edible. We will make sure he goes into the house first, for he will be the 'first foot' through the door in 2015, carrying these objects representing fire, fuel, food and drink, with the hope that the whole year to come will see us well supplied with these essentials and therefore Good Luck. First-footing Kit - salt, coal, whisky and bread, aka the basics. When I was a bairn in the north east of England, New Year’s Eve was celebrated as much as it is in Scotland under the name of Hogmanay, t...

I’m afraid I’m not talking turkey gravy here, just another writerly conundrum. Do you ‘flatter your reader’ by letting them work out what’s going on, or just lay it on the line, loud and clear? This balancing act came to mind during the recently concluded TV drama The Missing ,  a gut-wrenching tale about the abduction of a five-year-old child and his father’s insistence on following up new clues eight years later when everyone thinks he should move on.  I’m not questioning the characterisation, the acting or even the labyrinthine plot, only the problem of keeping track of what was going on in a narrative that jumped backwards and forwards in time right up until the final denouement. At first we were told this with useful captions ‘present day’ or ‘eight years earlier’ but after a couple of episodes we were left to work it out.  Well that was fine up to a point, but because the locations and characters were the same in each time frame, some close observation was r...

     Our regular blogger for the 28th, Enid Richemont, is indisposed , so we're grateful to Kathleen Jones for bringing us this interview with thriller writer, Rachel Abbott.. . (and to Lynne Garner for scheduling it!) The Back Road -  Rachel Abbott I've just been reading Rachel Abbott's new thriller The Back Road , and I'm very impressed by it.  I'm also curious to know what's behind an Indie best-seller.  Rachel works very hard and is very professional and I'm anxious to learn as much as possible. 1.      Rachel, I know that - like me - you spend quite a lot of your working life in Italy.  Do you find it disruptive going to and fro?  How do you find the atmosphere of Italy affects your ability to work?  What are the drawbacks, from a research point of view, of being in one place and writing about another? When we found our home in Italy we were really fortunate because from the day...