Authors Electric

The Lion of Sole Bay Halloween has snuck up and jumped me from behind. Several months ago I was visiting my friends at Kessingland Primary School near Lowestoft when I received an invitation to call on the librarian (oh, okay, Resource Centre manager) at the nearby secondary school, Pakefield High. It's a newly-built school and I was keen to visit as I knew that most of the Year Six children I'd met at Kessingland would be moving on to Pakefield. The school is still in a state of construction but the Resource Centre was impressive and there was a lovely buzz from the some of the younger students who were off to a poetry competition in Norwich the following day. I was therefore delighted when I was invited to take part in a 'Literary Leap Day' scheduled for the autumn term. “We're planning some sort of ghostly / Halloween theme” said the manager, Linda. “Oh fine,” I responded blithely. “I'll have my new book out by then and that's sort of Halloween-...

How to make a coherent blog post out of my diverse writing-related experiences of the last few weeks - without resorting to a worn-out clich é of the kind favoured by politicians? Well, I'll try. I've just finished draft three (or is i t four ?) o f my sci-fi novel for adults and it's 'resting' (and improving, I hope, in the process...). I found it challenging to write, involving as it did an explor ation of the nature of consciousness, self, identity, cognition, coma, dreams... and the attempt to create a credible world of suitabl y advanced technologies for 2104. All that, plus a woman juggling children, separation, divorce and an academic career. Oh, and I should mention the ethics of artificial intelligence and robotics thrown in. Fun, but not particularly easy to write. Quite a relief to be able to lay it all aside for a few weeks and have a well-earned rest... Except that things never turn out that way. From nowhere, it seems, a new book has popp...

Me at a school Talking to classrooms full of schoolkids is part and parcel of being a children's writer these days. I've no idea how this came about - in my day, the very concept of an author coming into school would have seemed bizarre. Anyway, a lot of children's writers visit a lot of classrooms. For me, it's a joy. Truly. I should think 90% or more of visits to schools absolutely make my day, gladden my heart and restore my faith in humanity. School visits make it worthwhile putting up with all the practical, emotional and financial rigours that the jobbing writer endures. As the end of the school year rapidly approaches, here are my personal thoughts on the subject, as distilled from loads and loads of schlepping around the country and trying to hold 10-year-olds spellbound for 45 minutes... It does get easier . When I started going to schools, I wasn't terribly good at the whole keeping-'em-spellbound stuff. Er, OK, to be brutally honest, I bomb...

A month ago, after twenty years in publishing, I launched my first e-book. Now it's feedback time. Three words spring to mind when I ask myself how it went. Panic. Exhilaration. Exhaustion. In that order. Even the most careful planning can go awry. Everything was lined up to happen at the push of a button. Book launched on Kindle, click . New look Pauline Fisk website launched with fabulous new ‘Midnight Blue’ artwork, click . Authors Electric posting launched entitled ‘Why Now, Why an E-Book and Why Kindle’, click . Mailshot launched to two hundred and fifty addresses, click . But you can’t launch anything without the internet. At five in the morning [yes, so keen was I to get launching that I was up at five] I was to be found on the phone to a BT engineer trying to figure out what had gone wrong. After an hour of phone calls back and forth, involving crawling under my desk, pulling out plugs and reinstating them and being sent to obscure corners of my computer to click the ‘...