Authors Electric

Createspace is dead... long live KDP paperbacks! I've previously used Createspace to publish indie paperback editions of my titles, but CS has now been retired by Amazon so this month I tackled my first ever KDP paperbacks with two short story collections  Mythic & Magical and Weird & Wonderful , which up to now have only been available as ebooks. Each collection contains seven of my short stories, so they both come in at around 125 pages, plenty long enough for a paperback edition. Being the same length also meant I could use the same KDP cover template for both titles, which made the design a bit easier. I'm calling this series 'Ampersand Tales' because the collections are additional to my novels, as well as being for older readers who might have enjoyed my children's books as young readers when they were first published. Some of these short stories helped inspire my novels, and each carries an introduction setting it in the context of my writin...

After watching the last episode of Line of Duty, when I think I forgot to breathe much of the time, I needed something to read in bed that would let me cool down and get to sleep. In the pile of re-reads by my bed is Jill Paton-Walsh’s The Serpentine Cave. Perfect.  As you’d expect, it’s beautifully written and beautifully crafted, a story of a mistaken episode in childhood and a search for a missing piece of identity – and it’s set in Cornwall, which is a plus for me. My Grandmother, Little Nan (so-called to distinguish her from Big Gran, my Great-grandmother) was as Cornish as cream.   Mar’Ellen Harvey from St Just in Penwith. She was from a poor family (tin-miners?) and was born in the workhouse at Madron. She’d had pernicious anaemia as a child and had lost all her teeth to gingivitis by the time she was fourteen. She was ‘taken up’ by a couple of early property developers she worked for, and went with them when they left St Just – a scandal still talked of...

On reading out a section of work in progress at my writing group I was asked whether a coroner really would attend a scene of crime in 1940.  And I had to admit that I didn't know. Online  research had let me down somewhat on this one as the only references I could find were in a modern context. Pottering back from an appointment pondering this question I realised that I was strolling past the Coroner’s Offices on Hartshill Road (as you do). So with a little time to spare I wandered in and asked. The Coroner’s clerks were really helpful and gave the following info. In a modern context a coroner will rarely if ever attend a scene of crime, at least when the body is still on site. This is because SOCO teams now gather all of the necessary evidence. (One said he had never known it happen in the 20 years he had worked there.) I was then told that in 1940, however, a coroner may well have gone to the scene of a homicide because SOCO teams, and indeed forensics to a great...

…And not just to keep body and soul together! In 1952, C.S.Lewis delivered a talk at the Library Association titled  “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,”  which was eventually adapted into an essay and published in Lewis’s Of Other worlds: Essays and Stories . What he says is this: In my own first story I had described at length what I thought a rather fine high tea given by a hospitable faun to the little girl who was my heroine. A man, who has children of his own, said, ‘Ah, I see how you got to that. If you want to please grown-up readers you give them sex, so you thought to yourself, “That won’t do for children, what shall I give them instead? I know! The little blighters like plenty of good eating.”  How right he was. When my children were small and it was snowing I used to follow Mr Tumnus’s menu to the letter, and it became a very popular event. But only when it was snowing!             …A nice...

L ast weekend I was asked to join a fellow author in an event at a local library. I’m a member of a group called Promoting Yorkshire Authors (PYA, https://www.promotingyorkshireauthors.com/ ), which is exactly what its name suggests: an organization of authors working together to promote their books. The ‘Yorkshire’ part covers both authors born in the English county of Yorkshire and those who currently live there. The event in question was to be two children’s authors talking about and reading from their books. And the theme was ‘A Yorkshire Childhood’. It has to be said I was a little uncertain whether this was really an event for me. I come under the latter category of membership of the PYA – I wasn’t born in what the locals call ‘God’s Own County’, although I recently realized I have now lived here something more than half my lifetime. (I was once told I could qualify for my Yorkshire passport after about fifteen years, but I’m still waiting…) But that ‘half a lifetime’ has bee...

Yesterday I launched the second book in the series “The Adventures of Letty Parker.” It’s a MG book, aimed at the 8-12 market, though as one reviewer, Kerry Parsons from www.chataboutbooks said “ it will be enjoyed by children and adults alike. I think it would sound great read aloud and enjoyed by the whole family.” There were more reviews, loads of comments on FB and Twitter and I felt much supported by friends, fellow writers and book-bloggers. All in all a very positive experience, but one which left me totally exhausted. Switching off the computer, pouring a glass of wine I wondered why I was so tired. What I’d been doing was enjoyable. I love interacting with people on social media and it was great to be able to thanking friends for their comments and likes. After all, I hadn’t done any hard physical work. I’d sat at my desk most of day, fuelled by cups of coffee and glasses of water –I’d made sure I wasn’t dehydrated, so I should have been fine. Talking to othe...

This week marks the start of my third term of teaching creative writing at the International Writers’ Collective , a creative writing community here in Amsterdam. It seemed like a good occasion to revisit a blog post I wrote in December 2017, wondering out loud in truly Hamlet-like fashion, whether I should be teaching at all. My existential doubts stemmed from a question Francine Prose asks straight up in Reading Like a Writer : Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? … The answer is no. What then was I expected to teach? Image source: Pixabay the first time When I was in college, I worked as a tutor. One semester, I taught math to local high school students. Another semester, I’d help premed students learn to write an essay.  The latter was a deeply painful experience because it turns out that, in order to write you need to be able to think. When all you’re trying to do is pass your freshman humanities class, then writing is...