Authors Electric

Umberto Tosi, New Year's Eve, 2026 "Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph, " wrote  Thomas Paine to George Washington in the darkest days of the American Revolution when the British Empire seemed invincible.  Mad King Donald-abused  America needs more Thomas Paines right now.  " These are the times that try men's souls," Paine wrote. "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."  George Washington , then commander in chief of a demoralized, underfunded Continental Army promptly  had Paine's  The American Crisis   pamphlet, read aloud to them. Thomas Paine-Laurent Davos By the 1990s, when my youngest daughter took her first steps, I blessed the stars that seemed to finally give her generation respite from...

The Scattered Authors Society is a fine, upstanding body of writers scribbling away all over Britain. I'm a member -- one of the founder members, in fact, along with Authors Electric's own Katherine Roberts. But I'm also a member of a smaller group (and very exclusive group, I'm telling you) within the SAS.  This very exclusive writing group of ours had a problem. None of us were doing much writing. Which, I understand, is not all that unusual with writing groups. Personally, I was bereft of all ideas. Just flat out. But the problem most of the others had was that they had deadlines and  ought to be writing, and wanted to write-- but somehow, the writing just wasn't getting done. We meet up reguarly on Zoom, it being a bit difficult to meet up in person, scattered as we are from the West Country to Scotland. The meetings were full of complaints about the failure to actually get any writing done, beset as we were by distractions. Now there are a few tricks to con you...

This month, we saddle up for some racy teenage fiction set in the glamorous world of equine polo. Unbridled by K L McKain " Three couples. Two rival stables. One unforgettable season ." claims the hot pink cover, and this book delivers on all three. Social media princess Bex keeps her string of four polo ponies at Lord Langdon's stables, where they enjoy the best of everything - including, if Bex gets her own way (and she usually does), the handsome Langdon heir Freddie. Her friend Luella is a faithful cheerleader to Bex's enviable lifestyle, until Luella begins a secret romance of her own with a talented groom at the rival Balfour estate. Into this den of equestrian rivalry comes horse-crazy Carrie, who lands her dream job at the Langdon stables and quickly draws the attentions of Freddie. Their romance blossoms, however snogging the boss's son means jeopardising her position and making an enemy of jealous Bex. With a big match for the Guillards Cup approaching, ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. AI images avoided.   Fiction reflects life in all its shades of grey (I believe someone once thought there were fifty of those and then considered there were another fifty after that). At either end of the spectrum, fiction has its light and dark sides.  I’ve written both kinds in my flash and short story work. Indeed when I was putting my debut flash fiction collection together, the moods of the stories inspired the title, From Light to Dark and Back Again . This was also useful as the moods of the stories helped me with my ordering for this collection.  I always prefer writing and reading the lighter side of fiction but know that for some of my characters at least, the darker side of the spectrum is where they “fit”. This is due to their being of a darker nature or their situation is such the likely outcome will be on the darker side. The important thing here is it will ring true and that truth matte...

Advert in the tiny airport at Canaima, Venezuela, complete with glorious spelling mistake. With the world in turmoil, and shortly about to embark on a holiday to Cyprus we booked last year, it struck me as a subject worth discussing. We all write dramatic scenes from time to time, and as England isn’t the riskiest place in the world we frequently use faraway destinations. As always, I prefer to write from personal experience, as online research can only go so far. It’s the smells and tastes that often enliven writing. Although we may not recall them as well as we do the visual and the auditory, that’s why they are important and they can be very powerful memories. Woodsmoke always takes me back to my first visit to Zakopane, in Poland, with my father, in 1965. The smell was everywhere, and not unpleasant. No central heating then, just tall wood-burning stoves that heated a room to perfection. The same stoves they had in Ukraine, where I’ve been three times, and is now one of the most da...

  May is only the beginning of a ride I believed I had taken before and urgently need to take now. In my 15 years of publishing on Kindle I'd always loved the writing part but had always moved on to the next book as an award-winning writer between publishers and agents without bothering to market or hustle my work. But something remarkable happened as I approached two milestones. My first Kindle book, Nobility, had never been available in paperback. Something about rights management had condemned it to only digital status. But this book had always been special to me and had had a curious history, sitting for years on the desks of publishers and agents. Too short. Too dark as a Christmas thriller with a hard-won happy ending (written long before the wave of dark and violent Yule movies). I'd drawn up a long list of other short books sold as novels instead of novellas. No market for a story of a broken man who'd betrayed his country and an angel who's no angel against a b...