Authors Electric

         I was decidedly short of inspiration this month - so I decided to look to my fellow Authors Electric for an idea. I found it in Ann Evans' post from earlier this month, about James Hadley Chase.           I enjoyed Ann's post a lot, and it made me wonder: Was there a particular writer who inspired me more than others? The name that came immediately to mind was: Rudyard Kipling.           When I was seven years old, my father gave me, for Christmas, three books: The First Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, and The Just-So Stories.           He gave them to me because he had loved them, when he'd been a child. I read them. And re-read them. I read all the Mowgli stories first. Then I ventured out and read some of the stories which aren't about Mowgli - The White Seal, Quiquern, Rikki-tikki-tavi.           I ca...

Three more Authors Electrics have recently tidied up, and so are prepared to share their working-space with you. Dennis Hamley - visit website My writing space has a double purpose. When I moved into my flat six years ago it seemed obvious that the third bedroom would become a study. As a present to myself I had a custom-made suite installed, which I love. A working surface over which I can shove all my rubbish, a computer I can slide out of the way, most of my books within reaching distance on lovely new shelves: marvellous. And at the end, full-length double-glazed windows and, just out of sight, a French door onto a balcony. They are important, because when Kay arrived she needed studio space with light and this room provided it. So it’s not just my study now: it’s a mini-studio as well and we looked forward to days of companionable creativity. Every evening Kay would show me a marvellous, still-wet painting and I would read her my fire-new deathless prose. Funn...

I’ve been a fan of the thriller in all its forms since my Dad took me to see Diamonds are Forever at the local Odeon cinema. I subsequently inhaled the collected works of Ian Fleming, Alistair MacLean, John le Carre and many others as I was growing up. And more often than not, I would see the movies as well as reading the book. I suspect that this is the reason that I tend to lean on films just as heavily as books when it comes to inspiration for my writing – flick through the reviews on my Amazon pages and you’ll find ‘filmic’ and ‘visual’ more often than ‘literary’. I’m fine with that, and I wanted to make the link even more explicit in this blog by talking about a fantastic tool for screenwriting that I use when plotting my books. If you haven’t come across it before, then the Hero's Journey is probably the single most useful aid a writer can have when it comes to plot. Whenever I’m stuck, unsure about what might happen, or where the story should go next, I flick ...

Last month I wrote about the sweet success of having a first book published.   This time I’m moving on the story by fifteen years.   During those years, as befit a child of the sixties, I did the hippie thing, moved to the countryside from the city, grew vegetables [not very well], baked bread in a solid fuel stove, collected cats and dogs – and five children.   I also taught myself to weave, and made cloth, wall-hangings and rugs. Then suddenly I found myself heading for my forties, the mother of five children under the age of eleven, including a new baby. And despite all my busyness, an overwhelming sense of emptiness settled like fog upon my life.   Who was I really?   Was I the person I seemed to be, or someone else? Where was I going?   Where was the person I used to be? That little girl once called Pauline Fisk who had so longed to be a writer when she grew up – where was she? For more than a decade, Dave and I had lived in a cottage in ...