Authors Electric

I have the urge to write about adaptations today, because some of the various meanings of this word have been on my mind lately. The fact that football, general elections and Glastonbury have been taking up a lot of airtime has caused me to abandon live tv for now and to watch too much Netflix in the evenings instead, and that in turn has caused me to announce to my son, the only one who would listen, that in the extremely unlikely event that Netflix offered me a million pounds for the screen rights for my novels, I would turn them down. My son didn't think I'd be able to resist an offer like that, but I hope I would stand firm. There have been cases where I've been pleasantly surprised by adaptations, particularly the classier BBC ones which stick fairly closely to the original material - the iconic 1995 Pride and Prejudice, for instance, or the Joan Hickson Miss Marple series. I also very much enjoyed a new version of Agatha Christie's Murder Is Easy. On the other han

As it is the day of the general election in the UK. I've written a lighthearted poem of outlandish promises candidates might claim they will deliver if elected. It is complete nonsense, any policies I've included are completely spurious and any resemblance to actual politicians is completely unintentional. Here are your five candidates - who would you vote for? Vote for me, vote for me I promise chocolate cake for tea, Overflowing lemonade All is free, expenses paid. Vote for me and you will see The future’s bright We’ve got it made.   “Cast your vote for me” she says “Just put a cross beside my name Not all the parties are the same We all find scapegoats we can blame. My policies? Oh, this and that Tax cuts pulled out of my magic hat How could you not vote for that?” A vote for me will save the world I’ll make the sun shine every day* (*Except for Christmas - we’ll have snow) The world will be a happy place Here, have a sticker, with a smiley face.

  Me with Toto in Boston, c. 1941    The PC system crash that I had been pretending not to expect happened in stages and became undeniable by my 87th birthday in mid-May. Somehow it felt catastrophic. I'm a creature of habit. I rely on routines to balance me over the voids of writer's block and dark neuroses. Expected or not, the crash disrupted various works in progress, including my Authors Electric post for June, which I missed. That's my excuse, anyway. Suddenly I needed to replace the familiar, multipurpose, desktop box with which I had been pounding out books, stories, secrets, images, videos, notes, missives, social media screeds and things personal for a dozen years. I knew its open-source Linux Ubuntu OS interface like the back of my hand - its folders and sub-folders, much like my cluttered desk and maybe my life - a friendly mess  whose pathways and objects I could navigate while sleepwalking. Tablets, laptops and smartphones just won't do for this clunky-fin

                                                                                                                                   Why Women (and Some Men) Read Fiction Liz Dexter who is a prolific blogger about books, both fictional and otherwise, and who has occasionally commented on my own AE blogs, has recently published a review of a book that had been on her ‘to be read' pile for some little time. It was called  Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives by Helen Taylor. As this was a subject that had particularly intrigued me during my years spent as an adult education tutor I set out to read her review carefully. My WEA literature classes were almost always predominantly made up of women.   The book itself, Liz Dexter says, is a mixture of primary and secondary research. Taylor is a director of literary festivals, so she has a good grasp of the latter and in pursuit of the former she had sent out a questionnaire which gave her information on what, how and where women