Authors Electric

Yes, we're back - bigger, better, bolder than ever before! Well, all right, so we haven't actually been away, but whipping up a bit of frenzied hype is de rigeur for publicists, surely? Well alright, so maybe we don't need frenzied hype either ... Let's start again. They said it couldn't be done but we proved them wrong!   Sorry. Right, here goes, more sensibly ... You may remember that last year we put together an anthology, called   A Flash in the Pen . A Flash In The Pen No? Well we'll just patiently wait here while you go order it up from Amazon. Here are the links: UK: A Flash in the Pen US: A Flash in the Pen Got it? Good. No, you don't need to start reading it right now, you can do that after you've finished reading this blog. Because we've only gone and done it again ... Another Flash in the Pen  contains yet another superlative line-up of stories from Authors Electric, and until the end of thi...

Cracking crime! A while back, in this very blog, I came out as suffering from, or perhaps reveling in, Multiple Publishing Disorder. After making my name first of all as a poet, reducing, ditching and deleting to enrich my work, I then became a novelist. How to make a story that long, without padding! Ulp. Poetry, crime fiction, comedy fiction, stage and radio plays (of all lengths, and some including original songs), scientific articles, prose polemic/non-fiction, and a nice line in science-themed textual kinetic art installations became my lines of work: in other words, it was a shorter story to say that I wrote everything but short stories. Ooh missus!  As a reader, I love short stories (brilliant, intense, funny, scary, eg Char March's ' Something Vital Fell Through ' or Saki 's) and hate them (interminable inner monologues with long descriptions of cigarettes lit, coffee made and drunk, eg far too many I’ve been subjected to at spoken word events and ha...

We seem to be blogging a lot about CreateSpace just recently. A Flash In The Pen      I have a CreateSpace confession. It was my job to turn Authors Electric's first anthology of short stories, A Flash In The Pen, into a CreateSpace paperback. I said I'd do it - I thought I could do it - and I made a right pig's ear of it. When you log on to C/S, you download a template, into which you paste your book. They give you a choice of a 'blank' template which has little except the formatting for page lengths - and the formatted template, which has formatting for front and back matter, page-numbers, and headers for title and author name at the top of the page.      For my very first C/S venture, years ago, I used the formatted template, and got hopelessly confused and frustrated by it.      So I ditched it, and used the blank template, with which I got on okay. You simply paste your whole book into the template and off you g...

Bring balloons, bring booze, bring the dogs, bring whatever you like - but bring yourself! It's time to partaaaay! Well, perhaps not quite yet, but soon, so we're just getting ourselves in the mood. Bercause this isn't any old party, this is the AE launch party for our forthcoming anthology. And because it is an e-book (although it will also be appearing as a physical version thanks to the heroic efforts and late night candle-burning of Susan Price) and we are Electric Authors, it will of course, be an online launch party.  There's a lot to be said for the virtues of this - no need to find dog sitters (or for children either) while you are out. There is no driving there and back involved, so you can drink as much as you like - and no rushing to catch the last train either. No stress over what to wear (or wailing when you find your favourite outfit fits rather more snugly than the last time you donned it - or worse still, fails to fit at all). No one has to c...

To my great shame, and my almost certain loss, I have never read Thomas Hardy, but yesterday, feeling low, I took myself off to see "FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD" at the Phoenix cinema in East Finchley. This proved to be one of the most visually stunning films I've ever seen, its images of the English landscape like a Nineteenth Century Book of Hours. The actual plot is extraordinary, with its peak moment coming about three-quarters of the way through (well that's my analysis, but others may differ). I have often meant to draw a plot graph of books that impress me, as I'm sure many of you have. The (sadly, late) Ruth Rendell orchestrated plot lines like a symphony. I often likened her novels to music, and even painting - Paul Klee 'taking a line for a walk' springs to mind. Very recently, I've taken on a brief for fifty word stories aimed at four/five year olds -  the length of a medium-sized email (or, in musical terms, a VERY short exercise piece for...

My visit was connected to the 2014 Felixstowe Book Festival Some months ago I was asked to work with some nine and ten year old ‘reluctant writers’ who were also doing an Anglo-Saxon history project. Could I help them use writing to enter imaginatively into the Anglo-Saxon world? My heart leapt! Decades ago, when I was at university, I’d been lucky enough to enrol on an immensely old-fashioned English literature degree. We started at the beginning, somewhere around the late 7 th century, and spent the next three years thundering on chronologically, until we collapsed exhausted somewhere between the First and Second World Wars. This was in the 1970s so we were only a generation or two from home. Many of us felt a little apprehensive when we were instructed to purchase our copies of the most recent edition of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader – initially published in 1876 when it was shockingly modern even to consider English literature as a subject for study. Our nervousness deepened...