Authors Electric

"' Begin at the beginning. ' the king said gravely, ' and go on until you come to the end. Then stop .'" I'm thinking a lot about beginnings right now. This is not so much because it's January, though that's natural. I've never been much for New Year's rituals and resolutions. The universe gives not a rat's patootie that we don party hats and make noise at an arbitrary point in our orbit around second-rate Sol on the seedy outskirts of the Milky Way. Jorge Luis Borges pointed out that "time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day - perhaps every hour - is different." Indeed, this January seems very different from the last. It feels more like an end - maybe the end - than a beginning. We've had our cup of kindness for auld lang syne, yet can't forget the blood orange orb rising over Amerca. It's not a new day, but a brutish one ...

Odds and Ends It’s January, and I’m so busy turning over new leaves that time is in short supply so I thought I’d cobble together some odds and ends that I use when teaching, which might be of use. Or not! Coincidences When you are faced with something that has to be glossed over – such as a coincidence which may seem just a bit too fortuitous to the reader – it’s often best to tackle it head-on. For example, if a character is taken for someone else because they just happen to look alike, or have the same name, you could make the character reflect how strange this was. This makes the reader subconsciously realise that the writer knows this piece of information is a bit unlikely, and is flagging it up, rather than hoping the reader hasn’t noticed – or, even worse, being totally unaware themselves how contrived the situation will seem. Don’t let your reader think he or she is smarter than you are, or the suspension of disbelief will go up in smoke. Dream Sequences D...