Authors Electric

James Allingham at his desk He worked out the cost of the printing, the office and the distribution and soon became fascinated. He saw the venture in its clearest and most material light. To him it appeared as a method of selling low-grade bulk paper at forty times its value with the added advantage that the more of it one sold, the higher the profit became. He saw too that it was the ink on the paper that did the selling, so, the only real problem was which words to print with the ink. (Dance of the Years 1943) Margery &Herbert Margery Allingham was looking back, fictionally, to her grandfather’s decision to found a penny paper, The Christian Globe, 150 years ago. James Allingham had been apprenticed as a compositor. When his father died, he seized his opportunity to invest his legacy share in a slim weekly newspaper. Literacy was beginning to boom in the 1870s as the educational initiatives following the 1867 Electoral Reform Act began leavening the number of readers within the...

 Yes, you might notice a bit of a Rodgers and Hammerstein theme in my blog today. Let's see how many song titles I can fit in! So, starting at the very beginning, I wrote my first blog for Authors Electric exactly four years ago and in that post I told you about some of my favourite things about police procedural books and crime drama TV series. I was setting the scene for what was to come! Crime books are my passion - not just reading them but writing them too. Looking back at my posts, I've definitely shared the highs and lows of writing with you all. January blues have been a consistent theme so I'm hoping to buck the trend next month. But there's also been happy talk when things have gone well with my writing. Thank you for being with my throughout my self-publishing journey for Rewind , the fourth book in my DI Bernie Noel series. It was certainly a steep learning curve as it felt like I had to climb every mountain to get there.  I've also shared the book event...

Last month I went to an author event in my local town of Northwich. It was held at our new local bookshop Cover2Cover , which sells an eclectic mix of new and second-hand books, including an impressive array of classic science fiction and fantasy. Think Forbidden Planet in the late 1980s with all the American import paperbacks that you couldn't get anywhere else - remember we were pre-internet back then. So who was there? This was hosted by the very talented speculative short fiction writer Nemma Wollenfang . I've known Nemma for several years and her stories are superb - I can't wait to read her first novel.  The weather was appalling. Strong November wind and rain and I was remembering when I ran an sf writing workshop in Oldham several years ago in similar weather, and despite the tickets being sold out, only one person braved the elements to actually turn up! Always remember that the value of a 'free' ticket is precisely nothing. He did get lucky though, in tha...

These past few months have been, for me, a good example of the consequences of Failing to Plan, but as a result I now have one almost-completed novel and one half-written one, so I suppose I haven't completely wasted my time. I didn't realise until the other day, by which time it was too late, because it was almost the end of National Novel Wiritng Month, a festival I still observe despite it now being obsolete, that I hadn't written anything in my planning notebook since my hospital stay. In a sense my life is now divided into before and after surgery, though I'm still hoping the division will somehow heal once I've healed up physically. I've now been signed off by the surgical team so I am taking that as progress, and the fact that I've opened the notebook again tends to corroborate this. The impressive cover of my current writing notebook My planning notebook has been an essential tool for me for some years now, although the actual notebook in use has cha...

Beginning with Malala, an Inspiration to Many Recently, I came across a newspaper article about Malala Yousafzaia which started off a train of thought and which led me to write it all down for this month's blog post.  I first encountered Malala when I was teaching a Workers' Educational Association (WEA) course on The Poetry of War in 2008. I was using a book 1914 Poetry Remembers created and edited by Carol Anne Duffy who at the time was Poet Laureate. Her idea was that a selection of known poems from WW1 such as Ivor Gurney with "First Time In" would be matched appropriately with newly created works by modern poets.    Duffy had asked fellow poets to create their own poem in response to a poem from WW1. "Avalon", for instance, was the poem that Simon Armitage created in response to Ivor Gurney's poem. I was teaching another matched poem from the book by Imtiaz Dharker, a Pakistani poet who had been brought up in Glasgow. It was called “A century late...

This time last year I opened the Christmas month by waxing lyrical over one of my favourite books as a child: The Magic Pudding , the Australian children’s classic by Norman Lindsay. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster By Book, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=14265163 So this December I thought I’d follow that by enthusing about another great favourite: The Phantom Tollbooth by the American author, Norton Juster.  This glorious fantasy novel, bursting with puns and wordplay, leads Milo, a boy with nothing to do except drive his pedal car, into the Kingdom of Wisdom which has been rent asunder by disagreement between the two brothers ruling it. In Dictionopolis, King Azaz the Unabridged (a title I fell in love with on the spot) maintains that words are more important than numbers, while at the other end of the land, the Mathemagician insists, from his fortress of Digitopolis, that - yes, you’ve guessed it - the reverse is true. As a result the princesses, ...

  Last month I was delighted to have made it to the shortlist of The Page Turners Awards, and although I eventually did not win, I reached the last 13 (worldwide) so I have a little endorsement sticker on my book and a certificate to come. On balance, I did really well statistically, because I didn’t pay for any categories except the one entry and I did find that as is the way of some awards and competitions, it would have been costly to enter a lot of categories. Some people obviously did, as they won more than one. This was a legit competition – they look like they did read the books and that was great, especially as mine is a very British, sweary punk novel, and it’s indie press as well. I’ll be entering more soon, and I would recommend entering your books but not paying out a lot of money and just see where it gets you. I think an admin fee is fair – what do you think? I’d love to know. Either way – I am proud I struck a blow for Indie publishing.   I am doubly glad that m...

'Allo, 'allo, 'allo I was scrolling through cat videos on Facebook... And there popped up this short clip from a tv series. I'd heard of the series. I'd heard it was good. But I'd never watched it because, well, I didn't feel like learning a whole new set of characters and their setting and the whole malarkey. The clip showed a woman police officer asking a tetchy male householder about the domestic violence call from his house. He kept trying to brush the whole thing aside and get her to leave. She kept on insistently repeating her question, to his obviously growing annoyance. Some readers may recognise the scene. It was very brief-- it was a Facebook clip-- but in that short time, the writing, the acting and the editing established themselves as way above the usual standard. The series was Blue Lights . The next time I was near a tv-set, I went to BBC iplayer and started from series one, part one. (I haven't caught up with the scene mentioned above a...

This month,  I take a look at Alexander Waugh's 1999 discussion of Time as we know it (or as we think we know it). This book begins at the beginning and works fairly logically through our accepted periods of time from smallest to largest, starting with a chapter on seconds  and progressing through  minutes, hours, days, weeks,  to eras and  aeons . It ends with a discussion of simple and complex time, followed by a final chapter tantalisingly entitled 'End' - which, as I read through the earlier chapters, I imagined to be a mind-blowing comment on the end of days but actually involves a discussion of death and the afterlife according to different religions. (If you're wondering about the words in bold, I thought it might be fun to highlight our attempts to divide and control time - just consider how his post might read without those useful labels!) Time by Alexander Waugh While it's tempting to compare this book to Stephen Hawking's book ' A Brief His...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.  One thing which makes a character, and their story, more real to me is when they have memories. I  think it is a great way to ensure your characters aren’t cardboard cut outs. A character recalling a memory is showing something of themselves, which shows they have more than one dimension. Memories can be played on by the character to generate sympathy. Memories can be used against a character to make them fall into line with what someone else wants - emotional blackmail. Characters can use memories to blackmail others in the more traditional ways too. Sometimes, as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, memories can be used as a tool for redemption. Scrooge didn’t want to face up to his past but until he did, he could not move on.   In The Lord of The Rings, memories dictated what elf leader, Elrond, wanted to happen to the Ring of Power. He knew it was what should have happened before but, due to the weakn...