Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos  Every year is special in some way to us all but I hope 2026 will prove to stand out for all of the right reasons.  I reach a milestone birthday in a few days time after this blog goes out - the big 60 - but it also reminds me of another anniversary.  This year will mark thirty years since I took up the pen seriously. It did take a milestone birthday and another life changing event (the birth of my son later in 1996) to make me realise if I wanted to get stories written and out there somehow, I ought to get on with it!  Despite setbacks, and the proverbial rejections (more than enough to cover several walls and possible The Great Wall of China itself), I’ve kept writing since. This year is also due to see the publication of my third flash fiction collection, Seeing The Other Side too. I hope to have physical book launches as well as online ones for this.  When my last book, Tripping The Flash ...

Tromso, 24th January, 2026 Cloud iridescence The Northern Lights have featured in many children's books, especially Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy. I have been fascinated by natural phenomena in the sky, from rainbows to cloud iridescence, which I was fortunate enough to see in Costa Rica. We were white water rafting, so I didn't have my camera with me and had to rely on the cameraman provided by the company. His photo doesn't do it justice, but it does give you some idea of the living rainbow that undulated around a cauliflower-shaped cloud.      As a child, after reading about Ernest Shackleton and looking at drawings of the Antarctic sky, the thought of ever seeing the aurora was an impossible dream. It's only the arrival of cell phones that has made them so accessible, as anyone can record them when, as this year, there has been unusual solar activity and they have been seen a lot further south. Needless to say, I missed every occurrence as living close...

  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...