Nine years and Counting - Debbie Bennett

So I was thinking what to write for my January post. New year – new beginnings. Resolutions and all that. I started looking around the blog and doing a bit of general admin. Realising there wasn’t a post up for today (2^ndJanuary), I thought I’d go through and update the sidebar of members so I could see how many vacancies we currently have. 

And this led me to a post by one our founders Susan Price from way back in May 2012 and her description of how Authors Electric came about and the work we all did back then in 2011. Nine years we’ve been going and I’ve been involved since the very start when our other founder member Katherine Roberts invited me on board. I’d known Katherine for a while before that from our mutual love of fantasy fiction and the British Fantasy Society.

It’s been a great nine years and I’ve blogged every month for pretty much all of them. AE has taken me through publishing 7 novels and a collection of short stories. I suspect I’ve missed the odd one or two – probably over the summer of 2018 when we moved house in a heatwave and everything was all a bit stressful and I probably didn’t have my computer set up for a week or so (somewhat surprisingly, BT moved our telephone account, number and broadband within a few hours …). And no, this blog isn’t a prelude to an announcement that I’m leaving, as I enjoy the e-space, and it focusses the mind to be required to produce something every month, even if some of my rants and meanderings aren’t exactly Shakespeare. But it is a call-to-arms, as it were.

Authors Electric is a group of volunteers. Some of us are full-time writers, some retired and some of us have day jobs. Some of us are traditional authors, some indie and some hybrid. We all have different talents and skills to bring to the table from all over the world. But we have three vacant blog slots at the moment which we need to fill and we could really use some extra admin help. Sue and I do most of the tech stuff between us, which is just about manageable, but we need help to recruit new members and manage a waiting list if we need one. In the past, we’ve had several writers wanting to join us and waiting for a spot – I suspect we have a smaller reach than we used to and I’m not sure why that is. Maybe social media has replaced blogging more these days? Is AE still relevant? I hope so as I’ve learned a lot from our posts, but I’m noticing that we have fewer comments from non-members than we used to. Maybe that’s because we no longer have guest posts? I’ll hold my hands up to that – I simply don’t have the time to recruit them and reformat/load their posts and it’s a job I’ll happily hand over to anybody who feels like taking up the reins? We could use some fresh input.

So come on guys. If you’re reading this as an AE member, how about helping inject some new blood into the group and volunteering to help out with some of the admin? If you’re a writer, but you don’t blog with us – we have three spaces. All we ask is that you commit to at least a year’s worth of posts. 

In the meantime, happy 2020 everybody and long may we continue writing!