Authors Electric

Every now and again I get an email from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) team. Usually these are bringing my attention to some discrepancy or other in one of the 11 books I have published with KDP, often requiring swift remedial action. A recent one required me to check the HTML coding that I had used on my book description pages, and to do it in less than 24 hours. They were about to change the way the website presented the HTML, and if I didn’t get it sorted… well, quite frankly, my book pages would look crap… or words to that effect. So when I see these emails pop into my inbox I open them with some trepidation. Whatever I was expecting from the one that arrived a couple of days before the end of October, it wasn’t this… “ We are considering including your book: Il disertore in an upcoming promotion in the Amazon.it Kindle Book Store .” Promotion? In the Amazon.it store? I read on with a churning stomach. I’ve written previously on the joys of Indie-pub transl...

Last month as part of the annual Chester Literature Festival I took part in a debate about Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. Now, anyone who knows my writing will know that I’m not a huge Twilight fan. I’m quite happy for people to read what they want, and for writers to do new things with established genres - so it’s not the sparkly vampires that bother me so much (although I do personally think they’re rubbish!) It’s the fact that, since Twilight’s astronomic rise in popularity, the misunderstood heartthrob vampire now seems to be the only type being written - and subsequently, a lot of horror markets have placed a blanket ban on submissions of vampire stories, which is a shame for writers like me who like vampires (and werewolves, and zombies, and other newly ‘unfashionable’ creatures!) This was actually the entire reason that me and L.C. Hu produced our anthology ‘ Re-Vamp! ’ in 2011, to counteract all the mopey teenage monsters - but I’m digressing. The thing is, in this debate, I wa...

Norman Nicholson saw dandelion clocks 'held like small balloons of light above the ground.'     MacNeice's tulips have heads like chessmen, bishop or queen. Eilean Ni Chiulleanain pictured Mary Magdalene looking out across the marshes at Marseilles to where the water-weeds 'wait for the right time, then flip all together their thousands of sepia feet.' Alice Oswald tracked the river Dart from it source to the sea and saw, at its beginning, 'eels in the glints, and in each eel a finger-width of sea.' Near Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria, the poet M.R. Peacocke's poems celebrating a year in the life of Cumbrian hill  farmers are carved on stones along the Eden valley; 'Snowlight peers at the byre door,' a heron sails, 'drawing behind him a long wake of solitude.' I could go on and on, quoting these words-made-music, these sights, sounds, ideas, captured in enthralling new ways. They make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in ...

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that a writer with life experience has an advantage over writers with none. We start at the cradle and continue to learn as we grow and develop, and this gives us a cupboard full of goodies to tap into. When I think of my own journey in becoming a writer it sets me wondering how on earth this ever came about. When I was growing up I didn’t know any writers. Oh, I knew books. I loved books, but the people who wrote them were mystical beings. Probably not even real people. And the teachers who taught us how to write compositions weren’t much help. I well remember the requested three paragraph composition with a beginning, a middle, and an end.           Nowadays, my granddaughter is tasked to write stories, and allowed to let her imagination roam free. Maybe I was born too early because my teachers would have held up their hands in horror at the thought of writing stories. As for imagination, that was ...

I’ve just spent half an hour browsing through university and further education college creative writing courses across the UK. They made interesting reading, mainly because – with all the benefit of 20/20 hindsight – I can see one glaring omission in the middle of all the exciting promises that students will explore and develop their literary intentions, examine their creative practice, experiment with form and - just occasionally - ‘become employable.’ You can spend up to £9000 a year in fees and that’s without all the other expenses involved for three or four years in order to ‘improve your critical awareness' of how you can get your work published or produced.           I can dimly remember a time when – as a young arts graduate, struggling to make a career as a playwright, and then as a novelist – I might have welcomed the opportunity to study creative writing at postgraduate level. I can still see the attraction. No such courses wer...

          The first thing most writers ever tackle is the short story. Either because it’s something they do at school, or because it’s less daunting than a book. It’s the preferred form in creative writing classes, as a number of them can be read out during the course of a two-hour lesson. It’s also one of the staple exercises of the creative writing degree, as once again it can be marked without too much tutor time being used up.           The print markets aren’t as widespread as they used to be, and competitions may be the only outlet for the more literary story as they don’t specify subject matter. But there’s a distinct possibility of an electronic rebirth. Dr. Who isn’t the only one who comes back in new disguise.  Short fiction on the Kindle may be the discerning commuter’s alternative to the computer game.             The fi...

I don't do drumrolling announcements, but after a long hiatus, my literary novel Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is available for Kindle again. You will have sensed the soul-searching of the past few months. I am working my way through my books, editing and formatting, and I am very happy to be bringing them back into the world. And am comfortable with them being on Amazon. I may write about this at some stage. I may not.     ( the UK link is here , and the US link is here . The book is available in all other places as well. It's $2.99 or equivalent)  Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is a blog run by the book's protagonist, Sandrine, a teenager growing up in Hungary in the years after the  fall of the Berlin Wall. She lives with her father and cat in a huge house on the vineyard that's been in the family for hundreds of years, and dreams of one day escaping, first to the metropolis of Budapest to be an artist, and then to the west, to find ...