Authors Electric

  The hard part, at last, was over: the years spent researching and writing the book; revising and editing; concocting a 1-sentence and then a 1-paragraph elevator pitch; and then, Lord help me, coming up with an outline that won a thumbs up from a trusted reader. I was ready to go with a ms. formatted according to industry standards. And I had a plan I liked: to submit my work to three agents before putting the book up on Kindle.  I've written queries in the past and several won me big agents. But times and query styles have changed, along with my circumstances. So here was where I found myself beginning to clear my throat, tempted to justify my book's 60K word length; to apologize for past mistakes; to make a case for my experience and age.  But no, no. The hell with that. When it's showtime, just man up and belt out the blues. If I've only got 300 words, there's no time for lard or blubber. Stick the landing with line one: a razzle dazzle hook that dares an agent...

Not long ago, I saw a comment online that made me squirm. Someone was complaining that an actor had “gotten political,” and the commenter was quite indignant about it. “Why can’t entertainers just entertain?” they asked. It’s a sentiment that pops up regularly. Actors shouldn’t talk about politics. Musicians shouldn’t talk about politics. Writers definitely shouldn’t talk about politics. Apparently the moment a creator expresses a view about the world, they have somehow stepped outside their lane. I’ve never quite understood this expectation. Stories don’t come from nowhere. They come from the air we breathe, the systems we live under, the values we were raised with, and the moment in history we happen to inhabit. All of that is shaped by politics. Even the decision to avoid politics entirely is, in its way, a political stance. As writers, we know this instinctively. A novel about class is political. A novel about war is political. A novel about family roles, justice, poverty, gender, ...

  Peter Duck in winter acrylic on board by Anna Mortimer There’s a phrase I like in the C of E communion service when we give thanks for bread ‘which earth has given and human hands have made’.  It’s one of the many phrases that can’t be taken literally. What one actually gets, in most churches, is a tasteless white wafer made of wheat flour and water, then stamped out by machine and packaged hygienically. Minimal intervention by human hands, it would seem (though I’ve now watched a couple of You Tube videos which show labouring nuns, smiling and thinking holy thoughts as they work some basic machinery.) The usual communion wafer is nothing like real, crumbly, hand-made bread. Even if one never makes it oneself (I don’t) homemade bread seems to retain some tactile evidence of fingers mixing; palms and wrists and upper arms kneading; a baker’s bodyweight leaning into the dough, lifting and turning and rolling. No doubt it’s tiring work for people who have to make it all the tim...

Last September, I wrote about tidying up my website and realising that a good percentage of links went precisely nowhere. It was very frustrating, realising that people I'd helped out clearly didn't feel the same way, and I lost a lot of work that I stupidly didn't have copies of, including a series of blogs I wrote for what is now called the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival . Don't you just love the power (and money) of commercial sponsorship? Back in the day, It was the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival and I occasionally wrote for their blog for 4 years between 2011 and 2015, figuring it gave me some exposure amongst the big boys of crime fiction. I linked my own web site to each post and only discovered these links didn't work when I was doing my housekeeping last summer. Did I have copies? Of course I didn't. Why would I need them when any reader could just go to the link ... I tried restoring email archives, to find my original submissions, bu...

I have tried not to worry too much about AI, and even to welcome it, in its place, since one of my sons has been working with it in some capacity and I still feel it has the potential to help with scientific and medical research projects and that kind of thing. I can't imagine that Copilot, on the other hand, will be a help with anything.  I didn't intend to have to wrestle with Copilot, but it has recently invaded my Word documents exactly like a virus, and one for which there isn't any kind of antidote or vaccine. I think this has happened as an unintended consequence of an upgrade I've made to my Microsoft Office setup in order that I can experiment with their new-fangled tool for creating online databases. I did this because I've volunteered for years in various roles in a local community organisation, and some issues have arisen that I feel can only be resolved with a database, and of course Microsoft have used this moment to stop including Access in the Office...

  The Curative Power of Art A Reading of  Art Cure  by Daisy Fancourt This book is proof if any were needed that an engagement with the arts is good for us. The Art that the author Daisy Fancourt refers to in it belongs to several different creative areas, such as music, dance, poetry and storytelling, and she has followed the first of these throughout her life as an accomplished piano player. In her prelude to the book, she says that behaviour connected to the arts can have a big influence on our health. For example: ‘If children engage with art workshops, choirs, book clubs, dance classes, drama groups or bands they are less likely to be lonely or develop behavioural problems…’ Nor is this book just a speculative account. Throughout it the author tells us about her engagement with specialist academic teams in areas of Psychobiology and Epidemiology, for which she is a Professor at UCL, researching how biological processes relate to human experience such as the emotions....