Authors Electric

  As I understand it, the point of any art is that it's based on, and grew from, real human experience. What happened to you, and how you felt about it-- whether it was good or bad. What you learned from it. Or failed to learn, as failing to learn is a very common human experience. These experiences involve an immense laboratory of bio-chemicals and hormones, acting on actual 'vital' organs -- that is, living organs vital for living. The ones that hurt when you're disappointed, or embarrassed. It involves organic memory, which is bio-chemical, and involves vision, forgetfulness, imagination... Human experience involves dreams, both in the sense of ambitions and day-dreams, and the mysterious, little-understood visions created by our brains while we sleep -- and these visions can involve all our sleeping senses, and be as vivid -- that is, alive -- as anything we experience while awake. So much so that some cultures have maintained that we actually enter another world wh...

You can find the Book DNA site here. It's a site that aims to put people who love reading and books in touch with other people who love reading and books. You can join as a reader and/or as a writer (since writers tend to be book-lovers and avid readers often write.) You can put forward your favourite books of a year, as I've done here  ...and Book DNA will make you a beautiful page to show off your choices. Or, if you join as an author, you can choose one of your own books, and then show-case five other books which you think will appeal to a similar readership, as I did here... At the beginning of this post and again at the end, I have the opportunity to mention my own book of ghost stories, Hauntings . This doesn't cost the writer anything except the time spent compiling their choice of books -- which, as always, is rather a pleasure. And I noticed a definite up-turn in the sales of my ghost stories after posting this.  The Book DNA site is building a community of reader...

  If that's the view from the front door, I'm staying in. That Storm Goretti was some storm.    And that's the view from the back door. It weighed down and broke my rose arch.            Still....   The Ghost Drum My story is set (says the cat) in a far-away Czardom, where the winter is a cold half-year of darkness.         In that country the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice. The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky! In the north of that country all the winter is one long night, and all that long night long, the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight.      In winters there, the cold is so fierce the frost can be heard crackling and snapping as it travels through the air. The snow is so deep that...