Authors Electric

  Recently I have been doing some research for a novel. I write historical fiction so I like to mention real people, real places and real events. Anything to help give my historical setting authenticity. It was while searching for some of these ‘real’ people – as in people whose names and deeds are recorded in history – that I came across some intriguing names. My books are set in medieval Wales so that does explain some of the unusual spellings and meanings I have come across. The first that caught my interest was Gwenwynwyn ap Owain Cyfeiliog (d 1216). It bothered me because his first name sounded rather soft for someone who was regarded as quite a formidable ruler in his day. Too many ‘wyn’s for a start. And then my Welsh speaking   son informed me that Gwenwyn means poison. Ah, makes more sense, I thought! Incidentally, he was the son of (ap) Owain Cyfeiliog who was apparently a poet as well as a ruler. I guess he named his son?! My favourite find was Rhys Gryg, or in ...

'King of Hay' memorial Royalty is very much on my mind lately, with this post publishing just two days after the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. We now have a new monarch, King Charles III. But this post is not about him. I'd like to introduce you to a slightly lesser-known monarch... meet Richard Booth (1938-2019), bookseller extraordinaire and self-proclaimed King of Hay! If you've ever visited Hay-on-Wye on the border between England and Wales, you'll already know its fame as a "town of books". It seems every historic street contains a bookshop of some description, many of them selling second-hand volumes that will keep your average book lover (me!) happy for hours browsing the shelves for rare copies of magazines and bargain paperbacks of every conceivable genre. The Hay Literary Festival has become big business, celebrity authors rubbing shoulders with debut novelists as they give talks and interviews to packed marquees on the Festival site. I ca...

  Funny how things turn out…Little did I think when I wrote Tattybogle all those years ago that it would be found in hospices as a source of comfort, involve me in a broadcast conversation with a vicar about the Resurrection (NB Tattybogle is a scarecrow, not Jesus), be turned into a schools’ musical and now start a dialogue with someone from a distillery in Scotland. The ‘resurrection’ element is there in that, as we know from the Theory of Conservation of Matter, our atoms keep on getting rearranged as we pass from one kind of life to another: I am closer to my after than I am to my before. This lively mass of atoms I now know as ‘me’                             was here at the beginning,                   scattered after the Bang, then gathered, dispe...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. The Hayes, Swanwick - photo taken by me, Allison Symes I was at the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School in August, my annual residential writing week at The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire. As well as learning a great deal, I catch up with friends I only see in person here. We stay in contact via social media otherwise. A lovely time is had by all. The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire   I deliberately go to courses that are “left field” to my flash fiction and blogging. I learn more than I think I will from these and did so again here.   I went to the four part specialist course of Creative Non-Fiction by Simon Whaley. I found it enlightening as some of my blogs hover on this category of writing. (If you can go to his course, I highly recommend it. You will learn so much about observation and conveying the truth).   Creative non-fiction is factual work told using fictional techniques. Facts cannot be changed but i...

    The first time I actively set out to research something was when I was writing a play about an escaped tiger, for Radio 4’s Afternoon Theatre. Up until then I’d written about what I knew, but when you’re in your twenties you run out of stuff pretty quickly unless you live in a small village filled with single men in possession of a good fortune who must be in want of a wife. All I knew about tigers was what I’d read in books, principally Jim Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon . In those days Chessington World of Adventures was Chessington Zoo, and they had tigers, so I rang up and asked if I could talk to the tiger keeper. I think I expected an animal lover who was both entranced and obsessed with his charges, so the first question I asked was, “How long have you worked with tigers?” The answer was rather unexpected – “Too long.” He regarded tigers as the most dangerous of all animals in the zoo, and was looking for another job. He seemed to think he was living on borrowed tim...

We’re on holiday in France and it’s been lovely. Of course. That’s what holidays are supposed to be, right? A lovely, relaxing time away. The problem is, several of my children don’t like change. I don’t like change, but that’s more about big changes. Like the death of the Queen, people singing God Save the King, and changes in the family around us. Or the fact that French coffee tastes different. My children, however, are rather optimistic as well as unable to remember unhappy moments, which makes them embrace change until the change actually arrives. They love going on holiday until we start packing. They love French pizzas until the pizzas arrive. We still go on holidays and they all ate their pizzas, but it leaves them feeling exhausted and I drink more coffee than I should. I also end up doing more crowd control than has been needed for the last few years, which is sad.  I get tired from simply wandering around the shop, trying to locate the cheese. This isn’t very hard to...

 So here I was, at long last in Tucson, suddenly finding myself back in school. I was in a different sort of school, but faced with the same pressures and as lost as any freshman. How do they get to Building FX103...then to XY2B2 in time for the next class? Where's the book store, the student union, the financial aid office? How would I ever learn to pass Medieval Lit, Calculus, Latin, Philosophy, Public Speaking?  I'd suffered all of such questions before. And now they came in different forms yet made of the same stuff: How do I get around by bus when I can't even draw a bead on the city's layout? How do I find work when I'm brand new here and unemployed...How do I furnish my new apartment when I'm starting with limited funds and without a stick of furniture...? After six days in the city I'd spent hundreds of dollars being chauffeured around town by Lyft: to and from assorted stores, back and forth from the UPS Store where a friend had mailed a dozen boxes...