Authors Electric

  I’m a great one for mislaying my mobile, which set me musing recently about our attitude to our phones. Some time ago I was faced with the prospect of having to go into town  WITHOUT MY PHONE as Mike was expecting a call from the clinic and they had my mobile number not his. The horror of this situation did not bear thinking about, so plan B had to be put into action: i.e. I would have his phone and he would have mine, so any emergency I might have to deal with on a fifteen minute walk to the library could be coped with. If this all sounds somewhat over dramatic, it shows how reliant we are on these devices.   Years ago, you went shopping, or out for the day, or even away for a weekend, or on holiday, without feeling the need to have the means of instant communication at your fingertips. Of course there were times when being able to summon help was useful. I remember coming back from swimming one evening with my three kids in the car and having a puncture on a l...

“The Awesome Adventures of Poppy and Amelia” would never have happened if it hadn’t been for lockdown. In those first couple of months, like so many writers, I found working on my current book very slow going.   A day’s work felt like ploughing through porridge. Very little got done and what I did write had somehow lost its flow. The impetus to write had also faded and most days I found it almost impossible to get going. Nothing much seemed to matter. While other people re-decorated, caught up with DIY or re-modelled their gardens I let the time slip past. Except for my four times a week Skype lessons with granddaughter Maddy. At the start of lockdown all grandparents had been roped in to help with home schooling and my brief was to deliver her English lessons. Having been a teacher in a middle school as well as in secondary education, this wasn’t going to be too hard. Or so I thought. Working through what the school had sent, however, was far from simple. No blame here t...

As a writer, when things get too difficult, I can escape into another world. Recently I have spent a good deal of time with Letty Parker, in an alternative Victorian Bristol. Like its nineteenth century model this is a place of stark contrasts between rich and poor. The Downs are lined with the mansions of the rich, while the threat of the workhouse looms over those who can barely scrape a living to feed themselves and their families. Letty starts off making a living selling pies. She is twelve years old and prides herself on being an independent business woman. Her friends are the street children. They are the pickpockets, the burglars, the runners for the criminal gangs that are operated by Miss Liddy and The Bear. Having divided the city between them, the gangs keep to their own territory. To stray over the boundary is to risk a stabbing, or to be thrown into the river for the eels to devour. The eels that slide up from the river to coil in dark corners awaiting th...

Well, the secret I've had to hold back on for two years is now out, as, if you follow me on Facebook, you'll already know. The modest film deal I've referred to from time to time was based on my first children's novel, THE TIME TREE, published by Walker Books in the early Nineties, and a first for them, too, as it was the first time they'd published a children's novel. The book stayed in print for ages, and seemed to grab people in a very special way. It's a time-slip story - a magical encounter, via an ancient oak tree, between two contemporary eleven year old girls, and a profoundly deaf Elizabethan girl of the same age. It's a book that grabbed a very close friend who works in the media, and who had always seen it as a film (I didn't) so she pushed me into writing a screenplay with a number of plot extensions and developments, which was challenging and exciting. Writing for the screen is SO very different from writing a novel, because the who...

From ghosties and ghoulies and long leggerty beasties, And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us ... Yes, the witching season is upon us once again this month! If you're looking for something both seasonal and canine, might I recommend Haunting Hounds? Although I don't normally make a habit of plugging my books here in such an in-your-face manner, I will make an exception for this one, as it's in aid of a really good cause:  50% of all royalties are going to Scruples Whippet Rescue , which does a wonderful job of rescuing and helping to find new homes for whippets in need. It was really good fun to write; and although it's a little bit tongue in cheek in places, there are a couple of stories that really gave me goosebumps when researching them, such as the tale of the Newgate Black Dog and that of fighter pilot Guy Gibson's Labrador who became the mascot for the Dam Busters squadron.     As well as o...

'Ghost Dance' by Susan Price.  Cover by Andrew Price           'Outside the circle, where the candlelight edged into darkness, two figures stood in talk, a man and a devil.            The man… (says the cat) was Master Richard Jenkins, an Englishman and a wizard.           The devil was a red and furry devil, its fur rippling in the candlelight like red velvet. Its tail had an arrow's point on the end, and was long, and coiled and bounced like a spring as the devil moved. Its head was fearsome, large and round with staring, glittering eyes and ram's horns; and all around its head and shoulders hung a shimmering red mist.           'Are you listening to me?' said Master Jenkins to the devil… 'Take off the head when I talk to you!'          The devil… wrenched...

THE GHOST DRUM by Susan Price           Susan Price has been a professional writer since she was 16, and has published 60 books, with Faber, Black, Hodder, Scholastic, OUP and CUP, among others.  She is now self-publishing, and her books are available as downloads from Amazon .           '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!... 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.’           The cat is the ‘...