Authors Electric

          I was asked to describe 'my muse', and this is what I wrote. It may seem an odd thing to post in a blog about e-books and digital self-publishing, but some things about writing never change... Winged Daemon on Corinthian Plate: Wiki Commons Rudyard Kipling, in his autobiography Something of Myself wrote:            Let us now consider the Personal Daemon of Aristotle and others… Most men, and some most unlikely, keep him under an alias which varies with their literary or scientific attainments. Mine came to me early when I sat bewildered among other notions, and said; ‘Take this and no other.’ I obeyed, and was rewarded....            After that I learned to lean upon him and recognise the sign of his approach... As an instance, many years later I wrote about a mediaeval artist, a monastery, and the premature discover...

Knock knock … can I come in?             I’ve been invited, so I think you are expecting me. What an erudite lot these electric authors are. I Bombs and Butterflies by Jo Carroll feel a bit of an interloper beside writers of such experience.             Shall I tell you a bit about myself? Well, I didn’t set out to be a writer. I spent years working in Child Protection, which is important, and I’m proud of all I achieved. I wrote numerous articles, and a book, and did some Serious Research; and then – on a bit of a whim – gave it all up to go travelling, on my own. Well, thirty years protecting children is a long time. I came home from trotting round the world (in my mid-50s, just to make it more difficult) with boxes of notebooks and more stories than I had people to listen to them. Write a book, someone said. Well, there were worse ways to fill my time, n...

I would like to thank the members of The Authors Electric for inviting me to contribute to this blog. I am truly humbled to be in such good company. I knew I wanted to be a writer as soon as I learned how to read. I remember being absolutely obsessed with how 26 letters in varying order could make movies in my head. Movies that were, by and large, so much better than the movies I saw in the theatre, especially when those movies had been inspired by the book I was reading. When I was very young, maybe six, my favorite books to read were the Winnie-the-Pooh and Paddington Bear books . The first story I ever wrote was an attempt to crossover these two series: Paddington's foster family, the Browns, took him to meet their very good friends, the Robins, who lived near The Hundred Acre Wood. I vaguely remember a conversation between Paddington Bear and Pooh (whose "real" name you may remember was Edward Bear) over whether they were related. There was also a tea p...

I had intended to write this month's blog about Rory A Miller's excellent book, 'Violence: A Writer's Guide' . I particularly wanted to look at its impact on my new 'Janac's Games' short story, 'The Sniper'... but all my good intentions went out of the window at 8.58 on Tuesday morning, when my wife Tina and I welcomed our baby boy Aiden to the world, a month ahead of schedule. To say that we weren't quite ready would be a small understatement, and since then we've been scrambling to finish preparing for Aiden's arrival (Buggy - tick; Cot - tick; Prepare Nursery - definitely not yet ticked; Nappies - fast running out) all the while learning how to look after our little one in his first few days in the world. So instead of a short treatise on writing, research and violence, you'll have to settle for this rather gorgeous picture of my lovely wife and baby son. And I promise I'll be back with something more writerly next mo...

Yet another long, warm summer evening and I was in the Dog & Pheasant in Shrewsbury talking publishing to Susan Caroline of Pengwern Books. Our much-loved local indie bookshop has had a checkered life since opening in Fish Street in 2003, and so has Susan.  Her doggedness is astonishing. Keeping in business in the current book-selling climate has taken a lot of ducking and diving. Pengwern Books has had a variety of homes, not least of which has been to the immediate right of the altar in St Alkmund’s Church, courtesy of vicar and PCC - which proved a real refuge when it looked as though Shrewsbury’s only independent contemporary book shop might go down. Nowadays, however, Pengwern Books is thriving in Shrewsbury’s indoor market, a central part of its current renaissance, situated next to Julia Wenlock’s chocolate shop and a stone’s throw from the delightfully quirky Bird’s Nest café.   Susan talked to me about that move, and about her life-long love of boo...

A huge thank you to all the kind folk who helped me untangle the Suvi and the Sky Folk by Sandra Horn knot I made last time. I wish I were the kind of writer who sits down at a desk after breakfast and writes until lunchtime, pausing only for a swift coffee, then starts again until late afternoon. I wish I had a desk uncluttered by scribbled odds and ends. I understood novelist Alice Thomas Ellis only too well when she thought about going outside in a thunderstorm. She said she didn't REALLY want to get struck by lightning, but it might be better than going back in to try to get on with the book. Yet I love writing. It's one of the major pleasures of life. Playing blasted Solitaire on the pc isn't - so why? I wish I knew.           The odd thing is, if someone gives me a commission with a tight brief and a short deadline, I'm in there! I'm like the proverbial ferret up a drainpipe and I pause neither to eat nor sleep until it's done. ...

It’s been a mad couple of weeks. I’ve been launching the third book in my Dundee Crime Series – Missing Believed Dead. I thought everything was under control, I was going to launch the ebook and Amazon paperback, at the same time as my book launch, which was scheduled for 11th July, in the Dundee branch of Waterstones. So, everything was underway. I was in the final proofs of the Createspace paperback. My local printer was geared up and ready to go to produce 200 paperbacks in the last week of June. That would give me plenty of time to address any hiccups, or delays. And prepublication copies of the ebook had been circulated for reviews. Thanks to everyone who was kind enough to do this for me. Silly, silly, silly! The first thing to upset the applecart was the paperback appearing on Amazon for pre-order for 1 July. I hadn’t approved it at that stage so I knew it wasn’t Amazon who had stuck it up there. It could only have been Nielsen who did the deed when I registered my IS...