Authors Electric

Cover art by Matt Zanetti  You know that question somebody always asks you, sooner or later, when you're a writer?  The one that makes you want to shriek and run away instead of smiling politely, which is what you always do? The 'where do you get your ideas from?' question. Because let's face it, ideas are almost never the problem. Time, personal space, money, application and luck may be problems. But not ideas. Well, this is an attempt to answer that - but only about one particular project. Because in the case of  my new novel, Bird of Passage , now available on Kindle, even I'm not sure where I got my ideas from! This book  has been a very long time in the writing - probably the longest of anything I've ever written, if you count the time from the smallest germ of an idea to the finished book. In fact, I can remember that first little bit  of inspiration. When I was twelve years old, we moved from Leeds to the West o...

I’m at that post book stage that I hate. Waiting for my editor to tell me if it’s good enough or not and so it’s hard to settle down to anything else involving words. I swear, when you stop looking at them, all the interesting ones go and hide somewhere, probably with a bottle of something alcoholic and a cake. Or chocolate – and not the grown up 70% proof stuff either. So I’m waiting and I’m catching up with all the stuff that didn’t get done while I finished the book and trying to get my head around what the next book might be about and thinking about what to try on the Kindle next. Immediately next, is to get a proper cover done for the book – PRIEST – that I already have on the Kindle. It was put together in a bit of a hurry because I wanted to be able to say that I did actually have an electronic book – this being an establishment for authors who were doing that sort of thing. But that was waaaay back last Summer and, guess what, I still haven’t managed to change it. I have d...

A LIFETIME BURNING   (Kindle 88p/$0.99) I've just re-published my second novel, A LIFETIME BURNING on Kindle. First published in 2006, it was one of those still-born books torpedoed by its cover and ignored by reviewers, perhaps because it belonged to that non-genre, accessible literary fiction. My publisher had no idea how to market the book (neither did I) and it sank without trace.  Well, not quite.  Readers loved it. (And a few loathed it.) A LIFETIME BURNING has only 5-star reviews on Amazon (twenty-five of them) and over the years its devotees have described themselves as haunted - even disturbed - by the book. A few have complained they were up all night finishing it and one man told me he read all 410 pages in one sitting. I started making notes for A LIFETIME BURNING even before I’d finished my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY . I didn’t have a publisher then. I hadn’t even thought about trying to find one, I was just writing to amuse myself. I'd just ...

This post has been published in S parks, A Year In E-Publishing - An Authors Electric Anthology 2011-2012 . It has therefore been temporarily reverted to draft status to comply with amazon KDP Select's requirements.

For five blogs now I have felt a fraud, a serial procrastinator and an IT incompetent. But now at least I can truthfully say that I'm not the first any more. The second and third stay precisely where they are. For at long last, my first ebook is up and running. Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick. And I have to say I'm reasonably pleased with how it looks Yes, I know the cover won't win prizes but it does what it says on the tin and it makes a telling contrast with the brilliant work of Anastasia Sichkarenko with her six covers for The Long Journey of Joslin de Lay. To celebrate, I'm clunking my website into operation again after a shamingly long period of inactivity, caused mainly because since my last book came out in 2009 there hasn't been much worth saying. But now, of course, there is. And this is what the website says about Colonel Mustard: Four slightly weird stories.  Murder, mystery, horror, fantasy, magic and a little bit of football ...

Meeting up with family in France. (My crown came with the traditional pudding we'd eaten .) Going to new places has always been the key thing for me in the hope of sparking ideas for stories, books or magazine articles. But on a  trip to France last weekend I wasn't looking for inspiration or ideas – but boy did I find them! At the moment, if (fingers crossed) my 'irons in the fire' come off, I'll be busy enough over the coming months, I don't need anything new to think about at the moment, besides the 4-day trip was to visit my brother John and his family who live in a little French village called Pommeuse. Plus my eldest brother, Eddie was coming too – so it was to be a real family reunion and I was going to have a little break from all things to do with writing. Or so I thought! Well, the first thing was the house next door to my brother's. Four storied if you count the attic and cellar, a shuttered grey stone building standing lonely an...

Susan Jane Smith, B.Sc.            Do you believe all children in the world deserve and need the following  (extracted from my book “ Emotional Health For Emotional Wealth ” )?              Freedom from fear.           Freedom from inflicted physical pain – that means no hitting or kicking them;  no burning them (including stubbing cigarettes out on their bodies), not being knifed or shot.           Freedom from imprisonment in their homes (no shutting in cupboards or cages, no tying up).           Freedom from neglect – not living with inadequate parents/carers who do not provide three nutritionally-balanced meals every day. Not living with drug takers or alcoholics, not having to take care of an adult who is physicall...