Authors Electric

  Once upon a time, in a century long gone, to send your book out into the world, there was only one path to follow. It was not the easiest one to negotiate, for there were a number of obstacles to be overcome; beginning with the quest for an agent. The Writers and Artists year book, a might tome, was your bible. You scanned the details of each agency and marked the ones which looked promising. Then the precious manuscript was packed into a padded envelope and taken to the Post Office, making sure that you’d included return postage. After this the wait. It could be days, which raised the suspicion that the sample chapters had not even been read. The classic was the time I bought the agent’s book on how to submit, followed her instructions to the letter, and in less than a week had the manuscript returned with the suggestion that I bought her book and followed the instructions on how to submit… If after all the angst and frustration and agent expressed interest and took you on...

  It was a rainy and cold day in Roxborough when my future husband, Dave, and I went to see a new movie at our local movie theater,   Rushmore,   the first film to be in wide release from director Wes Anderson. I was already pretty loaded in on our relationship because my husband wore Doc Martens, wrote and drew satirical comics, and liked some cool music. When we came out of the movie I felt even more in love, with my husband, with life, with the world in general. I was vibrating. So, there was no question of what I was going to do last weekend: I was going to go see Anderson's newest movie,   The Phoenician Scheme . It was everything I could have hoped for, weird, hopeful, sad, funny, well-acted, well-written, and the set was amazing, as were all the props, details, etc. The postcards were absolutely gorgeous, and how many films have you been to where there are postcards? I will say this, having seen  The Phoenician Scheme,  I do think Wes Anderson is mak...

Rusty, newly arrived Rusty arrived two weeks ago and trotted straight into my heart. Not that I flatter myself that my feelings are of any more than pragmatic interest to him. He seems a self-possessed little pony, not nervy, not needy, sizing up his new situation and making the best of it. A sensible chap.       My own riding days are over but we have two stables and some sheds which enable my daughter Georgeanna to base her two retired racehorses here. Rusty’s job is as a minder for Backbord, a hurdles winner at Cheltenham in his day (not with us, I hasten to add). Georgeanna was his work rider, led him up at the races and bought him for a nominal sum when his career came to an end. He’s now 23, elderly for a thoroughbred, and has recently suffered the loss of an eye.       Backbord is so devoted to his stable companion Bo (22)  that it’s become impossible to separate them. Theirs is an intense relationship with a competitive edge. They can...

  June is National Crime Reading Month and there are many events happening up and down the country. You can look  here  for events in your area. At West Barnes Library, we're welcoming back Rod Reynolds for the third time and introducing debut author, Sam Frances. Both have written police procedurals but in very different ways. Come along on Monday 16th June at 7.30pm to find out more! £2 cash entry on the door. West Barnes Library is right next to Motspur Park Station on the Epsom and Chessington South lines to Waterloo. Click  here  to book your seat.

Once upon a time, before the dawn of the World Wide Web, the internet was in its infancy. Some of us had computers with modems – those little boxes that sat next to your pc with whizzy lights and beeps that kidnapped your telephone line and charged you money for every minute it took to upload/download emails and read a few online text-only forums.  I’m talking late 1980s into the early 1990s, when monitors were green-on-black and gaming involved answering simple questions and hitting <RETURN>.  I had an email account that was linked to a site (not a web site, they hadn’t been invented yet) called CIX. It was American, I think, and had several interesting forums – the most active one for me being Cult TV. Remember, this was way before the age of digital streaming, when TV shows were broadcast once, maybe again if you were lucky and after that you had to see if it was available on VHS video somewhere. Cult TV was a discussion of all things sf and nerdish. From Doctor Who t...

I recently discovered that AI is being trained to do something I want it to do even less than I want it to write novels or design book covers or publish social media posts. It’s organising travel. Although there is very little point in making travel plans myself at the time of writing, because, for various boring medical reasons, I can’t actually travel anywhere for a while, I am no stranger to the task of organising travel. I must admit that in some cases (though not always) the planning process has been quite a bit more fun, or at least very much less stressful, than the actual travel. In fact I am quite tempted to start planning a trip now even without making any real bookings, just to keep my hand in. Of course, the more complicated the trip and therefore the more fun to organise, the more potential there is for things to go wrong. I had several panic attacks in the time leading up to my ‘North American tour’ of October 2001, partly because I hadn’t flown since 1978 and partly ...