Authors Electric

2011 version I first wrote Edge of Dreams way, way back. It was probably my third completed novel and the first that was realistically worth carrying on with! I think I posted a couple of months ago about my first novel I hand-wrote as a teenager? After that I wrote an otherworld fantasy that was also pretty dire (but again, I got to the end) and I can’t even find the dot-matrix print out or the old computer files, which were pre-Word and would probably be unreadable anyway.  So Edge wasn’t too bad. And I know I posted about the motivational aspect of this book a couple of months ago too, but stick with me - this isn't a complete regurgitation. I sat on it for a long time while life happened, then dusted it off and rewrote it a few times. This was the first novel I submitted to traditional publishers (indie publishing wasn’t a thing back then), and it did almost get picked up by Chicken House, failing at the last hurdle of the Acquisitions meeting. Still, it gave me a little confi...

 We've just had the de-clutterers round again, and I think they've at last finished with the front room. After a couple of sessions earlier in the year they had got rid of most of the complete rubbish, so this time they reached the far corners of the room and retrieved some treasures, relatively speaking. Old photographs and holiday souvenirs, a bit of family jewellery, more sheet music, and what seemed like thousands of letters from my mother. To put this in some sort of context, the front room had started out as quite an organised sitting-room, had morphed into my bedroom for a while and then into a store-room which as well as our own family clutter had accommodated whatever was left over when we cleared out first my mother's house and then my brother's some years ago. While I was in hospital having my hip replaced, family members had pushed things into the corners to make sure I had enough space to walk about in safely, and then the next time I was in hospital, havin...

A Misalignment of the Stars   Recently I suffered a painful bout of sciatica, something which I have experienced before but never with this level of intensity. I was becalmed for a few weeks, being unable to walk more than a few paces. Stairs were almost impossible to climb. Co-incidentally, however, the author Lissa Evans* with whom I have an online acquaintance, posted a compelling recommendation on social media of a book entitled  To Exist As I Am  by Grace Spence Green. It was subtitled  A Doctor’s Notes on Recovery and Radical Acceptance . Trusting in Lissa’s judgement of the book, I ordered a copy using my local library’s reservation service. It arrived within three days, and I began reading it.    The book is the extraordinary story of Grace Spence Green’s journey, after suffering a spinal cord injury which paralysed her from the waist down, which gave a completely new cast to a life that was up to that point her training as a fourth-year medical stu...

The lure of computer games.  Photo by Boris Hamer: https://www.pexels.com/photo /young-child-engaged-with-laptop-indoors- 29545224 / Recently a headline in the Spectator caught my eye: The Real Reason Children no Longer Enjoy Reading by Mary Wakefield. Given that Received Opinion blames the lure of the mobile phone, computer games, social media etc for the sad decline in young people picking up books, I was intrigued.The article title implied something else was afoot. And indeed, according to Wakefield, it is. The author describes a train journey whiled away (if you can call it that) by coaching her son for his 11 plus exam. The boy’s increasingly stubborn refusal to answer a simple question about an image in an English comprehension paper drives her dotty, until she realises there’s something else going on here. It’s not that her son can’t understand. He’s fighting back. Against a curriculum that has airily dispensed with any need to introduce children to the delights of litera...

  Susan Price's website can be found here... She does use words occasionally... 

Xenophon grew up in Athens and served in the Greek cavalry a few years before the birth of Alexander the Great. In his retirement, he wrote what is considered to be the first book on horsemanship, which I found useful when I was writing "I am the Great Horse", although I don't claim to have read it in the original ancient Greek! Fortunately translations exist, and I chose 'The Art of Horsemanship' translated by M H Morgan for its layman's approach to the text rather than being aimed exclusively at scholars of the period. The Art of Horsemanship This neat little book includes Xenophon's original Treatise on Horsemanship,  together with an essay on the Greek Riding Horse, closing with a chapter describing the characteristics of a good horse according to 10 prominent Greek and Roman writers of the time. A series of notes at the end provide fascinating detail to the equestrian, such as the type of bit used in the horse's mouth for everyday riding (smooth) ...