Authors Electric

  If that's the view from the front door, I'm staying in. That Storm Goretti was some storm.    And that's the view from the back door. It weighed down and broke my rose arch.            Still....   The Ghost Drum My story is set (says the cat) in a far-away Czardom, where the winter is a cold half-year of darkness.         In that country the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice. The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky! In the north of that country all the winter is one long night, and all that long night long, the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight.      In winters there, the cold is so fierce the frost can be heard crackling and snapping as it travels through the air. The snow is so deep that...

Either because of  an inevitable slowing down that comes with age, or because of various seasonal factors, it has taken me far longer than I wanted to finish the edits for my latest novel. Of course I hope it's just the latter, and in fact I do have a full set of excuses to hand, ranging from having to collate and send out the paperwork for an AGM held inexplicably in mid-December, to the largest radiator in the house having sprung a leak about the same time, just as the weather turned colder and we had a series of winter storms. Because of the resulting low temperatures downstairs in our house I have had to spend more time upstairs than usual, and as a result of this I've almost never had the right computer in the right place with all the notebooks, diaries etc that I rely on to keep myself on track. At the time of writing the heating engineers have just replaced the radiator with a very nice new one so I am hoping that's the signal for my brain to come out of hibernation,...

 Most of my novels, even the ones with murders in them, end up being rather lightweight and frothy, no matter how much I try to introduce serious topics. Incidentally, the same kind of thing has always tended to happen on the occasions when I have presented a paper at a work-related conference. In one case, the colleague with whom I co-wrote the paper but who was unable to attend the conference himself, gave me strict instructions not to make people laugh. Needless to say a colleague from another organisation came up to me at the end of the presentation and said, ‘I did enjoy your paper – it was so funny.’ However, I’ve recently realised that during these dark days of late autumn and winter, my writing has taken a darker turn. It isn’t so much that the murders have become more gruesome or the peril faced by the main characters is more terrifying, but that I’ve given the characters moral dilemmas to try and resolve. This year in particular there seems to be a theme to the moral ...

    Image credit:   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frost_patterns_2.jpg When I was young our house was freezing in winter -- literally. There used to be ice on the inside of the windows. This was because we lived in a council house built in 1954 which, although well appointed for its time, had no insulation, no central heating and only single-glazed windows. In winter, the heating was a fire in the living-room which didn't even heat that room very well. (The part of you nearest the fire was roasted; the part of you furthest away was cold.) There was a fire-grate in the front-room, but it was hardly ever used. The upstairs rooms had no heating and the cold up there could be -- often was -- bitter . We lived, as I still do, on top of the Rowley Hills. My Dad often observed that there was no higher point between us and the Urals and the east wind blew to us straight from Siberia. Going straight through us, of course, not bothering to go round. But Jack Frost use...

I have a very active Forgettery. We all have one of these - a place where we store idealised images, like an album into which we post nothing disagreeable or upsetting. The perfect summer is always in there - the blue skies, the flowers, the lavish picnic without squabbles, sweat or wasps, the turquoise pool into which perfect children jump and splash quite noiselessly, the perfect affair between a couple of unbelievably beautiful people with sungold skin - remember those two? Thought it would never end, but it did. Endings have no place in the Forgettery, though, so it doesn't show. Most people have lengthy summer sections in their Forgetteries - after all, who wants winter, unless you ski, and even then, things look better when the sun is shining, don't they? I, however, am a winter person. I like a bit of drama in my weather, and I enjoy the cold and seeing my breath clouding in the air, and the pleasure of coming into a warm house afterwards, books, TV, and maybe a whisk...