Authors Electric

I’m a member of Juno, a women’s theatre group based around Salisbury, with a brief to work at correcting the gender imbalance in theatre.           Juno’s reach is mostly in Wiltshire and Dorset and I’m in Hampshire, but I just sneak in under the ‘within 30 miles of Salisbury’ rule. We are mostly writers, but several members have performance and directing backgrounds too. We make a lively contribution to Salisbury Fringe Festival – somehow not quite part of the ‘official’ Fringe, but there all the same, putting on our own shows alongside it. ‘Little Red Ella and the FGM’ was one such production. Several of us are also working on projects celebrating women in WW1 at present. We run workshops on writing for the theatre: site-specific, non-natural, political, comedy, for example. I’ve learned a lot.           Our most recent venture has just been on at the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis – a love...

          So, at the risk of touching upon an emotive and controversial Die's forthcoming book subject for my first Authors Electric post, I really need to talk about the treatment of women in horror (not to mention writing in general). This is a huge topic. I’m not even scratching the surface here.           Horror is no place for women.           Of course I’m saying that as an ‘outrageous opening statement’, similar to the recent and excellent New Statesman article ‘ I hate strong female characters ’. But I do mean it a little. Why any woman would want to bother writing in the horror genre considering the pernicious, outmoded sexism that’s rife in it is beyond me.           Every genre writer I’m sure is aware that (and I don’t want to blanket here, there are good examples out there; this is just ba...

I'm currently busy on the final draft of a new novel called Line Dancing, set in a small Scottish village, of the kind I have lived in for many years. I've been working my way steadily through a print-out of Line Dancing, correcting and rewriting as I go. I always like to do these late corrections on paper and then type them up afterwards, even though I write the first draft straight onto the computer, and follow that up with a great number of on-screen rewrites. While I've been doing this, I've been thinking about a previous novel, Bird of Passage . I suppose there are vague similarities, although Bird of Passage is much more of a family saga; a twentieth century historical novel  spanning some 50 years. On the other hand, if I had to place Line Dancing into any category, it would be 'contemporary women's fiction, romance with a literary twist'. It's a love story which tackles serious issues in a rural setting. And perhaps that's one reason why...

An earthquake sounds like a jumbo jet landing on the roof. An immense, relentless assault of noise - rattling, rumbling, shivering, cracking, quivering. In the walls, the ceiling, the windows and the ground. It goes on for ever and when it stops the stillness is thick as rock. It was 9 in the morning. We were a group of friends from seismically solid England spending a week in a Palladian villa in Vicenza. Our expectations for the day were nothing more challenging than agreeing which old towns to explore or where to have lunch. But now we were dashing out of our bedrooms and bathrooms, all calling out the same - obvious - question. Was that what I thought it was? Is everyone all right? We had no internet access, no way of pinging the outside world to check. As if it wasn’t clear anyway, for above our heads the heavy iron chandeliers were swinging. All of them, in every room, beat in slow, wide arcs. It took twenty minutes for them to stop. Gradually we got on with our day. In...

The seventeenth century Margaret Cavendish - one of the very first women writers to publish her own work -  was known as the Mad Duchess.  King Charles II is alleged to have described her as ‘an entire Raree-Show in her own person - a universal masquerade - indeed a sort of private Bedlam-hospital, her whole ideas being like so many patients crazed upon the subjects of love and literature’.  Although she lived like a nun, scribbling away in her study, so that even her ladies in waiting hardly saw her, she was still nicknamed ‘the Whore of Welbeck’.  Margaret was born in Colchester in 1623, the daughter of a wealthy gentleman. She had a very eventful life - living through the English civil war.  Her family home was razed to the ground by Cromwell's troops, her mother imprisoned,  two of her brothers killed, and she escaped to France to join the court of Queen Henrietta in Paris, where she met her husband.  She was only a gentleman's daughter, Newca...