Authors Electric

  Hello everyone. I wanted to write today about where I got my inspiration for Irin Solis, the first character that you meet in my debut novel, Sisterhood. The name Irin means ‘peace’ and the surname Solis means ‘comfort’. I thought that together they would be a good fit for someone descended from a midwife. The birthing of babies has always been womans’ work. As far back as records go women have delivered the babies of their sisters, daughters and friends. They were usually women who were mothers themselves and so they attended these births with knowledge and compassion. Traditionally, the treatment of illness, injuries, pre and postnatal care, were not seen as a profession. The cures and remedies were part of the culture of the area and passed down from mother to daughter and shared between certain women in the community, especially those with a knowledge of herbs and plants. The human body was not understood scientifically and so old wives tales and superstitions in the form of ...

Malefice , the novel I for adults that I wrote in the very early nineties and which I have just self-published on the Kindle platform, is the story of a witch who was prosecuted and hanged in the seventeenth century, and my inspiration for it was the simple thought: I want to write a novel about a witch. The reason it's set in the seventeenth century is that the only local witch prosecution I could find out about was in Waltham St Lawrence parish register: "Mabel modwyn widowe abact 68 years old arraigned for witch craft at Redding 29th Feb: and condemned on the 5th of March, 1655. Shee lived at ye south-wist cornr. of lower Innings in ye cornr. next to Binfield" I changed the name of the village, and the witch; I was definitely writing for adults, and Mabel sounded a bit like The Worst Witch . Alice Slade, my witch would be called, and the village would be Whitchurch St Leonard. I did a lot of research; I always do for my novels, and I found out that the ...