Authors Electric

I went to a charity folk festival last week (as Teresa May might say, I'm not making this up) but not, for once, to play slow Irish airs on my whistle. I donated my "services" as a children's author to help raise funds to save the Barlow Memorial Institute in the Lancashire village of Edgworth from the cuts. It's Cameron's Pig Society, innit? Good fun it was, too - worth every penny that I didn't get. The assembled children were suitably shocked and delighted by the adventures of Wagstaffe the Wind-up Boy, and some of their parents were suitably horrified by some of its content, as well as Roy Bentley' s wonderfully gruesome pictures. {Above and below you can see Carl Grose as Waggie in Kneehigh Theatre's lovely version. I'd have done captions, but computer says no, due to my technical incompetence, no doubt.} Anyway, the Edgworth folk festival started with a specially written poem, and - inevitably - I was featured in it as a woman. An...

Well, we've tried all we can, we've got them this far after obeying every instruction there is and now they're here, they won't budge. We went in the end for the line of least resistance; three covers in a row over the top of the page. And this is the nearest we could get. Ah well, at least you can see them and, if you're still watching, relate them to the extracts in my first blog of the day, composed, it now seems, about three weeks ago. Thus far, no further. I'm off to enjoy my birthday now.

This will be, I hope, the first of two extra blogs. I don't know what on earth has happened to the pivtures. Last time I entered a picture it was all so easy. This time nothing will do want we want it to. But at last we've managed to download Colonel Mustard's cover, although it refused to go where we asked it to. Anyway, here it is, proudly overlooking us. But first, a correction and addition all in one to my previous blog of today. I quoted the much-missed Jan Mark’s Carousel review of the Joslins when they were first published: ‘A macabre series of page-turners’ In my frustration with technology last night I left out a vital word. It should have read: ‘A JUICILY macabre series of page-turners.’ Juicily. A word to cherish. And a very Markian epithet as well, which I really hope gets somewhere near to the full flavour of the series. I’m really quite proud of the stories in Colonel Mustard . The two ex-Point stories, the title story and Hospital Trust , were we...

Yes, it's my birthday. They seem to come so frequently lately. I chose the 14th as my posting day because the date is to me so iconic that there was at least a reasonable chance that I wouldn't forget to blog on it. And, though the year it heralds is a little further up the chain than I would like, I certainly feel very good about it. For at last, at last, I'll have ebooks up and running very soon and won't feel such a blogging fraud. But in a sense I still am. It's late at night and the cover images I've been preparing won't seem to load and, sweating with frustration I've decided to go to bed So further down the page you're going to find a lot of descriptions with no images to go with them. I'm so sorry about this. We've tried and tried - and last time it seemed so easy. More about that later. First, I must tell you about a remarkable circumstance which harks back to the old world of publishing and has cheered me and several other people up...

In these days of library closures and cut backs on spending, I was delighted to do two author visits to local schools recently both of which were also celebrating the opening of their new library. One of the new school libraries had only been made possible by a substantial amount of money being left to the church by a parishioner in his will. Happily for the school, the church council decided to spend it on refurbishing and restocking the school library. Excellent decision! For that special opening day, all the pupils dressed as characters from books. Cake and squash was laid on in the hall for all the children, and tea and cake for the school governors, church council and me! Both events were just so lovely, and the pride and excitement of all the staff and kids was a joy to see.   Being given the honour of cutting the ribbons really brought a lump to my throat. It was just so nice to think that those first people through the doors into the libraries wer...

I don't know about you, but I think a protagonist’s first duty is not to be likeable, but fascinating . In my experience, the flawed tend to be more interesting than the flawless, yet in the world of women's commercial fiction, editors seem to be on the look-out for a cross between Pollyanna and Mother Teresa. With sex appeal. Heroines must in addition also be young, pretty and thin because - well, because popular women’s fiction is about the young, pretty and thin. Obviously . Linda Gillard Only mine isn’t. I write about spiky, awkward, real women and most of them aren’t young, pretty or thin, which only compounds their felonies. The heroine of STAR GAZING is middle-aged, widowed and blind and she’s not too happy about any of that. (In fact the Scots hero describes her as "crabbit".) Over the years my heroines’ bolshy behaviour has led to conflict as I’ve resisted attempts made by long-suffering editors to make my female protagonists nicer . It’s not just that...

At last I've finally managed it - and if this technologically challenged numpty can manage it, then anyone can - my ebook is finally published! Admittedly I did tear my hair out a bit in the process: I had problems indenting paragraphs, when it kept indenting the first two lines instead of just the first one, but after downloading Mobipocket it sorted itself out. Mobipocket produced other problems though - my 'go to table of contents' disappeared completely, but as the contents list itself was still working okay I decided enough was enough and I'd reached the limits of my e-booking ability. Once I found where it had downloaded my file to, and I'd imprisoned it on a USB stick for ease of discovering it again, the actual publishing bit was a doddle, although after pricing it at 99p, it came up as £1.09 ... But it is done and dusted and now at last I can settle down to the next project - I have a commissioned paper book to do as well as a backlist one I want to revise ...