Authors Electric

Before I married I had a beautiful cat called Poppy.  I met my husband at work, and she tolerated him and our two children as they came along. She loved to sleep on the top bunk in their bedroom. She died aged 16 in May 1998.  After that we would still hear the familiar dull thud from upstairs as she jumped from the top bunk . Sometimes the lounge door would open too, as if she was strolling in. My father died in September that same year and we never heard those noises again. We think she waited for Dad.

  I have to admit I am a very visual person, and I am easily distracted. As a consequence I rarely listen to talk on the radio, don’t really get on with audiobooks, and haven’t – up until recently – engaged with the growing phenomenon of podcasts. If I have time to spare, I tend to read or watch something on a screen. I used to listen to things in the car, but these days I do so little driving, I don’t tend to get the time for any meaningful listening. But I have been encouraged to explore podcasts and so I have been doing so. They are apparently one of the next big things in marketing to the masses. And you never know they might even help sell books! I am trying to make time to listen to more podcasts – the time I spend doing the ironing is one opportunity (!) – finding ones that are especially relevant to writing, my interests and my genre. The world of podcasts is expanding and diversifying. I can guarantee that you will find one that fits just into your niche. A quick googl...

  What is your ‘brand’?   I recently seized upon a piece in which a fellow writer, whose books I enjoy, asks the question, ‘What is Your Genre?’ — vital for an ‘elevator pitch’. Yet how does genre or ‘brand’ relate to what really motivates a writer? If we write from our deepest being, the seeds of our writing may’ve been sown in early childhood, lying in the earth of our lives, growing into story form as we undergo more complex and consciously comprehended experiences. Whether lighthearted, humorous, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, dystopic — all may have their roots in early experience. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings , for example, we can trace a recurring theme of loss, arguably echoing his childhood. He lost his father at age three and his mother at age twelve, left the country village where he grew up, married young but left to fight in the trenches, immediately after happy studies at Oxford. Tolkien wove memory, experiences, and academic knowledge into the tapestry of his inv...

'Write about what you know' is still common advice for beginning authors. When I heard that way back in my pre-publication days, my first thought was: 'well, that's going to make a boring book!' I was still in my 20s at the time and actually knew very little, so I plunged headfirst into the fantasy and science fiction genre, deliberately writing about what I didn't know (and really couldn't be expected to know much about) since I was inventing entire worlds and travelling to distant planets. Much easier, and less chance of getting found out with some glaring error that would make wiser readers who did know laugh behind my back... or, more likely these days, in a scathing online review. Or so I thought. I soon discovered inventing fantasy worlds is just as difficult as learning about our existing world, since even magic needs some rules otherwise the whole plot just collapses. All the same, it was rather fun creating them. After experimenting with short genr...

Yesterday morning, my husband woke up from a particularly vivid dream in which he was driving a traction engine. He had no clue about what might have triggered it. His conclusion: ‘My brain has a mind of its own!’ Oh yes, Papa Freud! The brain/the Muse is a funny old duck. Capriciousness isn’t in it.   Sometimes walking wakes the Muse up, especially in a special place, like the salt marsh at Keyhaven, which I’ve written about before. There’s something about the rhythm of the movement and the air in the surroundings…but it’s never predictable and can never be forced. Sometimes there’s an out-of-the-blue inspiration that doesn’t seem to relate to anything. Sometimes a long fallow period that can’t always be accounted for either. Thank goodness I now have the inestimable luxury of writing for pleasure rather than trying to earn my living by it (although, in fact, I never did. It was always the jam in the sandwich rather than the bread). Now, we are giving books away as fast as we ...

Image Credit:  All images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I have the joy of being published with the indie press, as a contributor to various anthologies, and with my two flash fiction collections via Chapeltown Books . I decided early on I didn’t want to self-publish as I wanted to have a traditional publishing contract. I’m not against self publishing, far from it. It was something I didn’t feel equipped to handle.   What has been lovely is I’ve had the best of both worlds. Yes, I have to do the promotion but who doesn’t these days? I had input into the covers of my flash collections and I know many writers have no say on that.  My favourite quote on that topic comes from a letter P.G. Wodehouse wrote saying “God may forgive Herbert Jenkins Limited for the cover of ………….. But I never shall”. Book title not revealed to protect the guilty! Reading that made me laugh and wince in sympathy with Wodehouse. I’ve had the joy of having a straightforward process to ...

The order in which you present information in a book is very important. If you delay including something we need to know we’re going to spend too much time trying to work out what’s going on, which is when we lose touch with the story as we’re no longer concentrating. Most of us have read books where we’ve suddenly been surprised by something – the gender of the narrator, their appearance, their age perhaps. This can mean completely re-evaluating what we’ve read before, and we may end up no longer trusting the author to tell us what’s necessary which may be when we stop reading.  When we know the gender of the author we tend to assume their narrator is the same gender   too, unless we’re given a pointer. I have written as a man several times, and it’s often important to establish this fact right at the start, otherwise the plot won’t make sense. This is the beginning of my short story Cassie , which was one of the winners of the Canongate prize when I needed to flag up the gen...