Authors Electric

  Packing up The dolls house is packed and ready to go. The rooms are empty, the furniture and the inhabitants snug in the small boxes that will travel inside the house itself. It was less than an hour’s job and all they have to do is wait until we arrive. Meanwhile the ups and downs of moving house in the UK continue. The latest blip concerns the electrical report. Let me state from the onset that this is not a legal requirement, nor do we have or ever did have any concerns about the state of the electrics. We’re both far too nervous people to suspect our wiring might be faulty and not instantly call out an electrician to deal with the problem. Our buyers, however, commissioned a report which came back with pages of recommendations, none of which were safety issues. The report came with an estimate from the same company for the work, which our buyers asked if we were willing to pay for! The answer being no and convinced that they were being overcharged we asked our own trust

  This is an essay about the United Sates election. The topic of this essay is the grip of grievance, and what it is doing to our country and what it can do in our lives. So I want to present my essay  interspersed  with some art (some written, some visual) to maybe give you a bit of energy to keep going and striving, or to maybe unlock the death grip grievance has on your heart. So here are a few wonderful poems, and some of the USA's more beautiful monuments, and my thoughts on the election of grievance. The United States has just had an almost 50-50 split on the concept of what our country is, of what our country should be, but, more than that, of  who  our country should be. America, before the Europeans got here and began the great experiment of a country of the people by the people and for the people, probably was primarily native Americans and people from what is today Mexico, and parts south. Europeans (including Spain in that) forcibly brought more people here from other p

‘We’ve waited for a cargo and we’ve waited for a crew, And last we’ve waited for a tide, and now the waiting’s through. O don’t you hear the deep-sea wind and smell the deep-sea foam, Out beyond the harbour on the long road home?’ The Complete Poetry of Cicely Fox Smith edited by Charles Ipcar and James Saville I asked my friend, the artist, writer and musician, Claudia Myatt, what she knew of the poet Cicely Fox Smith (1882-1954). She was immediately able to point me to a recording of ‘Rosario’, sung by her own Quaynotes group in Suffolk. She had used this verse from ‘The Long Road’ (first published in Canada in December 1912) to preface their performance. But how many other people, outside the UK and US folk scenes, have heard of Cicely Fox-Smith today. It’s one of those questions where one hopes to be shouted down by an indignant roar; Of course I have, how can you have been so ignorant? But, with the zeal of the convert, I’m going ahead anyway. I’ve had Charles Ipcar and James Savi

 Sometimes, things happen in life and then all of a sudden, you realise that you've lost a month - just like that! I'm not sure what happened to October but it disappeared under the weight of hospital trips, two operations and now a long recovery period for my husband. Writing wasn't on my agenda at all. However, I need to get back to it. I was on a roll before and was powering through the soggy middle of the book. Unfortunately, having stopped for a month, I think I'll be wading through treacle when I restart. Will I get to the end of my book by my next post in December? I'll let you know! In the meantime, I do have something to look forward to. I run author events at my local library with the help of the Friends of West Barnes Library and w e have an absolute treat for you this November! Janice Hallett and Joanna Wallace will be joining us on Tuesday 19th Nov at 7.30pm. Janice's debut, 'The Appeal', turned normal prose on its head as the story is cleve

A blonde, a brunette and a redhead walked into a bar. They really did. I was the brunette.  It’s November 1991 (I think – give or take a year – it was a long time ago) and we’re in Earl’s Court, London at a fantasy convention. I’d met the blonde (Jan) and the redhead (Lindsey) six months or so earlier at a writers’ conference – we were among the dozen or so writers whose work wouldn’t be pigeonholed into romance, or memoirs or even thrillers. We were fantasy, science fiction and horror writers and affectionately dubbed the weirdos by the late and lovely editor Carolyn Caughey , who took us under her wing! Carolyn was a senior editor at Hodder & Stoughton and she made an effort to keep in touch with me over the years – even as far as making sure I got an invitation to the Stephen King party in London in the late 90s (Storm Constantine and I asking Mr King to dance is a whole other story …)  Jan and Lindsey knew each other already, and I lived only 20 miles or so away, so we formed

Just to clarify things, these are my favourite, or at least most frequent writing mistakes. If I started on the other mistakes I’ve made over the course of my life, it would turn into a book and would be entitled ‘What Was She Thinking?’, my preferred title for an autobiography. I present the top five list here in no particular order.                  1.      Every day a Tuesday Not usually a month of Sundays but sometimes several Mondays one after the other, or a very long week at work for my characters, with no weekend to look forward to at the end of it. This kind of thing often strikes me when I do the very first read-through after getting to the end of a draft, and it’s why I write down a chapter-by-chapter outline at this stage and add the day of the week to each chapter heading, trying to iron out discrepancies as I go along.   2.      Overuse of gestures / facial expressions My characters tend to recycle the same gestures to such an extent that they could be in danger

I’ve finally made the jump from what was formally Twitter to Threads. I do feel it is putting all my eggs in one big Meta basket, but I quite like the way it cross posts between platforms. We could debate the merits or downsides of social media all day, but as writers it is one of the best ways to build and connect with potential readers, which in turn hopefully leads to some sales, maybe reviews and thereby more sales… this writing lark is such a merry-go-round, when does anyone find time to write? I’ll address that one next month. I have tried to fill my threads timeline with mostly writers and creatives, I’m not following so many pollical accounts. All is calm and soothing – ish. You get the odd thread of how do you pronounce a certain word and how it freaks Americans out the way we say some things in the UK. I confess I tumble down a few of those rabbit holes, but somehow, they go in small circles. I get that sense of déjà vu and remind myself this is immaterial in the grand scheme

Only Connect, Part Two                                                                 The Woodlanders                                                                   It could have been a change of medication or my final retirement from a long-cherished teaching role, or it may have been simply that I was getting older. Whatever the cause, I was  struck down soon after my last birthday by the most awful bout of insomnia linked to the anxiety that I had so often suffered from. I had tried a number of remedies – lots of exercise, further medication, daily sessions of yoga nidra, counselling - even rereading favourite novels in search of the bibliotherapy that had aided me in the past - but none of this seemed to work. Apart from an hour or two each night, I lay awake, finding sleep impossible to come by. It was as though for some reason of its own my mind was refusing to allow me to switch off. At length, buoyed up by the optimism that had served me so well in the past, I decided to go