Authors Electric

The last year or so has seen me coaxing more life out of my (admittedly rather old) laptops, to keep them running just that bit longer. As an engineer by trade, I quite enjoy poking around in hardware and software to see what I can tinker with to extend the working life of a piece of kit. There are a couple of reasons behind this, and why I don’t simply buy a new laptop. Cost is one with choice and sustainability behind the other, although for me the two are somewhat linked. Most obvious for me is cost – I can’t see the point in splashing out hundreds for a slighty newer version of something I already have. I don’t need anything too fancy – just some web browsing, office suite, and audio tools to rip CDs and play audio files. No need for high-end video as I’m not into movies or games. Problem is, the current craze for AI has driven the cost of IT kit through the roof. To add insult to injury, I’d also be paying the Microsoft tax to immediately wipe Windows off and install Linux. You...

Buttons and fasteners. Connections. Things that hold things together. Or just an embellishment?  My daughter bought me a long fluffy cardigan for Christmas a couple of years ago. She’s very tuned into my dress style and knows what I like. It’s one of those cardis that thinks it might be a jacket, or even a dressing gown in the right circumstances and at this time of year, it’s rarely far from me. But it needed buttons. Not that I like to button it up fully, but it can get annoying when it constantly slips off your shoulders.  No belt and no buttonholes. And it was machine-knitted. Handy as I am with a sewing machine, I’m not competent enough to make holes in a knit without the whole thing unravelling. So I bought some fasteners I could sew on to both sides and now it’s perfect!  Fast forward a year or so and I’m mooching around one of my favourite charity shops while killing time in town. And I find the most gorgeous deep red velour winter coat. In a charity shop but bran...

In the intervals of wrestling with ACX, I've managed to start some minimalist gardening. For some time now, I’ve had the idea at the back of my mind that I’d like to have a go at audiobooks. I have a feeling the books in my 30-book mystery series might suit the format, and as a recent audiobook listener I now know that the right narrator can add a lot to the basic text. Until now there were two main barriers preventing me from going ahead. One was the likely cost, needless to say. However I’ve somehow managed to make enough from Kobo sales, of all things, to cover the cost of having the first book, at least, narrated. The other and slightly more daunting barrier was that I had always imagined my younger son was the only person I could trust to do the books justice. They are set in Fife, in Scotland, with a cast of characters who vary in age and life experience but are mostly Scottish, so I needed someone with a Scottish but not too Scottish accent. When I say ‘not too Scottish’, I ...

                                     Sensim Sine Sensu: what I have been reading   I was completely out of ideas for a post this month, so I turned to the books I had been reading for inspiration: The first was  The Quiet Ear  by Raymond Antrobus, a birthday present from my sister. This author, as some of you may know, is a performance poet who is partly deaf, but whose life has been considerably enhanced by the wearing of hearing aids. This autobiography is an account of his struggle to come to terms with his deafness in a world which often fails to accommodate those with hearing difficulties and his eventual triumph against all the odds.   The second book that I finished, one that I had been meaning to read for some time, was  Hamnet  by Maggie O’Farrell which I picked up in the second-hand section of my local library. It is the untold story of the death of Shak...

The servants' view:  Longbourn by Jo Baker Look, I don’t usually bother with this sort of thing.  Yet another rewriting of Pride and Prejudice . We’ve had it from the servants’ point of view (Jo Baker’s Longbourn ), it’s infused Bridget Jones’s Diary , and been recast as a comic horror film,  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,  starring the Undead. (This last version may be a kind of backhanded compliment to Jane Austen on the deathless status of her most loved work, I couldn’t possibly say.)  And now, heaven help us, we have Mary Bennet’s story.  Suffused with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice : Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding That’s right. The hilariously tedious, pedantic, verbose, two-dimensional middle sister whose only function is for us to laugh at her. Whether or not you find her a believable character, or feel there’s a touch of cruelty in her creation, there's no escaping the fact that this is how Jane Austen wrote her.  But guess what....

                                             I was very busy being in a play last month and had no time to do my monthly post. This month, I have struggled - what shall I write about? In the end it became easy: this month I will be musing on the benefits of trying new things.  I have stepped out of my comfort zone many times - from jumping off a 75 ft tower for a charity some years ago, dying my hair red, black, blond and back again, spontaneous ear-piercing, impulsively starting a business - to experimenting with different styles of writing. It's one of the reasons I like being independently published because I am not pigeon-holed as a one-genre author. Instead I am a multi-genre author and although I began writing Victorian Gothic pastiche and poetry, my poetry evolved into performance pieces and my novel is in a genre I have termed 'Brit-Grit'. I...

Umberto Tosi, New Year's Eve, 2026 "Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph, " wrote  Thomas Paine to George Washington in the darkest days of the American Revolution when the British Empire seemed invincible.  Mad King Donald-abused  America needs more Thomas Paines right now.  " These are the times that try men's souls," Paine wrote. "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."  George Washington , then commander in chief of a demoralized, underfunded Continental Army promptly  had Paine's  The American Crisis   pamphlet, read aloud to them. Thomas Paine-Laurent Davos By the 1990s, when my youngest daughter took her first steps, I blessed the stars that seemed to finally give her generation respite from...

The Scattered Authors Society is a fine, upstanding body of writers scribbling away all over Britain. I'm a member -- one of the founder members, in fact, along with Authors Electric's own Katherine Roberts. But I'm also a member of a smaller group (and very exclusive group, I'm telling you) within the SAS.  This very exclusive writing group of ours had a problem. None of us were doing much writing. Which, I understand, is not all that unusual with writing groups. Personally, I was bereft of all ideas. Just flat out. But the problem most of the others had was that they had deadlines and  ought to be writing, and wanted to write-- but somehow, the writing just wasn't getting done. We meet up reguarly on Zoom, it being a bit difficult to meet up in person, scattered as we are from the West Country to Scotland. The meetings were full of complaints about the failure to actually get any writing done, beset as we were by distractions. Now there are a few tricks to con you...