Authors Electric

A year ago I wrote a rather contemplative blog post about a new venture I’d embarked on – editing an anthology of short stories by a dozen authors inspired by the subject of my own two books , namely King Richard III . Demonized particularly by Shakespeare (following St Thomas More and other writers keen to pander to the dynastic requirements of their Tudor overlords), King Richard wasn’t of course much like the grotesque portrait that’s long been painted of him – and many modern writers are keen to provide their own take on his life and character. My blog post can be found at https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2018/11/dotting-is-editors-role-alex-marchant.html and focuses in particular on the process of editing other people’s fiction writing – something that I found very different from the more practical style of copyediting I’ve long practised in my day job. But it was a process I enjoyed – together with collaborating with a number of other authors with similar in...

I had a dream... No, not a Martin Luther King sort of dream (sadly), just an ordinary sort of one, a few nights ago. But it set me thinking on a subject I’ve thought about a few times before. The connection between dreams and the imagination of a writer. A couple of months ago one of the questions put to me in an  interview  about my writing asked, ‘Do you rely more on dreams, imagination, or planning?’ That was something of a surprise to me – that ‘dreams’ appeared in that list, let alone at the start. My answer was that I wouldn’t say I rely on them, but dreams have fed in to my writing at important times. Particularly those ‘between sleeping and waking’ types of dreams (one of which was responsible for my short story ‘The Beast of Middleham Moor’ that led to the charity anthology  Grant Me the Carving of My Name ). On this occasion, the other day, just before falling asleep I had been reading through some of the submissions for  Right Trusty ...

I’ve worked in publishing for a long time now in various capacities. My first job was as desk editor for a small press in Gloucestershire - back in the days when galley proofs were still a thing, and my first job was proofreading medieval city records in Latin (letter by letter...). The company was leading the way in computer typesetting, but overall little had changed since Gutenberg.  Caxton's printing shop After a spell back in archaeology, I moved briefly into medical, then management publishing – where I learnt numerous buzzwords and reluctantly retailed the bulls**t beloved of that sector. Being pushed towards management didn’t appeal – neither wrangling staff nor overseeing the editing of magazines – so I moved back to what first drew me to the industry – working directly with collections of words that other people had lovingly crafted. Newly freelance, I targeted academic publishing companies as potential clients – that’s where I’d started and where I fe...