Authors Electric

When I’m reading a book review or looking at notices of coming play performances, there’s one word that tells me I need read no further. I know at once that this novel or this performance is not for me.  The word is ‘reimagining’.  Instead of the writer’s creating his or her own original work of art in novel or play form, they have piggy-backed on a classic, taken over the well-defined characters (saves the effort of creating their own), invented new plotlines and generally ‘updated’ the story to add ‘freshness’ and ‘relevance’ for today. A particular favourite at the moment is to go for a minor character – Mary Bennett, say – and retell Jane Austen’s great novel from her point of view . The result is a kind of Cosy Classics in which readers are duped into thinking they’re being given a new, original story when much of it is simply borrowed finery from an infinitely greater creator.  The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. Told through the eyes of Maggie, NOT Tom Tulliver....

  As I understand it, the point of any art is that it's based on, and grew from, real human experience. What happened to you, and how you felt about it-- whether it was good or bad. What you learned from it. Or failed to learn, as failing to learn is a very common human experience. These experiences involve an immense laboratory of bio-chemicals and hormones, acting on actual 'vital' organs -- that is, living organs vital for living. The ones that hurt when you're disappointed, or embarrassed. It involves organic memory, which is bio-chemical, and involves vision, forgetfulness, imagination... Human experience involves dreams, both in the sense of ambitions and day-dreams, and the mysterious, little-understood visions created by our brains while we sleep -- and these visions can involve all our sleeping senses, and be as vivid -- that is, alive -- as anything we experience while awake. So much so that some cultures have maintained that we actually enter another world wh...

This year, I visited Hay-on-Wye for the festival's Romantasy day. Time I found out what this genre is all about, I decided, since I'm a lifelong fantasy fan and yet somehow (probably since I got published as a children's author and write mainly for the 9-11 age group) missed out on the Romantasy side of things! The two lovely authors on the panel, Hazel McBride and Imani Erriu, soon filled me in on the secret of its appeal. It turns out that this hot new genre, being basically fantasy written by women with a romantic twist, is essentially what I was writing back in the pre-internet days of small indie zines produced in people's garages with their equally small but faithful readership of genre fans/authors. In those days, most of these little zines were edited by men, and their content reflected this. But there was one called Visionary Tongue, whose editorial consultants included female fantasy authors Storm Constantine and Freda Warrington, which published a couple of s...

Image Credits:-   Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One photo from The Writers’ Summer School was taken by me, Allison Symes. Another two were kindly taken by Penny Blackburn at two Open Prose Mic Nights at Swanwick and used with permission. Book cover image is from Bridge House Publishing. AI images avoided. When this post goes live on 18th June 2026, my third flash fiction collection, Seeing The Other Side , should have been published by Bridge House Publishing  via their imprint, Chapeltown Books . The book has been a long time in coming and it is a joy to see it out there.  I’ve long thought what a pity it is you can’t bottle the feeling you have when your book comes out to draw on for encouragement and inspiration during the tougher times of the writing life. I’m busy preparing for launches. The book will have a physical launch, so to speak, at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick in Derbyshire in August. It has been a recent development for th...