Authors Electric

  Never judge a book by its cover. At least, that’s what they say. I’ve been doing some fresh research into cover design these past few weeks, gearing up to launch the first in (hopefully) a series of Young Adult books. The book is written (and rewritten, three times), and the manuscript has been edited and proof-read until it’s as polished as I can make it. As an aside, even after three passes for typos, some still remained; my go-to method for a final pass is to print out and read the book in reverse, a paragraph at a time. It’s long-winded and not the most fun, but it does seem to catch any remaining spelling and grammar mistakes. I suspect it’s because I have to force my brain to engage, rather than going with the flow of the story. On the plus side, even after reading the book seven or eight times, I still like it. But back to my original thoughts, cover designs. I hadn’t really thought much about this, but every year, it seems like a theme emerges that almost ...

Below is the opening to my very first (unpublished and unpublishable) novel. It was lovingly hand-written in a fancy binder in about 1978 when I was fourteen. No computers back then and nobody even had typewriters at home. I got a manual typewriter when I was seventeen or so, as I recall. It was (is) a crime novel, inspired by a dream I had, and was written in the evenings when I wasn't particularly happy at school and didn't have much of a social life. I don't think I ever showed it to anybody except perhaps a girl at school who did type some of it up for me - although that may have been novel number two when I was seventeen. Neither novels have ever been edited and I've never attempted to submit them or self-publish. They're nowhere near good enough and being only fourteen would not have cut it! So I’ve typed this up exactly as it appears in my binder, which I still have in the filing cabinet. Every missed comma and dodgy sentence structure! I don't think I...

I had planned to write about the actual writing situation that led me to ask the above question, but instead I found myself wondering if ‘trilemma’ is a real word or not, as I imagined I had probably coined it myself. During my investigations in various online dictionaries, however, I’ve discovered that not only is it a real word but that the word has existed for a few centuries and the concept for a good deal longer. In the middle of my trilemma search, I realised that ‘quandary’ was a more accurate term for my state of mind, as it would not restrict me to two or three options but was much more vague and open-ended than that - though looking at the structure of the word carefully I very much wanted it to mean a problem with exactly four possible solutions. In any case, it seems that a trilemma is often used in a very exact way, to refer to problems in economics or computing, so it would be quite unsuited to solving the less quantifiable question of what to do next. Anyway, I will leav...