Authors Electric

Last month, I wrote a piece on my favourite god, Hermes, the god of thieves, liars, athletes, scholars, merchants, the home, dreamers and travellers– even those travelling to the next world. Oh, and all those of us who earn our living by words. I also discovered that the worship of the Olympian Gods is no longer a thing of the past. Like Druidism, it’s been revived, as ‘Hellenism’ or ‘Hellenic Worship.’ While skipping about on the internet, I happened on a forum where present-day worshippers swop tales of how Hermes has helped them, and exchange photos of their home shrines. There are useful tips. For instance, suppose you are an American teen, part of an orthodox Christian household, but secretly worship Zeus and Aphrodite. You want to set up a shrine to Them, but can’t face dealing with the uproar that would cause. What can you do? Well, make yourself a ‘traveller’s shrine.’ This is a lidded tin that will fit in a pocket or bag. Inside the lid, put your image of the pagan...

The Man Who Listens To Horses by Monty Roberts The Man Who Listens To Horses is part autobiography, part equine training manual. It details Monty Roberts' upbringing in the tough world of cowboys and rodeo competition. From a very young age, the boy Monty was entering rodeos and winning prizes on horses his father had 'broken' (i.e. trained using the traditional and rather brutal cowboy method of the time). These days, we tend to talk more of 'backing' or 'starting' a young horse under saddle, which involves winning the horse's trust rather than using force and fear to produce results. As he grew up watching his father and the other cowboys work, Monty began to suspect that young horses could be trained more quickly and better by speaking their language... the non-verbal language of Equus. To develop his new technique, he followed and observed groups of mustangs in the wild, noting how the herd was always led by a mare who was responsible for disciplini...

Image Credits:-   Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. AI images avoided. Photos from The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick were taken by Gemma Owen-Kendall on behalf of the school or by me, Allison Symes. Many thanks to Babs Trevitt for the image of me taking part in the Swanwick Open Prose Mic Night. When this goes out, I would have had my first book launch for Seeing The Other Side at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick . A recent development has been to allow delegates to have their launches as part of the school events in the year of first publication.  I enjoyed this opportunity. It was wonderfully set up by a launch co-ordinator who, amongst other useful things, took pictures on my phone and theirs, so the school and I can use these on social media. See the pictures. Given my last launch was in 2020 when everything was online due to the pandemic, it is a joy to hold in person events again.  Many thanks to Babs Trevitt for taking this photo. I lo...

That's me in the middle, with my two besties. And yes, I was called Midget. We're standing outside the school canteeen, having no doubt been up to no good. I have got my revenge on several people over the years – not the ones picured here – disguising them as characters in stories. The funniest one was someone who really admired one of my villains, without realising on whom it was based. Anyway, as I'm off on holiday I thought I'd cheat a bit by using an old story of mine this month, originally published in Magnet magazine, which was getting something off my chest about my own schooldays.  Looking back, I now realise that I did in fact have a few very good friends, with whom I have stayed in touch, but there were also loners who didn't have any at all. I simply didn't notice them, just like the rest of the class. This story is called Flaming June. I chose it because of the tropical weather we've been having here in the UK, and I've only updated the endin...

                         This will be--I promise you--my only post about doody...American slang for poop.      If you're still with me, I refer to literary doody. And I don't mean hack novels ground out in a month or a week between shifts at Walmart or McDonald's. I mean the sort of doody real writers like the lot of us have to flush out as we work now and then.     May I share one gross example?     Thanks.     About halfway through my WIP, which was coming right along, I found myself in real trouble. The next scene was already clear in my mind, one involving a smash action scene and a crucial change in my lead character. The pacing seemed almost right for this scene. But my character wasn't quite ready. He had to learn, hear, or see something that galvanizes him.     I had an obligation as a writer to honor this need. But my duty led me to doody as I kept t...

 I didn’t stay to chat. I didn’t join the group which was heading for the pub. I left the meeting as quickly as I could and hurried down the beach. This year’s Peter Duck holiday had begun. There was already a game of cards in progress on the cabin table but I didn’t join in. Merely pushed my meeting notes somewhere far out of sight, ate my share of the supper and settled into my bunk. Nine nights of sleeping on board and waking early every morning to walk along river walls or beaches with the dogs instead of our familiar fields (lovely though they are). The saltings above Waldringfield Gwen, my oldest granddaughter joined the following day. I was impressed by her initial questions: did we have flares? where were they kept? Was there a VHF set and who was qualified to use it? You might think this implied some lack of faith in our ability to negotiate our very modest river to river passages but I thought they were good questions to ask on arrival on any new boat on which you we...