Authors Electric

When I was a child, I wrote lists. Huge, long lists. I would have been about ten or so and I was the kid who handed in ten pages of story at school, when everybody else had written one or two. I liked writing, even back then. I'd even ask for extra homework if it was story-writing. But those lists. They were names. Made-up girls’ names – class registers for imaginary schools, and I’d painstakingly create all these little girls and then put the list in alphabetical order, miss one out and have to start all over again. I went through a lot of writing paper back then. I don’t know why I did it and I can’t even claim these were story characters as I never did anything else with them other than sort them into lists. But I was obsessed with them. I'd be teacher, reading the class register aloud. My parents used to take my brother and I around stately homes and castles when we were children. Now this did fire my imagination as I could be living there, coming down that staircase, eatin...

What I'm about to describe is not my usual way of editing and certainly not particularly recommended! Still, it seems to have worked this time. I had been worried all along that I wouldn't get the 29th novel in my mystery series finished before being summoned into hospital for my heart surgery. I worried that if I had to have a long break from writing, I would completely forget where I was going with the story, and the whole thing would turn out as disjointed as one of my previous novels in the series, the one entitled 'Unrelated Incidents' because that was more or less what the plot consisted of. Fortunately this title fitted in with those of some others in the same series ('Unpredictable Events' and 'Unsafe Distances', for instance). I have just completed this latest one, and edited and published it in record time, thanks to a more or less unexpected combination of circumstances. As I write this, there is still no sign of a message from the hospital, w...

    The hosta that grows in a pot near my kitchen door. The pink petals have fallen from the climbing rose above. I was told that hostas grow best in damp, shady places and don't like growing in pots. I suspect I was told wrong because this hosta is living its best life-- in a pot, in the sunniest, warmest spot in my garden.  It's starting shooting up arcs of delicate, bell-shaped, lavender coloured flowers.  Another view of my garden in all its scruffyness. Seed trays piled on the bench. A watering bucket making the place look untidy.    This peaony -- paeony -- peony is called 'Bowl of Beauty.' No argument from me. And it's a sight easier to spell than 'peony'.     The herb trough - marjoram, thyme, sage -- and a tiny olive tree poking up at far right. It is now covered in miniscule yellow flowers.  The yellow flag in the pond.  The roses, hanging in swags from their broken arch. Light through hazel leaves, and the roses... Writing? I ...

brooch from a writing course goodie bag Sometimes as a writer it is essential to be selfish, especially for those who are carving out a writing career in between paid employment and family life. I am fortunate in many ways that my circumstances allow me to write whenever and wherever I can, but there are still times when I need to prioritise my own writing above everything else or I will never publish another book. “You can’t be a one hit wonder!” said my brother at my book launch. Well actually, I can if that one book has scratched an itch and fulfilled my dreams, but I want to write another and another after that. I scour my to do list for the things that I can drop rather than juggle this month. Sadly, writing for the Author Electric blog is being cut this month. I won’t say sorry but instead offer some advice – sometimes it is not only good to say NO to things but it is essential. Sometimes it takes many years to develop this wisdom, but at the age of 57 I’ve almost cra...

April has usually been my favourite month, partly because of the rapidly lengthening hours of daylight and partly because my birthday falls in approximately the middle of it, around the time of the anniversaries of the Lincoln assassination, the sinking of the Titanic and the Battle of Culloden!  So far April 2023 has been the worst April of my life, with a broken hip landing me in hospital for the first half of the month, but I must admit April 2025 wasn't one of the great Aprils either. This was partly because we had three committee meetings instead of just one, and one of them was actually held on my birthday, partly because the pollen count was particularly high and partly because I found myself - not entirely accidentally - working on two novels at the same time. I had started the month determined to finish the Regency novel set in Cornwall which I had started around Christmas, because I was beginning to hate it, which is usually a sign I have spent too long on something. Fort...

  People who’ve read previous posts of mine will know I have a deep love of music, primarily classical but other genres as well. It forms a permanent soundtrack to my life, and provides a palette of colours as a background. See, I have synaesthesia. I ‘see’ colours when I hear music (well, all sound, really, but music is much more overt). It’s not something I’ve spent much about – I was in my twenties before I realised it wasn’t the normal state of being for people, and that it had a specific name. All I knew up to then was it was easy to tell when my guitar was in tune as each open string was a specific colour. I say I ‘see’ the colours, but that’s probably a simplification. It’s not the same as seeing something visually, as closing my eyes makes no difference – I still get the same images as I do with eyes open. It was earlier this year, when the BBC Proms were on, when my wife discovered that when I talked about the different colours of the music, I was being lite...

