Authors Electric

  Peter Duck in winter acrylic on board by Anna Mortimer There’s a phrase I like in the C of E communion service when we give thanks for bread ‘which earth has given and human hands have made’.  It’s one of the many phrases that can’t be taken literally. What one actually gets, in most churches, is a tasteless white wafer made of wheat flour and water, then stamped out by machine and packaged hygienically. Minimal intervention by human hands, it would seem (though I’ve now watched a couple of You Tube videos which show labouring nuns, smiling and thinking holy thoughts as they work some basic machinery.) The usual communion wafer is nothing like real, crumbly, hand-made bread. Even if one never makes it oneself (I don’t) homemade bread seems to retain some tactile evidence of fingers mixing; palms and wrists and upper arms kneading; a baker’s bodyweight leaning into the dough, lifting and turning and rolling. No doubt it’s tiring work for people who have to make it all the tim...

Last September, I wrote about tidying up my website and realising that a good percentage of links went precisely nowhere. It was very frustrating, realising that people I'd helped out clearly didn't feel the same way, and I lost a lot of work that I stupidly didn't have copies of, including a series of blogs I wrote for what is now called the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival . Don't you just love the power (and money) of commercial sponsorship? Back in the day, It was the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival and I occasionally wrote for their blog for 4 years between 2011 and 2015, figuring it gave me some exposure amongst the big boys of crime fiction. I linked my own web site to each post and only discovered these links didn't work when I was doing my housekeeping last summer. Did I have copies? Of course I didn't. Why would I need them when any reader could just go to the link ... I tried restoring email archives, to find my original submissions, bu...

I have tried not to worry too much about AI, and even to welcome it, in its place, since one of my sons has been working with it in some capacity and I still feel it has the potential to help with scientific and medical research projects and that kind of thing. I can't imagine that Copilot, on the other hand, will be a help with anything.  I didn't intend to have to wrestle with Copilot, but it has recently invaded my Word documents exactly like a virus, and one for which there isn't any kind of antidote or vaccine. I think this has happened as an unintended consequence of an upgrade I've made to my Microsoft Office setup in order that I can experiment with their new-fangled tool for creating online databases. I did this because I've volunteered for years in various roles in a local community organisation, and some issues have arisen that I feel can only be resolved with a database, and of course Microsoft have used this moment to stop including Access in the Office...

  The Curative Power of Art A Reading of  Art Cure  by Daisy Fancourt This book is proof if any were needed that an engagement with the arts is good for us. The Art that the author Daisy Fancourt refers to in it belongs to several different creative areas, such as music, dance, poetry and storytelling, and she has followed the first of these throughout her life as an accomplished piano player. In her prelude to the book, she says that behaviour connected to the arts can have a big influence on our health. For example: ‘If children engage with art workshops, choirs, book clubs, dance classes, drama groups or bands they are less likely to be lonely or develop behavioural problems…’ Nor is this book just a speculative account. Throughout it the author tells us about her engagement with specialist academic teams in areas of Psychobiology and Epidemiology, for which she is a Professor at UCL, researching how biological processes relate to human experience such as the emotions....

Here’s a quiz question for you.  Just about every new writer will, at some time or other, be advised to ‘murder your darlings’. By which is meant not bumping off your nearest and dearest to give you AT LAST a bit of peace and quiet to create… but exerting discipline over what you’re creating. If you have written a passage you’re particularly proud of, with elaborate, flowery images, elegant use of words – the best of fine writing, in short – then delete it. The chances are you’ve strayed into a self-conscious writerliness, in which pace and plot have been sacrificed to draw attention to your own beautiful prose, or (in my case) to set up a joke I’m desperate to squeeze into the story.  It doesn’t work. The narrative must come first. Every bit of scene setting or character depiction, every scrap of dialogue and, yes, every joke needs to further the plot. Writing should be like a clear pane of glass. Photo by Magda Ehlers: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/rustic-wooden-window-overl...