Authors Electric

During the past month, as the heatwave continues to sweep across the country, I have mostly been inside. It isn't for sun avoidance, or because my house is cooler; it isn't even because I can boast of finishing my writing projects; it is because I have been marking exam papers. An online precedent has been set so I am allowed to say that - I am not allowed to say the exam board I am marking for or reveal any details, but because of TikTok, the subject of one exam has already been leaked: it was about technology and AI. And I have begun to realise that the younger generation is just as uncomfortable with it as any of their elder curmudgeonly complainants. This, dear reader, fills me with optimism. Perhaps there is hope for the future of humanity after all? As well as writing and leaping about on stage, I run a tuition company. It sounds grand, but in reality, I run a company of one - me. I do it all, from navigating the complexities of the timetable to sorting out invoices (as A...

Writers all: Bow your heads and have your offering of wheat cakes and olive oil ready. Here, I introduce you to your patron God.  Herald and Messenger Back in the day, Our Hermes— or Mercury, if you prefer— was a busy lad. He was the Gods’ Messenger, or Herald, divine representative of all those mortal heralds with the fraught job of carrying messages along dangerous roads, to equally dangerous people who might be extremely pissed off by what they had to say. As the Gods’ Messenger, Hermes had to give the hard word to characters even worse than the average human king: to giants, witches, monsters and other Gods (who could be so difficult). Hermes was a diplomat, a fast, smooth talker, a charmer, a deft bender of the truth. As no doubt human heralds were. Each herald carried a version of the God’s snake-wrapped staff, as a sign of the God's protection and a reminder that you really did not want to mess with the Olympian Gods. (You could end up as a shrubbery, or an interesting ...

This month, we take a look at a classic novel you've probably heard of even if you aren't a horsey person and don't normally read books with ponies on the front cover!  Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. Being pony mad, and with Black Beauty  accepted as a children's story at the time, I read this book when I was about 10 years old. I can remember enjoying it as a story written from a horse's viewpoint, although not much else of the plot stayed with me over the years. I don't even remember what the cover looked like, only that it was a library book like most of my reading back then, so it was probably a hardcover edition. Weirdly, I've never actually owned a copy of this book, so I picked up a paperback edition from a secondhand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye to re-read with adult eyes for this review. First published in 1877, the story follows Black Beauty's life from a foal in the meadow with his mother, through good times and bad, as he travels from Hampshire to B...

 I am the husband of Elizabeth Kay, of this parish. Her blog post the other day was about an attempt to scam her with promises of a film adaptation of one of her books. That book was, incidentally, a fairly unlikely choice from among her oeuvre, though admittedly it had the distinction that it was the only one to have been translated into Irish!   Elizabeth promised a follow-up post from me, focusing on the AI aspects, so here we are.   Before we get on to the AI, a couple of other related matters. First, the email address used by the supposed bigshot film producer, who we are calling Sheldon, didn’t look right. It was an ordinary AOL address, and we would have expected a major film producer like him to have been using something more corporate-looking. And the name of the account began with “official_” – which was perhaps protesting a little too much? He also gave us the URL for the website of his production company, which was superficially impressive – convincingly sw...

The closest I've come to kicking the bucket was when peritonitis put me in a coma for three days at age 5. (That was in 1942, when I was saved by new antibiotic wonder drugs), and late one night a month ago, at age 89, when my inamorata, artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, found me unconscious on the floor of my home office, where I had fallen due to low blood sugar - a hazard for   type 2 diabetic octgenarians on insulin like myself. Lucky for me she called 911. (I won't count the murder of a character that my friend and prolific  mystery writer Lewis Perdue named after me in his 1985 thriller, " The Linz Testament .")   The non-fiction me woke up in St. Fra ncis Hospital, in the pricey 'burb of Evanston, Illinois, not far from my home on Chicago's North Side. Not that  I'm a believer, but St. Francis, as well as Eleanor, must have been watching over me because I remain whole, and in possession of my faculties. I was bruised from my fall, but no broken bones. ...