Authors Electric

'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 ...

Friday. End of the working week. Jobs to be fitted in. Always keeping one eye on the clock to make sure everything gets done. There's a meeting at the village church to discuss practical arrangements for an evensong by candlelight. Perhaps if we turn off the harsh electric lamps that glare down from the ceiling and let softer lights make pools and shadows in the large,old space, perhaps we will feel closer to the people from the past, who have lived and worshipped and died where we live now.   But we have to get the logistics right. Twenty-first century people, even in villages, are not as comfortable with the dark as our ancestors had to be. We must ensure they can arrive and leave safely and feel comfortable while they are here.  Our meeting's at 4.30. Already it's after 4.00. I’m in the laundry room and hurrying to unload the washing machine, to take clothes off hangers and put them in the airing cupboard, take out the previously aired clothes and pile them into a bask...

 Having had very few book events this year, I had two in the space of two days! I had the great honour of interviewing Sophie Hannah at Basingstoke Discovery Centre for Only Murders in the Library on Saturday 25th October. Sophie has two books out at the moment - No One Would Do What The Lamberts Have Done  and her sixth Poirot novel, The Last Death of the Year .  We were all thoroughly entertained as Sophie told us how she began writing the Lamberts book by dictating 400 words into her phone whilst still in bed in the morning – I think this is a writing tip worth copying! Also, she explained how she created village life in Cambridgeshire for the Lamberts, including an Agatha Christie book club who fall out over whether they can read Mary Westmacott or not. Here's the blurb for  No One Would Do What The Lamberts Have Done : You think it will never happen to you: the ring of the bell, the policeman on the doorstep. What he says traps you in a nightmare that starts...

Stage Struck I recently went to the theatre for the first time for months. Unfortunately this scheduled outing happened to coincide with yet another development in my medical recovery, which reminded me of my October post about the gas man in that the latest complaint was a bad back, apparently caused by excessive coughing during an asthma attack which itself had been the legacy of a collapsed lung I suffered during heart surgery. I was slightly apprehensive about going to the theatre, but I reasoned that it wasn't going to be as much like hard work as my trip to one of several hospitals in Edinburgh for a chest x-ray the other week. The corridors at the theatre aren't nearly as long as those in most hospitals, and I know my way around this particular theatre so well that I could picture myself getting to my reserved seat, and I knew I could do it. Also there would be ice-cream, which immediately made the excursion worthwhile. Anyway, I was determined to see this particular pla...

A surreal memoir in Catamaran I get melancholy on Halloween. I love its makebelieve and mockery of darkness and death. In my parental days I loved taking the kids trick-or-treating, earnest in their costumes, carried on by my grandchildren and great grandchildren today, carried on when my eldest daughter Alicia Sammons builds her family altar and does herself up for La Dia de Los Muertos, November 2.  At the same time, I relive sad memories of the real thing - my mother dying in a San Francisco hospital the morning before Halloween some thirty years ago.  I remember taking a granddaughter and my youngest daughter, both age 7, trick-or-treating, giggling in their costumes the following evening as if nothing had happened, as my mother - a perpetual prankster - would have insisted.  The experience culminated months of watching my mother slip away. It cut deep. She had raised me in fiercely loving, but inconsistent ways. She hadn't been perfect, but done her damn best. ...