Authors Electric

Just to clarify things, these are my favourite, or at least most frequent writing mistakes. If I started on the other mistakes I’ve made over the course of my life, it would turn into a book and would be entitled ‘What Was She Thinking?’, my preferred title for an autobiography. I present the top five list here in no particular order.                  1.      Every day a Tuesday Not usually a month of Sundays but sometimes several Mondays one after the other, or a very long week at work for my characters, with no weekend to look forward to at the end of it. This kind of thing often strikes me when I do the very first read-through after getting to the end of a draft, and it’s why I write down a chapter-by-chapter outline at this stage and add the day of the week to each chapter heading, trying to iron out discrepancies as I go along.   2.      Overuse of gestures / facial expressions My characters tend to recycle the same gestures to such an extent that they could be in danger

I’ve finally made the jump from what was formally Twitter to Threads. I do feel it is putting all my eggs in one big Meta basket, but I quite like the way it cross posts between platforms. We could debate the merits or downsides of social media all day, but as writers it is one of the best ways to build and connect with potential readers, which in turn hopefully leads to some sales, maybe reviews and thereby more sales… this writing lark is such a merry-go-round, when does anyone find time to write? I’ll address that one next month. I have tried to fill my threads timeline with mostly writers and creatives, I’m not following so many pollical accounts. All is calm and soothing – ish. You get the odd thread of how do you pronounce a certain word and how it freaks Americans out the way we say some things in the UK. I confess I tumble down a few of those rabbit holes, but somehow, they go in small circles. I get that sense of déjà vu and remind myself this is immaterial in the grand scheme

Only Connect, Part Two                                                                 The Woodlanders                                                                   It could have been a change of medication or my final retirement from a long-cherished teaching role, or it may have been simply that I was getting older. Whatever the cause, I was  struck down soon after my last birthday by the most awful bout of insomnia linked to the anxiety that I had so often suffered from. I had tried a number of remedies – lots of exercise, further medication, daily sessions of yoga nidra, counselling - even rereading favourite novels in search of the bibliotherapy that had aided me in the past - but none of this seemed to work. Apart from an hour or two each night, I lay awake, finding sleep impossible to come by. It was as though for some reason of its own my mind was refusing to allow me to switch off. At length, buoyed up by the optimism that had served me so well in the past, I decided to go

What does BBC Radio 4’s long-running, much-loved soap opera about Everyday Farming Folk have against Hallowe’en? BBC Radio 4's The Archers The Archers began on 1st January 1951, as a 15-minute daily serial intended to spread the word about new developments in farming. It centred on 3 or 4 farming families, most of whom were called Archer, with the addition of the Aldridges at the posh end of the scale, balanced by the Grundys and Horrobins at the other. The characters took off, and a wealth of other storylines got woven in, some for comic effect, some for their gripping dramatic pull, but most as vehicles for messages about Good Social Behaviour. No one is ever racist, for instance, except in a clumsy way, because unless one of the villagers says something objectionable (and, needless to say, quite out of character), how are we, the listeners, to grasp that a newcomer to the Ambridge village is from an ethnic minority? Halloween pumpkins... at least they're not plastic. Photo

                                                       Cover of my forthcoming novel; artwork by Cody Sexton. Since publishing my books, I have learned a lot. It’s fair to say that new writers are going to be unaware of all the pitfalls that may lie ahead. You can wait forever to secure a traditional contract, and even then, you most likely will have to do a lot of the marketing and promotion yourself. You can use a ‘hybrid’ model, which has worked out for me once, but I would be unlikely to do it again. You do have to be wary of being trapped in contracts that just aren’t that beneficial in the long game. Because the reality is, you will start by simply wanting to leave a ‘legacy’ behind, and then you will start to realise that your work is worth money that you are simply not getting. There are all sorts of publishing models, but so far, the one that hurts my pocket least, and gives me great and supportive exposure, is to use a small, independent press. With an indie press, you are be

This didn't happen at Hallowe'en. It happened at Christmas. But hey-ho, Hallowe'en, Christmas, they're both times for spooky stories. Especially if they're true. It was the Christmas when I was 15.  I usually shared a bedroom with my sister, but she was staying with relatives, so I had my bedroom to myself.  I was the last of the family to bed, and lay awake reading, my bedroom door closed.  Lying there, I heard my brother walk from his room to the bathroom. Then he walked from his room to the bathroom again – only without first returning to his bedroom.  After that he went up and down the stairs several times – sometimes without bothering to come back up before going down again.  Sometimes he started down the stairs without having walked across the landing to get there. At first I explained these gaps in the footsteps as my inattention, but soon I started to be annoyed.  Sometimes the footsteps started inside a