Authors Electric

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...

  Winter is coming! The edge of the ice cap in Greenland My grandson did a degree in geology, and which got me thinking about minerals and fossils and rock formations, and how we use them in fiction – and a good opportunity to use some of my photos! C.S.Lewis fired my imagination with the underground scenes in The Silver Chair ( many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands ,) and I really wanted to see formations like that for myself. Many years have passed, and I have seen some really interesting geology on my travels, both under and overground, and they provide good settings. Form bat caves in Borneo and Cambodia to limestone formations in China and Slovenia, there’s a lot of atmospheric material there. Galapagos I think Cheddar Gorge was my first experience, and I was stunned by the fantastical landscapes and sculptural beauty of what I saw. And that was nothing, compared the Postonja Karst Cave System in Slovenia, which is over fifteen miles long. So long, that you need t...

                                                              One possible studio floor plan In January I'll move from a spacious one bedroom apartment into a 350-foot studio. roughly half its size. Job hunting has proved tougher than I'd expected. So has the daily ordeal of climbing up and down a steep staircase with my still stiff surgical knee. Tips and fees for food deliveries were getting astronomical. If it took me longer than 3-4 months to find work... Let's fast forward since many of you have had to make your own tough budgetary decisions. The apartment complex that rang my bells offered studios at savings of hundreds of bucks. But they then add on a slew of fees totaling roughly $200. At first, the move seemed ill-advised. All told, to lose half my living space, I'd end up paying close to what I pay now. BUT the amenities off...

  On the day when we remember the fallen of two World Wars my thoughts inevitably turn to my own family history and the reflection that without those two events I would not be sitting here writing this post. My family comes from Poland; a country that for a part of its history did not even exist. My grandmother was born in Lemburg, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, my mother in the same city, which at the time was Lvov and was in the newly independent Poland of the inter war years. Now it is Lviv and is in war torn Ukraine. My father was from Warsaw and he and my mother met in Iraq when both were in the British Army, he a Captain, she a nurse and they married in Italy during the Italian campaign. After the war, returning to a country under the rule of the Russians was impossible. There was discussion about moving to Argentina, where scientists like my dad were being welcomed by Peron, but fortunately for us, my parents decided to stay in the UK. Growing up in Bristol in ...

Meet Peggy Arthur, writer of the forthcoming novel, The Pretender's Game. Peggy is working a strategy to encourage readers who would enjoy reading her book to find her. Peggy has begun a regular feature on her website called "Rooted Reads." Peggy's book, The Pretender's Game, is a sweeping tale of a Black family in the southern United States. Peggy, through this book, is creating a new mythology that is based, or rooted, in southern Black culture. Did you know you could create your own myths? I confess I thought just dead Greeks could do that! But as soon as I began to read Peggy's excellent and, frankly, thrilling book, I knew I was wrong.  And so, where do we find our readers, when our book releases? Well, one good thing to do would be to line them up ahead of time, so that they're waiting for your book. Peggy is doing this by giving something away free to people who might want to read her book. She is giving them a recommendation for another book, like ...