Authors Electric

December is a time for looking back and although I’ve written a few Christmas letters in my time reminiscing about what we have been up to as a family I have never looked back at what I have achieved as a writer in the past 12 months. To be honest I tend to play down many of my writing exploits, but with my memoir about to be published in the New Year it’s time for a change, a time to be bold and update my writing CV. In January I discovered a new opportunity writing for Paddler Press magazine .  My piece based on Silence was accepted on January 6th and the magazine arrived all the way from Canada on the 28th.   According to my diary I was also very busy writing lots of 100-word stories for my memoir. At the beginning of February I wrote a 100 flash for the Retreat West monthly microfiction competition.   By the end of the month, I was crowned the winner and I took home the People’s Prize as voted for by the readers. March was a month where life took on a ne...

I worked out this month that I am not the only writer in my family, we all spend at least part of our days siting at our laptops typing away. I blog, write flash fiction and am trying to craft my memoir. My oldest son actually makes a living from writing as a sports journalist, something I find quite incredible as he never really enjoyed English at school. I must admit his grammar is probably better than mine, but at the drop of a hat he can throw in an odd cliche without sounding derivative. Youngest son is a software engineer otherwise known as a computer programmer. He has recently started his first graduate job and has been writing, much of it in another language, computer code. It’s still writing with rules for each line and a correct order of syntax for the code to be read by a machine but that’s as far as my knowledge extends – although I did read both his dissertations, I found his brother’s articles about tennis much more interesting. As I said he has just started his ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Those of you of a certain age will recognize the “will go” element of my title as part of the way we were taught Maths (division) in the 1970s. Without a love of stories, which comes from a love of reading, a love to write will be hard to develop. It will be even harder to maintain. I should have realised the writing life was beckoning me sooner than I did. I loved “composition” lessons during English where we had to invent stories. It was even better when the teacher didn’t set a theme. To this day I prefer open-ended writing competitions! My colleagues all groaned when told to do this. I couldn’t wait to get started.  There were also SRA cards which were colour-coded depending on how well you could read. On one side was the story. On the other were questions about the story. Loved those. Story analysis right there at junior school level! I just didn’t realise it. Breaking down what makes a story work has help...