Authors Electric

Katherine Roberts’s blog post a few days ago about the tyranny of social media struck a chord. Social media have changed our lives.  First Facebook, whose friend connections at least made sense. I mean, it’s just another way of connecting with friends you have in real life, isn’t it? (IRL if you will… see what I did there? Oh heavens, two deeply irritating social media cliches in one go. Sorry.) Oh, and their relations, who you may have met. And their in-laws, who you definitely haven’t. And then… crikey who are these totally strange friends from round the world I’ve never come across before? Photo by Leila Larochelle: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ white-and-brown-deer-standing-on-snow-10709569/ Then Twitter, which revolutionised everything. I remember when I first, tentatively, tweeted and followed other accounts. How amazing it was to connect with people I had absolutely nothing to do with and would never come across otherwise, not just in different parts of the UK but on different

A couple of days ago, I was watching The Truman Show, and it made me think how much writers have in common with the character of Cristof. If you have never seen the film, it is the story of how the 'creator' (Christof) of a major Television show and the network adopted an unwanted baby, (Truman) who unwittingly becomes the star of his own life on the long running show. The God(of the media)/man/free-will analogy is very clear, and what is magical about this film is the way it highlights the true resilience and unending curiosity - the need to explore - possessed by humans. Truman is safe in his bubble, but he need to embark on a quest for adventure. He literally breaks pout of his bubble and fee will wins out. But it got me thinking about the power authors have to manipulate both character and reader alike. Like Christof, as a writer of stories, I manufacture entire worlds and create characters who have lives, loves and adventures. I can put my characters through the wringer, m

   The colour of Autumn.   Pink and blueberries, ripening   Still green, dripping with rain.   Madonna. The intense perfume drifts after you around the garden.   Raindrops on dahlias.

The UK government is currently pushing ahead with a policy to give staff the right to switch off outside normal working hours. Whether you agree with this policy or not, I believe it addresses a much bigger issue that is slowly but surely imprisoning us all in a virtual world of artificial intelligence. There is a general assumption, especially among the internet generation, that we are all online 24/7, ready to dance to someone else's tune at a moment's notice, with no real life of our own. Whether we are having 'fun' online, or we're there for 'work' - and I use those terms loosely, since they are not separate entities - we are still in danger of becoming slaves to the machine. Jaron Lanier's 2018 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now  explains in frighteningly clear terms the ways in which these platforms are manipulating our behaviour and changing us as human beings. When you consider he published this book before the

Image Credits:-  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Photo of The Hayes, Swanwick and screenshot were taken by me, Allison Symes. I’ve just returned from a major highlight of my writing year, having spent six days at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick in lovely Derbyshire, immersed in the wonderful world of writing. I’ve learned so much from the courses, caught up with many friends whom I only see online for the rest of the year, and I was glad to be running a two part course.    My course was on Editing as an Author, Editing as a Competition Judge . I wear both hats and will be judging again soon. Seeing how something is done and why is invaluable, which was my approach for this course.  The great joy of writing events is being with like-minded people who understand your drive to write, who know what it is to have to handle rejections as well as acceptances, and to not have to explain why you write. You just do. So do they.    I’ve been grateful for so much useful in

  Svalbard I read a lot of books about the Arctic before I managed to go there.  I would like to recommend Dark Matter, by Michelle Paver. Also Michael Palin’s Erebus , and An African in Greenland, by Tete-Michel Kpomassie. These are both more or less factual, and there is of course a whole host of of Children’s fiction featuring snow and ice from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights . It may well have been Narnia that first attracted me to the snowy landscapes that were all too uncommon in my childhood, and even more so today with global warming. Although I have been north four times, I have only seen the Northern Lights once, and then faintly for fifteen minutes in Norway. Iceland and Greenland both failed to deliver anything except heavy cloud cover. However, my trip in June was during was during 24 hour daylight, and the object of the exercise was to see a polar bear in its natural environment.   The Arctic is expensive. I went with a company

Now, here's a trick photo for you, a trompe l'oeil to rival the best. Have a look.   Look once and you'll see--no, not a crone who transforms to a girl when you blink--no, you'll see something more surprising:  two stackable steps six inches high a handicapped writer fights daily to climb so he can climb higher to seven. Why seven? Because that, to my changed way of thinking, is now the key to the kingdom. At year's end I'll move from my small ground-floor studio into a spacious one-bedroom apartment--with an office and  I'll be on the second floor, though, with a fifteen-step stairway whose risers measure seven inches. That's a cake walk to most of you; but I'm still recovering from my June total knee replacement and my knee flexion is still less than it should be: 110-120 degrees. At 105-108 degrees flexion, I can climb comfortably up and down the four-inch red base. But the sound effects began when I added a black two-inch second step. My mule-stu

  Meaning of Delirium: derangement, dementedness, temporary madness, raving, incoherent. Locked in an existence with a husband who has been diagnosed with delirium, my world is confined to the walls of this house. Time makes no sense. It’s a month since my last post but it could have been yesterday or a decade ago. I know that Mike was rushed into hospital at some point in April and from then on the rest of my life faded into the background as my focus became entirely on him.   I ate, I slept, shopped, showed viewers around the house we are trying to sell then set off once again to visit a man who had lost the power of coherent speech, who raved aloud throughout the night, disturbing the rest of the ward and refused to eat even though, when the words began to return, he “was as hungry as a seagull.” At the time it seemed that his derangement, dementedness, madness came out of nowhere. Looking back there were since January that things were not right, but at a certain age it is demen

  On occasion it starts with a notification. Maybe it's a text or an email that my Mac has kindly let me know about, floating a little banner at the top of my screen. Maybe it's my dog, who is lifting my arm with his nose to let me know it is time for a pee. Maybe it is my cat meowing out his hunger, or my Guinea pig whooping at me for attention. Maybe it is my daughter looking for her other shoe. Maybe it is the temperature in the room, or my tendency to be itchy. Maybe it is just intrusive thoughts:  How weird is it that I (do, or don't do) some such thing? Certainly I have earned a second cup of coffee or a snack by now.   It's a funny sort of word, snack. I sometimes watch reruns of  VEEP , and I am always amazed when the main character, conniving Selena Myers, demands a snack from Gary, her bagman. "Snack!" she'll yell, and I always think,  What an odd, vulnerable, childlike word for her to use. Snack   Wait, did I just lose focus over the word snack,

It should have been an achievable adventure, an old-style family jolly, nicely within the capacity of different-aged adults, an old wooden boat, visiting children and dogs. Three of my grandchildren would be sailing from the Mount Batten Centre in Plymouth for the Cadet dinghy national and world championships. My son Frank and daughter-in-law Alice were lead organisers; Francis and I were among the sponsors. This would also be my oldest granddaughter’s last event. Retirement comes at 17 in the uniquely child-centred Cadet dinghy class. What could be more fun for me, my brother Ned, son Bertie, dogs Nellie and Solo, than to spend a week or two sailing Peter Duck to Plymouth from Suffolk, so we could show our support for the young sailors and watch the racing from on deck? Yes, it’s 300 miles – we could reach Scotland for that, or the entrance to the Keil Canal – but, taken in stages, it would be a matter of six long days or eleven shorter ones. Time on land for the dogs to empty thei