 Alicia Sammons I worked as an editor for the better part of my too long professional career. Editing can be demanding, but I never thought of it as a particularly glamourous or creative calling. Over the years I climbed my way up from proofreader to senior editorial positions on magazine, major metropolitan newspapers, and editing for independent publisher.  I always felt in awe of writers and aspired to their magic with words, an assessment shared in popular culture. We see a lot of juicy movies about authors like The Hours and Midnight in Paris. On the other hand, editors can't get much respect even from their writers, including a few authors with whom I've worked.  Vladimir Nabokov  sneered at them as ‘pompous avuncular brutes.’  Robert Gottlieb edited books of  Joseph Heller ,  John Le Carré ,  John Cheever , and  Toni Morrison . The legendary Maxwell Perkins  edited and famously mentored Lost Generation icons F. Scott Fitzgerald ...

Because social media and the trials and tribulations associated with using the various options loom large in the novel I'm currently writing, I thought I would share what's been happening with my own social media accounts. They haven't caused me quite as much trouble as my characters are having in the novel, but I must admit to finding aspects of them a little baffling/annoying/anxiety-inducing just lately. I've been using Twitter (X) and Facebook for some time. Although Twitter has been horrible lately in many ways, there are still some nice things about it. For instance at the time of writing I've just taken part in a hectic and very friendly discussion there with other writers and readers about cosy mysteries, using a hashtag to group all the relevant posts together. And then there are the cat and dog accounts, of course! I see that recently many of these have also appeared on other platforms, so I'm fairly confident that if/when I give up on Twitter I will s...

A couple of days ago, I was watching The Truman Show, and it made me think how much writers have in common with the character of Cristof. If you have never seen the film, it is the story of how the 'creator' (Christof) of a major Television show and the network adopted an unwanted baby, (Truman) who unwittingly becomes the star of his own life on the long running show. The God(of the media)/man/free-will analogy is very clear, and what is magical about this film is the way it highlights the true resilience and unending curiosity - the need to explore - possessed by humans. Truman is safe in his bubble, but he need to embark on a quest for adventure. He literally breaks pout of his bubble and fee will wins out. But it got me thinking about the power authors have to manipulate both character and reader alike. Like Christof, as a writer of stories, I manufacture entire worlds and create characters who have lives, loves and adventures. I can put my characters through the wringer, m...

March must be the month for poetry as I see Peter Leyland posted something About Poetry on Saturday, I do hope you will allow me to add my own thoughts and memories... Poetry can take many forms from sonnets to Limericks, Haiku to Villanelle (OK I confess I’m not really sure of the structure for a Villanelle – didn’t she want to kill Eve?} I digress, and I might meander even more as I write this in a lyrical style as poems are often written Hmm I wonder what actually constitutes a poem?  I’m loathed to look up a definition, Google will undoubtedly bamboozle me. Poems can be highbrow and esoteric or about the mundane and everyday – I wrote one once about belly button fluff – more about that later… I started writing poetry early and here’s one of my early efforts from primary school. I also remember writing one at BIG school about a dolls house, I vividly recall reading it out in class, it had a repeated refrain which everyone joined in with. I was in year 7, or first ...

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,...

I can always remember when I bought my first 'word-processor', a clunky Amstrad, because I was then  working on the final rewrites of Ghost Drum. The book had already been accepted for publication by Faber. These edits were something like the twelfth or thirteenth rewrite. Before I'd even sent it to my agent, I'd rewritten all of it from beginning to end, several times, and different parts of it, many times more. As my brother once said, "Writers don't write. They rewrite." The latest Ghost Drum cover Oddly, the opening paragraphs, often one of the most difficult to get right, were almost unchanged from the start. I'd 'written' them in my head during long walks and bus-rides, learning them by heart, before I ever began writing the book on paper. Through all the rest of the rewriting, they hardly changed. In a place far distant from where you are now, grows an oak-tree by a lake.  R ound the oak's trunks is a chain of golden links. Tethere...

  Picture is an overhead shot of many swimmers swimming in blue water with the word "PRACTICE" floating among them Practice is to do something in a low-stakes environment that we will later do in a higher-stakes environment. Or so said the eighth-grade choir director when I was in eighth-grade choir. He encouraged us to keep singing, at home, in the shower, walking to school, to continue to turn each song into a well-oiled machine before we stood on stage in our long robes. I took him very seriously, and by the time the concert came I was very well-oiled.  This morning, for my first post of 2024, I got up before 6 am. I made coffee, fed the cats and the Guinea pigs, closed the bedroom door very firmly and quietly on the dog and my sleeping spouse, and sat down with my laptop in my lap, coffee by my side. I'm not thirteen anymore.  This means that there are pets to feed, and soon a child to wake and feed and layer with coats and bags and scarves and books and load into a c...