Authors Electric

  Puma Three and a half years ago I had two cataract operations. I wasn’t happy with the first one, but was told I was worrying about nothing, it would resolve itself in a few weeks,  so I went ahead with the second op on the right eye, which was fine. My left eyelid was drooping, and cutting out light, which meant I could only read on a Kindle as I could alter the brightness and the size of the font. You can’t enlarge illustrations, or tables, or maps, which becomes increasingly frustrating and has a real impact on your understanding of certain books. My optician diagnosed ptosis, but warned me that consultants do not listen to opticians. How true that became. commissioned illustration for playing cards, that never went on sale Consultant after consultant told me I was imagining my poor vision, as if I forced my eye as open as wide as possible I could see perfectly well. Keeping it open was a different matter altogether. The worst response of all was from a consultant renowne...

Like you, I play many parts in the writing of a book: part plotter, part pantser, part craftsman, part laborer, part artist, and part klutz. And I accept myself as all of those. But so far I've never been able to see myself as a gifted promoter--or even a mildly competent one. When I finished a book, I moved on to the next with half-hearted touts on Facebook and Twitter/X. I've steered clear of giveaway events as well as interviews. My shyness or aversion stems, I think, from my Catholic upbringing--where the flames of hell were never far from shameless self-promotion.  But in the six years spent on my WIP, I learned some exciting new narrative footwork. Result: a new kind of crime thriller unlike anything else I've done. Ans I've developed a burning ambition to share this book with readers I've never managed to reach. And this will require mastering new footwork once again--this time in marketing and self-promotion. For months I've worked on expanding and stren...

  “So where do we go from here? At what point will the Kafkaesque tenor of our lives return to something approaching normality? Who knows? Up until this point the journey has been both fascinating and harrowing. All I can do is wait and hope.” This is what I wrote a year ago, when I posted about Mike’s sudden descent into delirium and the pressure I felt from the health professionals to put him in some sort of care. The implication being that I wouldn’t be able to cope with someone who spent the nights raving and whose behaviour at times was akin to that of a three year old the midst of a temper tantrum. Their prognosis was bleak, but I simply couldn’t abandon a husband of over three decades without at least trying to see if we could find a way of living together. And over the past twelve months this is what we have done. There were ground rules. The first being that I had to be able to sleep, so there would be no more shouting all night, because if he did then I would be...

When we write novels, we often imagine an ideal reader, someone smart, curious, and eager to dive into our worlds. But there’s an important fact many authors overlook: the  average  American adult reads at about a seventh to eighth grade level. And more than half of U.S. adults read below a sixth grade level. That doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy complex stories, but it does mean that overly dense prose or elaborate sentence structures can make a book harder to access. If you use Microsoft Word, the built-in Editor can give you a readability score based on the  Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level . This tells you the U.S. school grade needed to understand your text on first read. A score of “8” means the average eighth grader could easily follow it. You can turn this feature on in  File → Options → Proofing → Show Readability Statistics  after running a spelling and grammar check. Another measure you may hear about is the  Lexile Framework for Reading . The Lexile scor...

witness chair & lawyer's desk I walk up the shallow steps into the oddly anonymous building for the last time. For the last time the doorman opens the big glass door, smiles and greets me and I smile back, embarrassed and grateful for one last time. He’s the staff. He works here along with the friendly lady who hands me my badge and the cheerful people who see me through security and volunteer to look after my extra bag until the session’s over. They are all Black whereas most of us, arriving now, are white. This makes me feel awkward as if we’re playing out some unchosen stereotype. I’m invariably grateful to them for their kindliness and reassurance, for their welcome.  Several people are arriving with suitcases. This is the last day of hearings for Module 6 (social care) of the UK-COVID 19 Inquiry and lawyers from across the UK are poised to hurry away to catch their trains or planes home. Before they go they'll be offering their closing submissions. These are summarie...

 It was a 'sliding doors' moment. If you've seen the film then you'll know it's a 'what if' moment. What if Gywneth Paltrow had caught the train and what if she hadn't. For some, it's incredibly serious - waking up late for work in New York on September 11th 2001 or, more recently, denied boarding an Air India plane.  For me, the 'what if' relates to my grandfather. He emigrated to Canada in 1921, aged 20, to work on the railways. A family member in the UK became very ill so he returned for her. He then stayed, met my grandmother and the rest is history. But what if he hadn't returned? Obviously, I wouldn't have been born. There would have been another wife, other children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. My grandfather died when I was six. I didn't really know him but the desire to go to Canada - to see the land where he had been - has always been strong. This summer, I finally went there with my family. We had a whirlwind to...

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...