Authors Electric

Mary Reinholz '70 West    The jobs I had as a kid and even later, as a young man don't exist anymore. I had no inkling I'd work on a newspaper or write books, or be in "media." My "big get" was getting a job. I started earning pocket money at age 10 delivering newspapers to home subscribers on de Luxe Schwinn I loved that sleek, red-and-black bike, with its whitewall balloon tires, shiny streamlined chrome fenders, built-in horn, head-and-tail lights, front-wheel shock-absorber and rack to carry the afternoon dailies I delivered to my afternoon paper's forty subscribers.  I became adepted at sailing fat copies of rubber-banded,  Hollywood Citizen News onto subscribers' front porches without breaking a window - most of the time.  Schwinns of that era were like our plush, chrome-laden, dreamboat, fintailed cars -  as stylish as they were unsafe, gas-guzzling, and impractical. I lusted after just a second-hand one that I could restore. To save up, ...

This month, we expand on July's theme of long-distance walking routes to tackle endurance horse races. First we have non-fiction: Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer, which I read in the evenings while riding a much less arduous trail of my own across the Welsh mountains. Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer This beautifully-written memoir by the niece of event rider Lucinda Prior-Palmer describes Lara's experience, aged just 19, of riding the Mongol Derby. Arguably the world's toughest horse race, this 1000 km test of endurance takes place each August across the steppes made famous by Genghis Khan. Riders change mounts at each stopover and complete the course by riding 25 of the tough little Mongolian horses provided by herders along the route. This year's Derby will have just finished by the time this post goes up, but entries are now open for the 2026 race if you are inspired! Second is fiction: The Glory by Lauren St John. The Glory by Lauren St John When I first saw thi...

Image Credit:  Images taken by me, Allison Symes, from the 2025 Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick. By the time this post goes out, I will have just returned from my big writing treat of the year - The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick.    I get to spend a few days immersed in the writing world. I also love catching up with friends I only see online for the rest of the year. I learn so much from the workshops and courses and the after dinner speakers.  The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire - home to The Writers' Summer School for over 70 years. I also find this break away reaffirms my belief in myself as a writer by helping me fight Imposter Syndrome. Real writers go to conferences, don’t they, whether said events are online or in person, day events, or longer. Also last month, I was involved with a friend’s online book launch. That went well, I’m glad to say, but what is lovely here is with this and Swanwick, there was plenty of writer engagement. For the online launch, that...

  Puma Three and a half years ago I had two cataract operations. I wasn’t happy with the first one, but was told I was worrying about nothing, it would resolve itself in a few weeks,  so I went ahead with the second op on the right eye, which was fine. My left eyelid was drooping, and cutting out light, which meant I could only read on a Kindle as I could alter the brightness and the size of the font. You can’t enlarge illustrations, or tables, or maps, which becomes increasingly frustrating and has a real impact on your understanding of certain books. My optician diagnosed ptosis, but warned me that consultants do not listen to opticians. How true that became. commissioned illustration for playing cards, that never went on sale Consultant after consultant told me I was imagining my poor vision, as if I forced my eye as open as wide as possible I could see perfectly well. Keeping it open was a different matter altogether. The worst response of all was from a consultant renowne...

Like you, I play many parts in the writing of a book: part plotter, part pantser, part craftsman, part laborer, part artist, and part klutz. And I accept myself as all of those. But so far I've never been able to see myself as a gifted promoter--or even a mildly competent one. When I finished a book, I moved on to the next with half-hearted touts on Facebook and Twitter/X. I've steered clear of giveaway events as well as interviews. My shyness or aversion stems, I think, from my Catholic upbringing--where the flames of hell were never far from shameless self-promotion.  But in the six years spent on my WIP, I learned some exciting new narrative footwork. Result: a new kind of crime thriller unlike anything else I've done. Ans I've developed a burning ambition to share this book with readers I've never managed to reach. And this will require mastering new footwork once again--this time in marketing and self-promotion. For months I've worked on expanding and stren...

  “So where do we go from here? At what point will the Kafkaesque tenor of our lives return to something approaching normality? Who knows? Up until this point the journey has been both fascinating and harrowing. All I can do is wait and hope.” This is what I wrote a year ago, when I posted about Mike’s sudden descent into delirium and the pressure I felt from the health professionals to put him in some sort of care. The implication being that I wouldn’t be able to cope with someone who spent the nights raving and whose behaviour at times was akin to that of a three year old the midst of a temper tantrum. Their prognosis was bleak, but I simply couldn’t abandon a husband of over three decades without at least trying to see if we could find a way of living together. And over the past twelve months this is what we have done. There were ground rules. The first being that I had to be able to sleep, so there would be no more shouting all night, because if he did then I would be...

When we write novels, we often imagine an ideal reader, someone smart, curious, and eager to dive into our worlds. But there’s an important fact many authors overlook: the  average  American adult reads at about a seventh to eighth grade level. And more than half of U.S. adults read below a sixth grade level. That doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy complex stories, but it does mean that overly dense prose or elaborate sentence structures can make a book harder to access. If you use Microsoft Word, the built-in Editor can give you a readability score based on the  Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level . This tells you the U.S. school grade needed to understand your text on first read. A score of “8” means the average eighth grader could easily follow it. You can turn this feature on in  File → Options → Proofing → Show Readability Statistics  after running a spelling and grammar check. Another measure you may hear about is the  Lexile Framework for Reading . The Lexile scor...