Authors Electric

Happy New Year!  And now that Christmas is over, I’m going to try something.   Here are a few lines from some of the top famous poems of all time (according to Google):  1. Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?       You are lovelier and more temperate. ( Sonnet 18 , William Shakespeare)    Autumn foliage 2. Season of mists and yellow fruitfulness,      Close friend of the maturing sun. ( Ode to Autumn, John Keats)   3. I must go back to the seas again, to the lowly seas and the sky       And all I ask is a good ship, and a star to sail her by. ( Sea Fever , John Masefield)   4. I wandered lonely as a cloud      That sails on high over dales and hills ( Daffodils,  William Wordsworth)  Notice anything?   Lovers of literature will be foaming at the mouth long before they reach No 4 (judging by myself, naturally).  Because these lines are fu...

  Hey, it's Christmas Day! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buddhism_dham_jak.svg     So there were these two Buddhist monks travelling together, one much older than the other. They were on foot, slogging along. They came to a fast-flowing river, with no bridge. On the river bank, looking scared, was a beautiful young woman.  A  Buddhist monk, like most other monks, is bound by strict vows of celibacy and is forbidden to even touch a woman. As the monks near the woman, she turns to them and tells them that her mother is very sick and she needs to go to her. But her mother's village is on the other side of this river. She's tried to cross it once, but was nearly swept away. Can they help her get across? "Of course," says the older monk, a hefty sort. He picks the young woman up his arms and wades into the river. The water sways him and the woman cries out and locks her arms round his neck. But the monk is strong and soon gets his balance. Slowly, he w...

My challenge to review a random book for every month of this year ends with a suitably snowy read for the holidays.  Nevertell  by Katharine Orton   was originally published for young readers, which usually means a good read for adults too, and this book delivers a magical story for anyone aged 10+. Nevertell by Katharine Orton Lina and her mother are prisoners in a Siberian labour camp, the only home she's ever known. When a group of daring escapees recruit Lina to steal food from the greenhouse, she finds herself stranded in a snowstorm with desperate men she doesn't trust. Only her best friend Bogdan, who follows them with his smuggled maps, can help Lina find her grandmother in far-off Moscow and rescue her mother. But first they must cross snowy wastes haunted by ghostly hounds and an evil sorceress, who wants to know why she can't enchant Lina. The magical elements creep gently into this book, drawing the reader from its historical Soviet setting into an enchan...

" It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. " One can get sick of being right. Just ask Santa.  Were he alive today, Charles Dickens might be proud that  A Tale of Two Cities , published in 1859,  endures as a literary classic. But I suspect he'd be uncomfortable at how much its darkness remains relevant today.   Not to compare myself with Dickens, or to Father Christmas, or Santa Claus, I feel the same about my holiday novella, "Milagro on 34th Street," published in 2012. I'd glad it remains entertaining. But I regret that it seems to have been more prophetic each year since then .  The Santa novella mixes my 1990s experiences as a  department store Santa, with satire of my favorite holiday movie, "Miracle on ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.   Firstly, may I wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. Secondly, may I hope you receive many wonderful books as presents.   One of the joys of the post-Christmas and pre-New Year period is having more chances to curl up on the sofa with a good book. I make the most of this. My Christmas reading consists of books I receive on the big day (these always jump up my To Be Read pile) plus I catch up on writing magazines.    In the run up to Christmas I take in a number of related stories usually via film. To my mind, the best rendering of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is The Muppet Christmas Carol. Sir Michael Caine is superb in that. After that, comes the Patrick Stewart version.  Hogfather by the much missed Sir Terry Pratchett is the Discworld’s answer to Christmas and the story is a cracking thriller. Who is trying to get rid of the Hogfather and why and can Death, assisted by h...

  The real Calamity Jane I have been watching films and TV episodes from the past to see if they stand up to current day scrutiny. Some do, surprisingly well, and some don’t. And some that you thought were candyfloss really surprise you. When my elder daughter was ten, in 1981, she contracted chicken pox from her younger sister. Being older, she had it really badly. She was so miserable that we put the television in her bedroom to try and distract her. As luck would have it (this predates any way we had of recording programmes) the afternoon film was Calamity Jane , which was made in 1953. She absolutely loved it, as she was quite a tomboy herself. So when it came on recently I thought I’d revisit it, and see why she found it so engaging. To begin with it seemed dated, exaggerated, stereotyped, prejudiced, and a bit disappointing. But before long I was as captivated as my daughter had been, and full of admiration for something with no CGI or dubbed singing, and that rarely used stu...

  Here's hoping you open this at the read of light. A miracle happened this Christmas that I want to share with you. Indulge me, whether you believe in miracles or even Christmas. Allowing for any differences on either score, I plan to write this quickly, sticking only to the facts. I found myself in dire straits when a second source of income ran out a month early--with my move to a lovely new place scheduled for January 8. I'd have to pay movers, cleaners and junk removers. And after a four-month job search I'd not had a single interview.  Working against me: my age, my lame right knee, a two-year writing and knee-recovery sabbatical, and a long stint in retail as a cashier when what I really wanted was a security guard job.  Working for me: my receipt of a state security guard card, a half-dozen certificates for continued studies, my refusal to accept the prospect of eviction from my new studio apartment, and my fierce hatred of ageism. Decision: my resume was killing...

  Cover of an excerpt on Wattpad Sometime in the dim distant past, well pre-Covid, I wrote a novel I called “Dark Angel.”   It was a Vampire story, at a time when Vampires were past their hey-day, or so received wisdom from the publishing world told me but, judging by my own fascination with the tropes, I could never quite believe that the readership wasn’t out there. The book was aimed at a YA audience and it certainly had the right Gothic vibes to appeal to that age group. Whenever I used sample chapters as part of the writing workshops I did in schools, not only did I get great feedback but the writing the students’ produced showed how their imaginations had been sparked and how well they were able to use Gothic imagery and themes. On one level, the book was already a success. It was, however, too short to be a novel, not short enough to be a novella, so it languished on my hard drive until earlier this year when I decided that I would use it as an exercise to practise ...

Dan Cohen and I recently sat down together to talk about his journey to being an author, which began when his dad awoke from dementia, and Dan felt compelled to share the story with more families. Dan wrote a blog for the online platform Medium, never really thinking anything would come from it, but it did. The story was very popular on Medium. It got a lot of views, and a lot of people wrote to Dan to thank him and share their stories. As the years passed Dan could not let go of the fact that so many had read his article on Medium, and really connected with him and his dad. He felt there was more his father could do to help the world, and Dan wanted to make it possible for his dad to do that, through sharing his story with an even wider audience. Dan kept writing, hoping something would come of it. Finally he made the decision to see if he could share his dad's story, and other families' stories, with a podcast, and he wanted a book to go with it that would honor what his fath...