Authors Electric

Cool cats Dear Santa, please could you send me a time machine, Doctor optional, although David Tennant would be a nice addition. He could pilot it for me. I want to go back to 1950s Leeds. Just for a little while. Oh, and I want to be a child again, so that I don't find it too much of a shock. But with just enough adult hindsight to be able to observe with a certain amount of clarity. And take notes.  Tall order, I know. The alternative, as I've discovered, may be a magical website called Leodis, which is one of the old names for the city. You can visit it here . I first discovered this wonderful site when my cousin sent me a link to it, and I must confess that back when I was working as a writing fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, I browsed it in between appointments whenever my students were late. It was ideal for filling in the odd five or ten minutes of free time, easy to click on a few photographs and just as easy to click off them again. Now I've bee...

These days, most people are familiar with Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s boarding school. The building itself is a castle, and seems to resemble an Oxbridge College or public school more than anything, if its dining hall and common rooms are anything to go by. Of course, there are magical additions which make it all the more appealing, such as staircases that change position, and invisible rooms. We can’t invent something from nothing, so we have to have a starting point. Castles are particular favourites in fantasy land, and C.S Lewis used them a lot. Cair Paravel is all that is good about a building like this, colourful and full of feasting and tapestries and golden goblets. The domain of the White Witch, with its stone statues in the courtyard created from living beings and a gateway guarded by wolves, is cold and grey and all that is bad. Harfang, inhabited by giants in The Silver Chair , gives a child’s view of a medieval castle, seen from the perspective of someone very small. The h...

Dunfermline, the town where I grew up, has always been defined by the stretch of water separating it from Edinburgh the ‘new’ capital. (Yes, Dunfermline came first, although not a lot of people know that!).  Our history lessons started with Queen Margaret who came all the way from Norway and alighted at the Queen’s Ferry and then there were all the adventure yarns from Stevenson onwards where the water had to be crossed one way or another.  But the Firth of Forth (how that name puzzled me before I could spell it!) was not just geography and history but also our holidays, on beaches with views of Arthur’s Seat, or on picnics to a tiny beach near Cramond made memorable by a trip on the ferry boats where burly sea-men in navy jumpers tossed ropes and took our tickets as we stepped onto the oily smelling deck.  (Thanks to Dennis Penny of http://www.queensferrypassage.co.uk for the ferry boat graphic and the ticket just like the one I clutched in my hot little...

Mallard in all her glory at the the National Railway Museum at York. Picture by Rich Bacon  Research has always been one of the bugbears of writing. In the old days, if one was doing a book based on factual matters, part of the process was finding out where you could find out things that were important and germane. This, as you all know, could take hours, days, weeks, months – it was a pain. Rich and Muava with Adam Fozard in museum colours It hit me hardest when I was writing one of my historical naval fictions. Because of a misspent youth I knew a vast amount about the technicalities of square rigged ships and how to sail them. But suddenly, well into a novel set in the mid-eighteenth century, I wanted to investigate some of the nuts and bolts of gunnery at sea. Simple, I thought. I'll find a book. That in itself wasn't easy, as it turned out. Or even possible, in the area that I was specifically after. And many of the volumes I needed were either in obs...

In  last month’s blog I reached a point where I was just about to launch into  a consideration of the Railway Ghost Story. There are so many of them that they almost constitute a separate genre. I’ve written two myself, both of them included in Out of the Deep , my supernatural anthology. And I’ve also written a novel in the old Hippo Ghost series from Scholastic. It was published in 1995 and, when it went out of print, I was fond enough of it to get the rights back and bring it out again on Print on Demand with Back-to-Front. The Railway Phantoms. A reviewer said that the main, entirely malignant, ghost was ‘A Heathcliff of the rails.’  I liked that! The Scholastic edition (1995). You can get it at Amazon for 1p. It is set in Wuthering Heights country and the railway in the present day timescale is a disguised version of the preserved Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. Its 19 th century manifestation was a fictional joint line of the London and North West...