Authors Electric

  The search for tools to make my writing easier continues. I’ve put the idea of a custom built word processor built around a Raspberry Pi to one side for the time being, partly due to time (or, more accurately, my lack of it) and partly due to practicalities – realistically, I’d need a 3D printer to design a case for the hardware, and some way of connecting a screen and keyboard. It’s doable, but I don’t have the time or money to invest in the equipment, or learning how to use it. Instead, I’ve gone in a slightly different direction. My wife recently changed her phone – she went to the dark side, as I call it, and now has an iPhone. Of course, this doesn’t play nicely with any of the existing kit so the Garmin is going to be replaced by an Apple Watch, and she’s already got an iPad. This is often something we joke about – I used to teach on Macs, many years ago, and tried an iPhone once – their stuff is not for me, as I like to tinker and do things my way; but I’ve ...

There are many things in life which polarise people. Off the top of my head, I can think of politics, religion, climate change. Opinions on these things can make or break friendships and other relationships. How many times have I read online: If you vote X, then unfriend me immediately and similar statements. I have friends of all persuasions and their opinions on most things are all part of what makes friendships rich and interesting both online and in real life.  In the online literary world – well, social media anyway – the controversy of the month seems to be artificial intelligence. People come at this from all angles. Some hate any use of AI in any shape or form – it’s stealing, it uses too much water, it’s cheating, and they can go on and on about saving the planet and the livelihoods of every creative persn living on it. Others see it as the future and why shouldn’t they use all the help they can get, they don’t have any money and don’t see any problems.  The reality,...

 Short stories seem to multiply on my computers as well as in notebooks, though I often forget having written them. I embarked on an effort to tidy them up and do something useful with them some time ago, but the only visible result of these efforts was that I succeeded in unpublishing two very short collections of stories entitled Five Short Stories and Five More Short Stories. With hindsight, I think I could have made more effort with the titles! I realised only the other week, during another phase of our horrendous decluttering project, that in addition to the ones I vaguely remembered, I had a whole notebook full of hand-written short stories I had completely forgotten about. I have a feeling that forgetting them was probably the best option, and I’ve been putting off looking at them in case of embarrassment. Oddly the declutterers responsible for unearthing it, although they kept trying to talk me into getting rid of some things I definitely didn’t even want to consider gett...

                                                                                   There's a cool web of language winds us in.                                          Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:                                          We grow sea-green at last and coldly die                                          In brininess and volubility. (Robert Graves) What would Jill have said?   This is what the members of our poetry group now ask during ou...

When I’m reading a book review or looking at notices of coming play performances, there’s one word that tells me I need read no further. I know at once that this novel or this performance is not for me.  The word is ‘reimagining’.  Instead of the writer’s creating his or her own original work of art in novel or play form, they have piggy-backed on a classic, taken over the well-defined characters (saves the effort of creating their own), invented new plotlines and generally ‘updated’ the story to add ‘freshness’ and ‘relevance’ for today. A particular favourite at the moment is to go for a minor character – Mary Bennett, say – and retell Jane Austen’s great novel from her point of view . The result is a kind of Cosy Classics in which readers are duped into thinking they’re being given a new, original story when much of it is simply borrowed finery from an infinitely greater creator.  The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. Told through the eyes of Maggie, NOT Tom Tulliver....

  As I understand it, the point of any art is that it's based on, and grew from, real human experience. What happened to you, and how you felt about it-- whether it was good or bad. What you learned from it. Or failed to learn, as failing to learn is a very common human experience. These experiences involve an immense laboratory of bio-chemicals and hormones, acting on actual 'vital' organs -- that is, living organs vital for living. The ones that hurt when you're disappointed, or embarrassed. It involves organic memory, which is bio-chemical, and involves vision, forgetfulness, imagination... Human experience involves dreams, both in the sense of ambitions and day-dreams, and the mysterious, little-understood visions created by our brains while we sleep -- and these visions can involve all our sleeping senses, and be as vivid -- that is, alive -- as anything we experience while awake. So much so that some cultures have maintained that we actually enter another world wh...

This year, I visited Hay-on-Wye for the festival's Romantasy day. Time I found out what this genre is all about, I decided, since I'm a lifelong fantasy fan and yet somehow (probably since I got published as a children's author and write mainly for the 9-11 age group) missed out on the Romantasy side of things! The two lovely authors on the panel, Hazel McBride and Imani Erriu, soon filled me in on the secret of its appeal. It turns out that this hot new genre, being basically fantasy written by women with a romantic twist, is essentially what I was writing back in the pre-internet days of small indie zines produced in people's garages with their equally small but faithful readership of genre fans/authors. In those days, most of these little zines were edited by men, and their content reflected this. But there was one called Visionary Tongue, whose editorial consultants included female fantasy authors Storm Constantine and Freda Warrington, which published a couple of s...