Authors Electric

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post, or even dedicate much time to writing. IT issues, both parents ending up in hospital at different times and needing help, coupled with increased work pressures mean I’ve barely written anything for the last six months. Things are settling, though, finally. Parents on the mend, work settled, and have a new laptop all configured with backups restored at last; I got the last few pieces sorted out over the Easter weekend and can now return to scratching that itch I get when I don’t write for a while. On the plus side, I’ve got a notebook full of random jottings I’ve managed to get on paper, and feel sure there’ll be something in there I can use in future work. I’ve not been completely dormant, though. I’m around 10k words from revising the third draft of my Young Adult adventure set in the Middle East. (As a wee side note, my wife has pointed out that my timing is impeccable – I was gearing up to launch a dystopian YA adventure set a few ...

I’ve come to the conclusion I’m either prescient, or just suffer from incredibly bad timing. Or, perhaps, it’s neither, but a form of pareidolia. Back in early March 2020, I put the finishing touches to my first Young Adult novel. The plan was to work out a plan to do some pre-launch marketing, try and build up some pre-orders, basically all the usual stuff we do as writers when we have a new book coming out. (I use the term book loosely, to include chapbooks, poetry collections, short stories, and so on.) I’d sketched out a few drafts of what I thought would make a good cover, worked on the blurb, written a synopsis, and was all good to go. A week later, we went into lock-down as Covid cases began to skyrocket. Normally, this would be a gift to a writer – all that time at home to write. (You’d think, anyway, but that’s a post for another time.) My average commute was around an hour each way – I never considered it totally wasted as I often cycled and used the time to let my sub-cons...

I'm into a trio of print books at present, all borrowed from the Barbican Library. THE STORY OF MR SOMMER, a short, beautifully written/translated novel by Patrick Suskind, with exquisite illustrations by Sempe was both moving and haunting - just one of those books you can't forget. Jeanette Winterson's fantasy based on Noah and the flood makes an amusing contrast, and I have yet to savour the third - JUSTINE, by Alice Thompson... I've already dipped into its descriptions though - the sort of lavish and visual poetic prose I lap up. There is a difficult-to-define difference between reading on my Kindle and reading a print book. All three print books are paperbacks, and so have rather springy pages which is annoying for breakfast reading - one hand on the coffee mug and the other on the book. There's also a subtle difference for me, as a writer, between reading/working on screen, and reading my eventual print-outs, and I do wonder if there is a similar one for p...

In 2003 I was asked to work on a project to help promote a local cultural venue called Aklowa. It was an African village in the middle of the Hertfordshire countryside, within minutes of Stansted Airport. A friend's friend, Felix Cobson had set it up some twenty years before. Originally born in Ghana Felix moved to the UK and had spent his life teaching children about African heritage. This included traditional clothing, cooking, music, crafts and stories. This is where I came in. I started my writing career writing for craft magazines. So I was asked to write a book that would appeal to children about African crafts. Knowing little about the subject I jumped at the chance to visit Ghana. I spent a wonderful week with friends visiting villages known for their pottery making, Adinkra block printing and Kente strip weaving. I also visited markets and talked to the makers of musical instruments and carvers of masks. Based on this trip I created a synopsis and approached The British Mu...

Before I start: hello! This is my first post as a member of Authors Electric and very delighted I am to have been accepted into the group. Thanks to everyone. In a few months, I'm releasing the ebook version of my very first teenage novel - Mondays are Red, which was originally published in 2002 and is now out of print. I'm doing it jointly with my ever-supportive and patient agent and the question we have is a rather basic one: do teenagers buy ebooks? I hope so! Today and tomorrow, I'm going to be asking them. I'm speaking at the Appledore Festival in Devon, with a family event on Sunday and school events on Monday. This won't be the first time I've asked teenagers this question but it's the first time the answer is going to be terribly important. Here's what I've learnt from the few (probably too few to be significant?) times in recent months that I have asked: When I ask a mixed group whether they have ever read a book or part of an eboo...

I wonder how other authors feel when their books are finished? For me, each time a book is submitted to the publisher after the final revisions, I have a sense of parting with it, knowing that I’ll never again “live” in that book as I did while writing it. Reading the published book isn’t the same at all; in fact, if I do so at all, it's with trepidation, fearing the discovery of some toe-curling mistake, or at the very least something I want to change. Preparing The Damage Done for its e-edition gave me the rare chance to live in a book again, and one of my favourites. I revised it for things that have become outdated (Kirsty listening to her Walkman; people smoking in a pub or waiting for dial-up internet connections) but also made numerous small tweaks, taking a word out here, adding a few there, all so surreptitious that probably no one but me will ever notice. Doing this, I experienced the enjoyment of writing all over again. Especially, I had fun with Kirsty’s father, G...