Authors Electric

  As winter comes to a close and the sun gathers in strength it seeks out every nook and cranny to illuminate the drifts of dust that have accumulated there over the darker months. Windows that on a grey January or February morning were perfectly translucent are now covered with an almost invisible film, unnoticed until a ray of sunshine sneaks into the room, sending the dust motes dancing and igniting a small flare of guilt about my lack of housekeeping. It’s not that I don’t clean, I do, but I am probably not as thorough as I might be. A friend gave me a mug which says “Housework never killed anyone but why take the risk.” I use it most mornings for the first cup of tea of the day and it never fails to make me smile. I don’t believe that housework is deadly, but it is deadening in its relentlessness, for no sooner has the dust been removed from one surface that it floats down again and a recently hoovered carpet is a magnet appeal for stray bits of fluff and other detritus....

T here are novels that tell a story, and then there are novels that carry the weight of history, identity, and moral urgency.   When All the Girls Stopped Singing   is firmly the latter. Spanning continents and generations, it follows Zora Monro as she is pulled from a carefully constructed life into a truth that is as dangerous as it is necessary. I spoke with Susan Burgess-Lent about voice, responsibility, and what it means to write toward the realities many would rather not face. Dianne Pearce: Without giving too much away, what is   When All the Girls Stopped Singing   about? Susan Burgess-Lent:   When All the Girls Stopped Singing   follows Zora Monro, a Washington, DC human rights advocate whose carefully constructed life unravels after her mother’s sudden death. What begins as grief soon becomes a revelation. Hidden files and cryptic notes expose a long-buried secret about Zora’s origins, one that stretches from America’s fraught racial history to a...

Tomorrow we meet in a pub, with no alcohol, to say goodbye to a friend. We first met Heidi when our children were at primary school together. It was a very small village school where I can remember being on first name terms with all the other parents. Some of us ran an after school club together. Heidi was part of this. She was musical, artistic, imaginative, affectionate, alternative. Sometimes her suggestions were a bit fey. Sometimes she didn’t turn up when we expected her. Heidi was a single mother with a single child, Oliver, who she loved dearly. He too was musical, artistic, affectionate, full of enthusiasms, never quite in the mainstream. Sometimes they were very late for school. Occasionally Heidi wasn’t there when it was time for the children to go home. Once or twice I went to Heidi’s house and couldn’t make her hear me. There was a day when she started to tell me how unhappy she was. People occasionally made remarks. I began to worry about her. I was also the school governo...

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post, or even dedicate much time to writing. IT issues, both parents ending up in hospital at different times and needing help, coupled with increased work pressures mean I’ve barely written anything for the last six months. Things are settling, though, finally. Parents on the mend, work settled, and have a new laptop all configured with backups restored at last; I got the last few pieces sorted out over the Easter weekend and can now return to scratching that itch I get when I don’t write for a while. On the plus side, I’ve got a notebook full of random jottings I’ve managed to get on paper, and feel sure there’ll be something in there I can use in future work. I’ve not been completely dormant, though. I’m around 10k words from revising the third draft of my Young Adult adventure set in the Middle East. (As a wee side note, my wife has pointed out that my timing is impeccable – I was gearing up to launch a dystopian YA adventure set a few ...

This post was inspired by the discovery that there’s an apparently endless supply of videos on YouTube which focus on a number of players fighting each other and various enemies on Minecraft (don’t ask me how I know this). Before I watched some of the Minecraft videos, I was tempted to write about the great Kit-Kat heist,  with the illustration below.  Glad to have my Kit Kat stash at the moment I had a difficult history with computer games even before Minecraft. That history, I’ve just worked out, goes back around fifty years, which was when some of my work colleagues discovered they could access a game I think was called ‘Space Wars’ on the mainframe computer at our place of work. Once the senior staff found out about it, they ruled that it wasn’t to be played during working hours but playing after hours was all right. This was a workplace that had very few other rules even compared with others of the time. I never quite understood the attraction of Space Wars, if that was r...

  In Isfahan                                                                                Chehel Sotoun Palace, Isfahan In Isfahan is the title of a short story by William Trevor and I turned to it after watching TV pictures of the war raging across Iran and tried to make some sense of the destruction that I was witnessing.   Isfahan is a beautiful city. In the words of its governor Mehdi Jamalinejad:   “Isfahan is not an ordinary city. It’s a museum without a roof…In none of the previous eras, not in the Afghan wars, not in the Moghul conflict, not even during the ‘sacred defence’ [the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war] was this ever done.   “This is a declaration of war on a civilisation. An enemy that has no culture pays no heed to symbols of culture. A country that has no hist...