Authors Electric

Recently a friend brought a book for me to read. It had achieved the extraordinary feat of being enjoyed by every member of her rather scary book club, so naturally I was intrigued.  The book was O Caledonia , by Elspeth Barker. O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker Set in a bleak, harsh landscape of 1920s Scotland, it is a glittering gem of black, gothic humour, the like of which I have never come across before. All the rules of story creation are thrown out the window. The heroine, Janet, is an unlikeable, awkward, bookish girl who relates to animals better than to people, and whose selfish instincts make her difficult for the reader to sympathise with. Moreover, she’s killed off on page 1. Found, at the tender age of 16, clad in a black lace evening dress, stabbed to death at the foot of Auchnassaugh Castle’s great stone staircase.  Not what you’re meant to do as a writer because, well, why would anyone read on if the main character is already dead? What kind of mind writes a comin...

The Dioskouri or Sons of Zeus - Wiki Is the mortal or immortal who's checking his phone? Most people know that, in Greek and Roman Mythology, there were twin heroes -- or, demi-gods. Some of you might even be born under the sign of the Gemini, which was their Roman name. To the Greeks they were the 'Dioskouroi' or 'Sons of Zeus.' Today they are known mostly from the  zodiac sign, where they are usually shown as cute little babies. I’ve even seen them, on the horoscope page of a woman’s magazine, drawn as cute and smiley baby girls with pony-tails and pink ribbons... Ha! In myth, the Dioskouroi were Spartan warriors. In other words, well-hard. Forget the smiles and ribbons. The term 'laconic' refers to Lakonia, the region ruled by the city-state of Sparta.  Spartan youth were trained, famously, to endure hardship and to despise anything uselessly showy or emotional. Their ideal was to say, bluntly, only what was needed to be said. Anything more was wet, indu...

'No Mow May' is a campaign started by the charity Plantlife  in an effort to save our pollinators such as butterflies and bees, without which we as a human race would eventually starve. The UK has lost 97% of wildflower meadows since the 1930s and there are various large-scale projects to restore some of these, but even if you only have a tiny patch of lawn you can help by not mowing until the wild flowers have had a chance to set seed... usually around the end of May, although could be earlier in some parts of the country especially with climate change. wild corner: fern, forget-me-not, primrose, herb robert I have been leaving a tiny corner of my small back lawn to do its own thing for several years now and have seen a definite increase in the number of wild flowers growing - not only in the little corner I leave wild, but also in the rest of the lawn. This year, violets have made an appearance in the shorter grass, and I've seen my first ever goldfinch feeding on dandeli...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One positive thing to come from the pandemic was the increasing use of Zoom to enable people to still “meet”.   I use Zoom regularly to meet with distant family members and for workshops. One welcome thing I hadn’t expected was being able to run flash fiction workshops for writing groups all over the country. No travel fees and I’m paid. I like this - a lot! I now run a monthly flash fiction workshop, on different aspects of the craft, for a Christian writing organisation. The members could never meet in person - we live hundreds of miles apart - but Zoom comes to the rescue and it has made it possible for the organisation concerned to offer genre specific writing groups. I think it is a wonderful development. Zoom has also led to my rediscovering PowerPoint . I used it a lot in the 1990s, moved away, and then returned to it for Zoom workshops as these presentations are great (and easy) to share on s...

Communication systems are now being organised, in the main, by people under fifty with no disabilities and a reasonable income. As readers and writers, we should be concerned not only about the language in which we communicate, but also the means of communication which have already excluded some sections of society. And when this comes to medical matters, the effects can be fatal.       Yes, I did do A/L zoology We thought the internet was a wonderful thing, for disseminating knowledge and getting in touch with people on the other side of the world. We would learn so much. And so we have – we can look up any number of symptoms and decide what is wrong with us. I have always had a reasonable knowledge of medicine, starting with A/L zoology which gave me a good idea of how a mammalian body works. I used to be asked if I had a medical background, and would reply with a smile that I was an enthusiastic amateur. That’s not funny any more. Doctors these days assume that ...

  It's a terrible thing to be skinny these days, at least if you're writing thin books. Bloated or musclebound books are the rage when the minimum word count required by publishers and gatekeepers is 70-80K. Never mind that many published novels would have been far better if cut in half. On the beach of the publishing business today, you need to bulk up to keep bullies from kicking sand in your face. Have no fear. Doc Bloato's here with eight great tricks to save the day. Set aside your shame and play the same game played by many others. 1) Add unnecessary speaker tags--he said/she said--to every line of dialog, as done by the late Robert B Parker in his last ten years. This will also increase your page count exponentially.  2 Calculate the number of words you'll need to meet the minimum word count. Then force-fed them shamelessly, page by page by page. For example, if you're 10,000 words shy, at 250  words per page, you can add 40 words to each. Add an extra line o...

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” The quote from Hamlet has almost become a cliché yet it sums up so much of what many of us think and feel about the world we live in. We sense that there is more than the physical. We yearn for the spiritual and yet more and more of us no longer believe in or subscribe to any religion. Instead we delve into the world of the supernatural, go for tarot card readings, consult mediums, take part in ghost hunts. I’ve tried all these but never had an experience that convinced me. However, that doesn’t mean that I am a total sceptic. I think I’ve just come to the conclusion that I don’t have any sensitivity to physic phenomena. My one chance of proving whether I did or not, ended in dismal failure. I had gone to a series of evening class about the connection between mind and body in terms of health and wellbeing. Dr Graham was phycologist at Keele University and this was her particular intere...

  The list of people who I have published is starting to become substantial. One of those books is the wonderful ECHOES FROM THE HOCKER HOUSE by Virginia Watts . Virginia lives in Pennsylvania, in fact she grew up there, and so did I, which may be a small reason why her stories so resonated with me, because they channel the "something" that is the more rural parts of the very large, primarily rural state. My dad was from coal country, and there is something unique to being from coal country. Virginia's stories capture this very well. A little bit about the book from our side, the publishing side, My husband, David Yurkovich , and I are the entirerty of the company, or, I should say, we were, until we added some short-form/poetry/ writers/artists/experimentors on board as volunteer collaborators. They help each other, and us, publish chapbooks (for lack of a better word) of their excellent writing, and, we hope, someday, together as a group, we will open up opportunities f...