Authors Electric

Image Credits:-   Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. AI images avoided. Photos from The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick were taken by Gemma Owen-Kendall on behalf of the school or by me, Allison Symes. Many thanks to Babs Trevitt for the image of me taking part in the Swanwick Open Prose Mic Night. When this goes out, I would have had my first book launch for Seeing The Other Side at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick . A recent development has been to allow delegates to have their launches as part of the school events in the year of first publication.  I enjoyed this opportunity. It was wonderfully set up by a launch co-ordinator who, amongst other useful things, took pictures on my phone and theirs, so the school and I can use these on social media. See the pictures. Given my last launch was in 2020 when everything was online due to the pandemic, it is a joy to hold in person events again.  Many thanks to Babs Trevitt for taking this photo. I lo...

That's me in the middle, with my two besties. And yes, I was called Midget. We're standing outside the school canteeen, having no doubt been up to no good. I have got my revenge on several people over the years – not the ones picured here – disguising them as characters in stories. The funniest one was someone who really admired one of my villains, without realising on whom it was based. Anyway, as I'm off on holiday I thought I'd cheat a bit by using an old story of mine this month, originally published in Magnet magazine, which was getting something off my chest about my own schooldays.  Looking back, I now realise that I did in fact have a few very good friends, with whom I have stayed in touch, but there were also loners who didn't have any at all. I simply didn't notice them, just like the rest of the class. This story is called Flaming June. I chose it because of the tropical weather we've been having here in the UK, and I've only updated the endin...

                         This will be--I promise you--my only post about doody...American slang for poop.      If you're still with me, I refer to literary doody. And I don't mean hack novels ground out in a month or a week between shifts at Walmart or McDonald's. I mean the sort of doody real writers like the lot of us have to flush out as we work now and then.     May I share one gross example?     Thanks.     About halfway through my WIP, which was coming right along, I found myself in real trouble. The next scene was already clear in my mind, one involving a smash action scene and a crucial change in my lead character. The pacing seemed almost right for this scene. But my character wasn't quite ready. He had to learn, hear, or see something that galvanizes him.     I had an obligation as a writer to honor this need. But my duty led me to doody as I kept t...

 I didn’t stay to chat. I didn’t join the group which was heading for the pub. I left the meeting as quickly as I could and hurried down the beach. This year’s Peter Duck holiday had begun. There was already a game of cards in progress on the cabin table but I didn’t join in. Merely pushed my meeting notes somewhere far out of sight, ate my share of the supper and settled into my bunk. Nine nights of sleeping on board and waking early every morning to walk along river walls or beaches with the dogs instead of our familiar fields (lovely though they are). The saltings above Waldringfield Gwen, my oldest granddaughter joined the following day. I was impressed by her initial questions: did we have flares? where were they kept? Was there a VHF set and who was qualified to use it? You might think this implied some lack of faith in our ability to negotiate our very modest river to river passages but I thought they were good questions to ask on arrival on any new boat on which you we...

Back in July, I did an author get-together at our local book shop Cover2Cover in Northwich. The weather was beautiful and it was artisan market day so good footfall in town and we had a great day. Didn't set the world on fire - although fantasy author Danny Williams did well. But we had a great time and it was good to meet other local authors. Cover2Cover has been great at getting us all together. I know many local writers and I go to a writing group, but these are mostly people I've never met before and I honestly didn't realise there were so many of us! The shop is also fantastic at promoting our books - we don't have shelf-space, we have an entire bookcase for us all! And there are frequent talks too. Pretty sure I posted a while back about the one I did. The old ... But one of the things I did get out of a Saturday morning sitting outside a bookshop was inspiration! It was refreshing that - for once - we were dealing with physical tangible paperbacks and not eboo...

I write this in greater haste than usual, having forgotten what day it was for all sorts of reasons, some of them more convincing than others! We had an extremely busy July, which was also very frustrating in some ways, involving as it did some chaos in the garden and a series of phone calls to and from the bank because they had decided someone was trying to do something fraudulent with my current account when actually it was only that I had to pay a small fortune to tree surgeons to get rid of a tree that had well outgrown the space in our garden. You will see from the stump that remains how big it must have been. RIP the big tree The only thing that kept me (relatively) sane during July was writing. Despite all the upheaval, I stuck to my regular writing slot almost every day, between 11 am and 1 pm. Incidentally this coincides with the timing for letting the cats out, although of course I couldn't do that while the tree work was going on. Our current cats are rather wary about b...

  Encounters, remembering David Hockney*   I’ve written on Authors Electric previously about 1960s meetings with Paul McCartney (roughly ten minutes) and poet Barry MacSweeney (a good deal longer), and so the recent death of David Hockney prompted some thoughts and memories which I thought I’d share with readers of this blog.    I met him in 1968, or it may have been 1969, I can’t quite remember the year. Time often blurs the boundaries of our thinking. Anyway, he came to our college literary society to give a talk about his art and he spoke to his audience of degree students for an hour or so about his growing success as an artist. The most memorable part for me was his account of his life in California, beginning in 1964, which was always bright and sunny, and which was making him extremely happy.    I drank it all in. I was in the first year of an English degree at Hendon College. I was by now delighting in the experiences of life in London which was so ...

The Silly Season is upon us. Indeed, some might say it began early this year... but that’s enough about the state of the UK government.  Since the heatwave has filled my mind with thistledown, this will be a post all about trivia. Verbal trivia, that is. Specifically, some of the proverbial metaphors we pepper our speech with every day (see what I did there?).  Recently, when describing a sudden realisation I’d had to a friend, I used the phrase, ‘the scales fell from my eyes.’  I like that image. My friend knew exactly what I meant.  Fish scales. Odd to have them covering your eyes. Photo by Engin Akyurt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ close-up-of-fish-scales-with-natural-texture-33654489/ It was only, some time later, it occurred to me to wonder… what did I mean? Scales? Eyes? Why would there be scales on my eyes in the first place, and what kind of scales? Fish scales? Piano scales? A weighing machine?  These kitchen scales would give 'heavy-eyed' a whole new ...

During the past month, as the heatwave continues to sweep across the country, I have mostly been inside. It isn't for sun avoidance, or because my house is cooler; it isn't even because I can boast of finishing my writing projects; it is because I have been marking exam papers. An online precedent has been set so I am allowed to say that - I am not allowed to say the exam board I am marking for or reveal any details, but because of TikTok, the subject of one exam has already been leaked: it was about technology and AI. And I have begun to realise that the younger generation is just as uncomfortable with it as any of their elder curmudgeonly complainants. This, dear reader, fills me with optimism. Perhaps there is hope for the future of humanity after all? As well as writing and leaping about on stage, I run a tuition company. It sounds grand, but in reality, I run a company of one - me. I do it all, from navigating the complexities of the timetable to sorting out invoices (as A...