Authors Electric

Europa and the bull enter the sea picture credit: Jean François de Troy [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons Living in a seaside resort, it can be difficult to settle at the computer in August when everyone else seems to be on holiday. But a morning walk along the promenade can be great research. Small boy to his dad: "Why does the sea sparkle?" Dad (clearly the practical type): "It's the sun reflecting off the water." Small boy goes quiet, possibly trying to remember exactly what 'reflection' means, and why he isn't seeing the whole sun reflected in the water just a whole bay full of sparkles? A writer might have answered differently: "They're fairies dancing on the waves..." "A mermaid dropped her purse and lost all her diamonds..." "It's the dreaded sparkle-eye disease and you've just caught it..." "They're last night's fallen stars..." "An evil villain in an...

A while ago, I submitted two poems for an anthology on Age. I am Of A Certain Age myself, and was under the (mistaken, as it turned out) impression that it would be celebrating agedness. I was delighted when one poem was accepted. Then, when the proofs came, it was only too evident that the focus was on loss, dementia, incontinence, death...very good poems, I must say, but not exactly joyful. I went to the launch with some trepidation and discovered two things: the guest editor had been working with people with dementia, and I was, by a stretch, the oldest poet there.   It made me remember that when one is surrounded by the less happy aspects of life, perspectives, inevitably, become skewed. No-one there had met my sparky mother, dignified, in control, and sharp as a tack until she closed her eyes for the last time at age 93. Or my friend Alice, who lived to 105 and was equally ‘with-it’ to the end. They didn’t know about the woman who has just passed grade 6 ballet at the ...

Names are one of the biggest problems for me with any writing. Names matter. They attract or deflect by their very nature, colouring our view through our own personal experience. A character names Maude for example may conjure an older woman, possibly Victorian fiction as Maude was a daughter of the old Queen. Or a very much older Empress Maud who was an ancient claimant of the English crown. I recently had birthday notifications on the same day, via Facebook, for two Michaels. One is generally known as Mick and the other as Mike. They are both thoroughly nice guys but possessed of very different personalities, and I would never address Mick as Mike or vice versa. Why they should have gained their separate diminutives is unknown. They are of similar age and, one assumes, similar background. Is it regional? A possibility. I don’t expect I shall ever know. But the point to be made is that in my  mind they are their name. Which brings me back to fictional character...

As I write this, a week has passed since the Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, but it feels more like a month. It was my first experience of Harrogate, and any kind of book festival, and I’ve had a major comedown from the amazing event.  I booked up late, only  securing a B&B in April (most people attending had booked the previous year as soon as the dates were announced), and now I’m so glad that my ‘fear of missing out’ bug kicked me up the butt just in time. As a very new author, I was feeling quite daunted as the day to travel to Yorkshire approached. However, I pulled on my big girl pants and had a good talking to myself – this was a great opportunity to meet other authors, bloggers, publishers, publicists and people I’d spoken to online for over a year. If I’m honest, I think I embraced the experience more as a reader than an author, because once I was there my nerves took over on more than one occasion. But I don’t think it altered my experie...

I’ve just visited the Chip Museum in Bruges. Sounds utterly ludicrous, doesn’t it? How can you have a whole museum devoted entirely to that very Belgian food item, the chip? But you can – and I think this is one of the secrets of humour, when you take something way beyond the obvious.           The Chip Museum starts off the way you’d expect, with the history of the potato and a delightful display with potatoes of every shape and size and colour suspended in mid-air. Then there’s the fascinating topic of freeze-drying, the invention of the chip (with crisps as a by-product) and the correct way to cook them; oils or fats? And just when you think the place must run out of steam, there is a whole host of chip-cutting machines. Every sort of fryer you’ve ever thought of, and more besides, and the dinky little stalls that have sold them through the ages with their candy-striped canopies or corrugated iron roofs. Lots of cartoons, with baby...

It is that time of year where the Edinburgh Tattoo, The Edinburgh Fringe and The Edinburgh Book Festival all come together to bring culture, excitement and to one fantastic city. Yesterday I took the train through to Edinburgh for The Book Festival and what a great day it was. It didn't start too well as I left at 8.30 am and the coffee shop at the station was closed. So there I was, an early morning, no coffee, and a packed train. However, I got speaking to a delightful family and ended up singing and playing games with two little girls. That made up for the lack of refreshment at the station. This was my first visit to the book festival and wasn't sure what to expect. It is held in Charlotte Square gardens and the organisers have made it into a glorious small village, all dedicated to books. I was there with the Society of Authors in Scotland and spent the day in the Bookshop. The place was packed and it made this writer giddy with delight to see so many people buyi...

As the sun was shining on the south coast and things were grimmer than usual in my part of the North, I took myself down to Portsmouth to see what the old town looked like since I left. For the first three days of my visit, the weather was not much better. A succession of cold fronts sweeping down from the North West, most of them carrying   rain, all of them redolent of the snowfields of the North. August for God’s sake. It felt like March or late November. St Helen's fort. Built to keep the inbreds in? The town itself was much as I remember it. I have never known a place that I was more grateful to leave, which I achieved when I was twenty years old. I moved from the Portsmouth Evening News (the News, as it is now more trendily named) onto the Daily Herald, and discovered a whole new, bright new world. A world of clubs, and drinking, national stories that made much of my work in Portsmouth seem trivial, and Northern girls who seemed to me vibrant, sharp,  ...