Authors Electric

I turn eighty on the 16th of this month. In a global perspective, this will amount to a mere 30,000 days, roughly, or some 700,000 hours of puttering about this four-billion-year-old rock spinning in space. It covers a lot of ground for me nonetheless as I continue to strew my path with printed words. As it turns out, May also marks two years since I started blogging with my fellow esteemed Authors Electric. I'm not much for reflection, but now is as good a time as any. Like golfers, symphony conductors,  Colonel Sanders , and  the Energizer Bunny , writers seem to go, go and go until they stop. That's my intention, anyway. I detect little change as my odometer rolls into its eighth decade. I have half-dozen projects in process, none of which I can guarantee will come to fruition. Among them: a speculative fiction novella and my autobiographical novel, The Einstein Express , and a sequel to Ophelia Rising . for which I keep gathering string. This year's to-do list...

Another Flash in the Pen I know it's not the done thing to favourably review a book in which you yourself have a story. It's understandably seen as biased. Well, I would say it's good, wouldn't I?           So I wasn't planning to review Another Flash in the Pen here. I reckoned I would post the fact of its existence on Facebook and then keep schtum.           And, to be brutally honest, I had muted expectations.           I like short stories. I've read lots of anthologies and what I've come to expect is a few stand-out pieces studding a book full of perfectly good but underwhelming stories. Or, perhaps, stories that would be stand-out pieces for someone else but just don't do it for me.           That's what I expected from Another Flash in the Pen and, had it been so, I would simply have kept quiet.   ...

As the summer weather really hasn't been much cop so far, we have decided to attempt to spread a little cheer by extending the period in which you can buy an e-copy of our latest anthology Another Flash in the Pen until the end of July for the bargain price of 99p. It is also available from Amazon in paperback if you prefer something a little more papery ... AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON HERE! We are also excited to be able to announce that this year we are publishing not just one, but two anthologies of short fiction stories ... here's a sneaky little preview of what we have planned for October ...

It would be hard to ignore today's results from the UK's Referendum. Like most people I know, I'd assumed we would (and had voted for) 'Remain', but came down this morning to the news that the Farage tribe had succeeded. We now seem to be in bed with some very unlovely people - 'Approved by Trump' is not a sticker I'd want to flaunt, and as for Marine le Pen... I've just signed a petition to request a second referendum, which is gathering pace - apparently some of the people who voted Out are now regretting it. There's also a feeling that the Brexit team didn't ever expect to win this one, so making unrealistic claims was OK as they'd never be called on to implement them . My husband, David, used to say that there's an old Chinese curse: 'May You Live In Interesting Times'. Well, unfortunately, we do, we do. 'Another Flash in the Pen' came out recently . I'd already pre-ordered it, but forgotten, so its ar...

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...