Authors Electric

  I'm sure there are few who cannot have heard of TikTok but for those who have not, it is a video centric social media platform. WIth over a billion users worldwide it is racketing up the charts and is either fifth or seventh in the charts on whether you count messenger and WhatsApp as social media apps. So, why am I talking about TikTok here today? Join me on my TikTok adventure. In a fit of enthusiasm I joined TikTok about seven or eight months ago in a slow period during lockdown. Then, I saw all those youngsters dancing and lip synching and nearly lost the will to live. I literally had no clue what I was doing, or why I was doing it. I did a small video of my writing space, chucked on the hashtag #booktok and left it to fall as it would. I followed one person, had one follower, got a number of views and likes but nothing more. It was like astronauts drifting in space with no clue what space actually was, where they were supposed to be heading and hadn't even heard of the m

My kids couldn’t believe it. It was literally a few days after Christmas, and the shop was selling Easter Eggs! Is it me, or are they even earlier this year than normal? They’re all mixed on the shelves with Valentine merch. At least, it means as a writer, your timeline doesn’t have to be too precise. That’s my excuse, anyway. It’s a nice detail to include in your story, something like a poisoned cream egg, for example. Your time frame is from the start of January, all the way through to Easter. You can describe the victim, walking through the supermarket, tutting at the fact that Easter Eggs and Valentine's hearts are right next to one another. Maybe she dislikes the passing of the seasons, feels it’s like wishing your life away. She might hesitate between cream eggs and valentine hearts, with the killer peeking between the shelves to see if his dastardly plan will succeed. It could confuse your readers, I suppose. It makes the timeline less precise. Writing about seasonal s

I’m naturally anxious to remind the august membership of Authors Electric that I’m still a keen follower of the group’s comings and goings so I’ve decided to use one of my occasional guest visits to help prolong the relentless gaiety of the Christmas and New Year observations by offering a little light-hearted challenge designed specifically for members' tastes and talents. In fact, it’s a variation on one I published several years ago by way of response to a Facebook posting. Facebook is a strange place for all sorts of reasons – some good, some less so. Just by answering a few questions, one can, for example, find out really useful things, such as which 18th century politician, Renaissance painter, Jane Austen character, or medieval landlord one most resembles in terms of one’s susceptibility to certain medical conditions. Other queries help one decide whether, temperamentally, one is closer to a porcupine, a swallow-tailed butterfly, or a haddock. Or there’s the simple process

  Oh, They have a long list of reasons why the book that's your baby belongs in the casket they've already made. It's too short/long/purple/plain/commercial/literary/off-the-wall/common...or to put it simply: I've spent the past year on a project that had Too-Too all over it before I'd even started. And yet I continued with some trepidation. But, as I continued, I grew more defiant. I also grew more confident that there was a market for my project: seven radical renditions of poems by one lesser-known Roman poet--'inspired-by covers ' instead of conventional translations. I envisioned a book totaling maybe 50 pages, including commentaries that I hoped would be half of the fun. Since nothing like this book exists, it might have a fighting chance if I remembered E. Lynne Harris.   Harris was a bisexual black author who self-published this first book in 1991. Like other authors in those pre-Web days, Harris drove around in a car loaded with copies. But unlike o

When I was a little girl, the answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was always the same. “I’m going to be a writer.” As I’ve written about elsewhere, life got in the way and it’s only now, in my mid-fifties, that I am a proper author, with a book or two what I wrote.   I took the plunge and at the end of last year, we did our last catering function and hung up our aprons forever. “What joy!”, thought I to myself. “No more distractions like quotes for weddings, working out how many champagne flutes a client needs, planning a menu which will suit a party which contains two coeliacs, five vegans, two dairy-frees and a person who can’t abide peppers. Surely, I will be as light-hearted as a swallow, swooping ‘ere closer to the earth.”   Sitting at my laptop, with all the time in the world, the words didn’t flow. Not even a bit. I wrote several paragraphs then edited them heavily, sighing as I did so. Where had my creative spark gone? Why wasn’t I racing along,

On the last day of 2021, I sat at my desk ready to write.  I woke up early, made a cup of coffee, told Alexa to play the best of Kenny G and cut a huge slice of my favourite Rum cake to nibble on. I wore my fluffy lounge wear and cosy socks. I was ready, absolutely ready to write the last few words of my new novel. I only had 4,000 more words left. Then the unthinkable happened, I stared at my screen for more minutes than I could count and nothing. My hands didn't move, but my mouth did, finishing the cake and coffee that was supposed to last a few hundred words in only a few minutes. It was weird and uncomfortable. The ease with which my mind betrayed me.  It was not that my mind was completely blank, actually, it was quite full with words, so much so that - I could smell the words I could taste the words I could see the words I could hear the words I just couldn't write the words  My mind was entangled, spun into a web of doubt, fear and insecurities. It felt so crazy to me,