Authors Electric

My late mother was a marvellous raconteur (or raconteuse, to be correct). She’d regale a whole room with her funny stories of life as a diplomat’s wife, or – cringemaking for us – the hilarious things her children had said and done. Growing up, I began to spot embellishments in these anecdotes, not to say downright twisting of the truth; but whenever I pointed this out (with a doubtless annoying puritanism), I’d be silenced. ‘So what?’ she’d roar. ‘It makes a far better story this way.’ Cue uproarious laughter from her audience.  It didn’t matter, of course it didn’t. Or not very much. But over the years I found myself increasingly treating her accounts of her early life, family history, relationships, discussions and quarrels with a large pinch of salt, to the point when I would doubt her version of a certain important event, only to find out later that it was true. The problem was, how could I tell? Knowing her talent for spinning dull, factual straw into exciting, gleaming, semi...

                                                      I recently read an article in the Guardian where it ‘admits’ it had ‘massively exaggerated’ the number of students who had access arrangements in examinations this year. They had apparently double-counted and wrongly reported. They seemed to feel they needed to apologise for this ‘mistake’ in case some people thought it would be offensive to suggest that students who needed help to get through exams should get it. The idea that some students receive extra time, scribes, laptops or other additional support seems to stir up controversy – even in 2025, and the comment I read on the article predictably brought out the loonies and extremists – but also worrying comments from apparent educational professionals and psychologists. The attitude amazed me, and may explain why it is stil...

Nuts and Bolts by Roma Agrawal  I could say this book is 'interesting', 'fascinating', 'absorbing'... It is all of those things. It's also an absolute delight.  I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and it's not only taught me a lot, but also made me think a lot-- Oh, about history, and the gob-smacking ingenuity of all people, everywhere, at all times. How, from the Stone-Age (and before), they've observed, applied, invented... I mean, how did anyone come up with the idea of melting metal out of rocks? Or of using the power contained in a bendy branch to make a bow and arrow? If I think about it for too long at a time, it makes me dizzy. The author, Roma Agrawal, studied engineering at Imperial College, London, and physics at Oxford. She worked on the Shard. So, she knows what she's talking about. And her love for her subject is evident in every word. The subtitle is 'How Tiny Inventions Make Our World Work' and her first chapter is on...

Non fiction this month, and to celebrate summer we have two different books about walking the UK's South West Coast Path. This scenic 630-mile coastal route winds its way from Minehead in Somerset around the edges of Devon and Cornwall and finally along the Jurassic coast to Poole in Dorset. Despite living in a seaside town on the route, I confess I've walked very little of it, just a few miles of local footpath on my way to somewhere else. But, of course, books about walking the 'Salt Path' are rarely just about the walking. The Salt Path by Raynor Winn Raynor Winn's The Salt Path has recently hit the big screen, although the book is worth seeking out too as the film version only covers part of the whole. This is the story of Raynor and Moth, who become homeless when they have to leave their family farm. With their children grown, and Moth having had a life-changing diagnosis with advice to "be careful on the stairs", they decide to pack up their belongi...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. It is the 250th anniversary of the birth of one of my favourite authors, Jane Austen, later this year (16th December to be precise). I’m fortunate enough to be able to easily get to Winchester Cathedral where she is buried and they have had exhibitions celebrating her life and work.   Indeed there is an exhibition running there from 23rd May until 19th October 2025 called the Jane Austen Poetry Exhibition which looks at the friendship between her and Anne Lefoy, who was a mentor to Jane. (I find it encouraging mentors are nothing new for writers). Jane wrote a poem regarding the death of her friend and that poem is one of the objects on display here. I discovered the joy of Austen’s work, especially Pride and Prejudice, thanks to it being one of the books I had to read at secondary school. I would say its impact was to show me irony was a thing in fiction.  I’ve had good cause to appreciate that since...

    When I started my MA in creative writing, I was asked who I wanted to write like. I was immediately indignant – I didn’t want to write like anyone else, I wanted to write like me. Then the question was rephrased – if you wanted to write like a piece of music, what would you choose? There were a number of different responses from the rest of the group. Smoky basement jazz, a clarinet maybe, or a trombone or a saxophone. Someone else wanted a piece by Corelli, there was Ravel’s Bolero and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. I chose Danse Macabre, by Saint Saens, long before it was popularised by Jonathan Creek. This quickly established me as someone who went for something a bit different, due to the necessity to retune the E string on the violin to E flat, which gives the whole piece its unique flavour. So the lines I wish I’d written are always a bit off-beat, and I am still in awe of the lateral thinking that creates them.         ...

I've always hated CEOs, those brutal, heartless bastards, and would have laughed if anyone had told me I'd become one. Me, the bohemian who'd pursued the next big adventure in life and love and art? Me, the defiant one who'd never met  a convention he didn't want to beat? You can imagine my shock when I found myself forced to become, yes, a CEO to save the WIP I'd worked on for six years.  May I explain? Thank you. Lean in and try to imagine... The finale of my WIP is set in Tombstone, Arizona. For plot reasons, I needed one character to spend a single night in a particular spot on a major street. The more historical the setting, the better. I'd read several books and searched online, even bought a large detailed map of the quarter. Finally, I found the one and only hotel for my guy. The room photos I'd seen were as perfect as the hotel's history and location. And yet I faced a problem I saw no way around.  To wit: the hotel had only three suites, on...

  I’ve written the book. I’ve had it edited. I’ve proof read it over and over again and I’ve made use of the Word programme that reads your work aloud word by plodding word. In our house this is known as the boring voice due to the unending monotone which can make any piece, however interesting or exciting, sound totally and utterly deadly. It is so dire that I can only listen for twenty minutes maximum at any one time, otherwise I lose concentration and fail to pick up all the missing words and typos that it highlights. Having completed all this, I’ve formatted the e-book and uploaded it onto Kindle. All that remains to do is to upload the cover and I’m good to go. At this point I have ground to a complete and utter halt. It’s not as if I haven’t already designed the cover for “New Beginnings at Rosa’s.” I did this before I started preparing the e-book, but then the doubts crept in. The problem with covers, as I see it, is that they are all generic. Women’s fiction have a ...

Old Scratch Press (OSP), a poetry and short-form collective that I started in 2022, is seeking two new members to join us starting at the end of 2025. I began the press because authors who I had published in  Instant Noodles Lit Mag  asked me to publish a book of poetry for them. But, as a small indie publisher without a university backing me, it was a big ask to publish one-author-only books of poetry, because books of poetry typically do not sell in a press-sustaining way. I run my various publishing things with my long-suffering husband Dave , and we looked at what the major costs of producing a book are, beyond our time. We decided that, to do it, we'd pay some costs, and some of the labor that had costs associated with it beyond our personal time we could avoid if a group would come together and take on the labor. Basically I went to all the authors I'd worked with in anthologies or the lit mag, and asked them, "If you could trade a little labor for a published book,...