Authors Electric

Image Credit:  One photo taken by me, Allison Symes. Other images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. It has been a funny month. Had a fabulous Scottish holiday. Then came home after a swimming session to find I’d been burgled. Thankfully my dog was okay. They locked her in a room. We’re okay but it has brought home the joys of creative writing. I planned to write about this topic anyway but it is with more feeling I do so now!     Why? Because it was therapeutic to get back to writing after dealing with other matters. It was a relief to be creating characters for stories and working out ideas for blogs, including this one. It was good to resume my normal writing life. There is something about the creative arts which is good for us. I guess it is because they give us an outlet. I have yet to decide whether some nasty burglar gets their comeuppance in a future flash fiction story. If I do this, I shall enjoy every moment of writing it! I suspect you’ve seen the coffee mug slogan

  Vera Rich was one of those extraordinary people who was a total one-off. Clever, funny, infuriating, multi-lingual and fiercely in favour of an independent Ukraine, she was a part of my life for fourteen years. She was revered in Ukraine and Belarus for her poetry translations, and I travelled to Ukraine with her on two occasions. Vera never needed to embellish stories – her life had been quite exciting enough. She edited the unique Manifold Magazine, and I remember her saying, oh yes, people who’d had a week’s holiday in Prague would send me poems about their extensive knowledge of the place. I spent a week in Prague hiding from the Secret Police in a circus… And then there was the time, after Poland was once again a free country, when they saw a police car broken down by the side of the road and stopped to help. The driver kept staring at Vera, until she asked him if he knew her. He stood up very straight, clicked his heels and said, “I had the honour to interrogate you in 1965.

  'April is the cruellest month," T, S. Eliot lied in The Waste Land. An American in London, he'd never been to Tucson in the blazing month of June. If he had, he'd have been less poetic and howled with his brain frying. The average June temperature--dry heat, as they like to say--is about 100 degrees, with highs of 110 or higher..  Yes, we have desert rats riding their bikes without t-shirts or caps. Then again, in Alaska some like to jog or skinny dip when the temp is minus 80 degrees F. For the most part many on both coasts make what peace they can with the weather. Having spent half my life in heavily snowbound places, I know what it's like to hibernate for 4-5 months a year. But I had trouble adjusting to the desert's stifling heat. At first, I resented my staying indoors, dehydrated and exhausted. Even with air conditioning and an overhead fan, the writer in me withered. From mid-May to mid-September, I lost the city that I'd come to love. And I felt

  Over the years I’ve been posting here I’ve tended to write my blog very much at the last minute, this month has been the same only more so. Yesterday ran away with me and by the time I realised I was in danger of missing my slot I was too tired to think, yet alone write. Inspiration too was missing. When I’m stressed I find it almost impossible to be creative. However, there is always plan B, which is why I’ve modified a post from my own blog. Here’s hoping that’s okay. When life gives you lemons then make lemonade is very much where I am just now. I was busy planning the publishing schedule for “Friday Night at Rosa’s” starting with “Wedding Belles at Rosa’s,” the prequel to the series. My post went up on Monday during the Mslexia write-in hour, then Mike and I had lunch and went shopping to M&S. Supper was mushroom risotto, a favourite of his, then he watched the football and I went to do more work on my list of things to do before publication day. All these might see

Hi lovely   AE   readers, Dianne here. I run the publishing company Current Words Publishing, which is partner publishing company. In addition to doing partner publishing my company also founded and supports Old Scratch Press (OSP), a poetry/short form collective. In 2025 OSP and its members are going to open up more opportunities for people not in the collective to have a chance to have their work in poetry or short form published. Currently there are opportunities remaining this year through Current Words Publishing’s literary magazine INSTANT NOODLES . Recently Morgan Golladay, an author I have worked with many times, has recently won a few awards for both her fiction and her poetry,  and through OSP has just published her first book, THE SONG OF NORTH MOUNTAIN which she both wrote and illustrated.  I sat down to talk with her ( https://www.facebook.com/morgangolladayfineartist )  about her book and her work.   Current Words Publishing (CWP):  What inspired you to write "The

Anthologies are sickly things,’ wrote the historian Sir Francis Palgrave in 1851. ‘The splendid bouquet decays into unsavoury trash, and as trash is thrown away.’ The word ‘anthology’ is derived from Greek and means a collection of the flowers of verse. Ten years later his son, Francis Turner Palgrave, picked possibly the most famous bunch in the English language. Sir Francis died in the month that The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and  Lyrical Poems in the English Language was published. In his life, from difficult beginnings -- possibly attributable to prejudice against his Jewish ancestry -- he had achieved eminence as Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office and had played a key role in ensuring that the national archives were properly catalogued and stored. His son’s success may be thought of as storing lyric poetry in individuals’ heads and establishing a distinctive poetic tradition as part of our cultural heritage. Sir Francis's oldest son, Francis Turner Palgrave was

 It's June which means it's National Crime Reading Month. Lots of events are planned across the country and you can find out more about them at  crimereading.com  I'm hosting a couple of events at West Barnes Library in Motspur Park. First up, we have a murder mystery to solve! There's been a murder in Motspur Park. Miles Whitehead, local businessman was found dead in a ditch next to the pathway that runs between the park and the cemetery. Can you follow the clues and find the killer? Then on Monday 17th June, at 7.30pm, Graham Bartlett and Biba Pearce are coming to West Barnes Library to tell us about their police procedural books. Graham is a retired chief superintendent of Sussex Police and used to be in charge of Brighton and Hove. It's £2 cash entry on the door and books will be available to buy and be signed by the authors. Please book your space either by contacting the library using the details below or click  here.  Graham will help to solve our murder myst

I've been meaning to write an alternate history novel for some time now, but I have been put off, quite rightly in many ways, by the amount of research I thought I would need to do for it. Somehow unravelling things that did happen in real life and taking everything in a new direction was more daunting than inventing something completely new from square one. The initial idea for this was sparked by a conversation I had with a friend some time ago, which started when, for some reason lost in the mists of time, she told me that Edward VII, before becoming king, had fondly imagined his older sister Princess Vicky would inherit the throne, and when someone told him it would be him instead, he burst into tears. I began to speculate on what might have happened to international relations if Princess Vicky had inherited the British throne as well as becoming the empress of Germany, and I had been turning over this idea in my mind ever since. My initial thoughts on the subject, which were b

I will confess until very recently I knew very little about Mother Julian of Norwich, perhaps just enough to write on a hazelnut, I’m sure I could fit “all will be well” – her most famous saying - on one, if I wrote in really, really, tiny letters.   ·         I knew she lived a very long time ago – she was born in 1342. ·         I knew she lived in Norwich, in a cell beside a church, a bit like a nun. ·         I knew she wrote a book called “Revelations of Divine Love.” I picked up a copy in a charity shop once, but it just sits on my shelf gathering dust – one day I might read it. Actually it has the distinction of being the first book written by a woman in English, which is quite a feat. Now there is a fictional autobiography about her called I, Julian by Claire Gilbert, which brings this mystical woman to life. I never really enjoyed history at school but give me a historical novel to read and I lap up all the details. Especially when this is about a woman who writes, who