Authors Electric

I spent much of last month zipping around all over the place, mainly fulfilling long-planned visits to friends we rarely see because they live so far away. This included a lightning five-day trip to Long Island (nuts, I know, but she is a very GOOD friend and sadly on her own since her husband died a couple of years ago).  Coe Hall, Planting Fields Park, Long Island, USA. Now Long Island, as you probably know, is famous for several massive mansions built in various historical styles by nineteenth and early twentieth century industrialists who had made huge fortunes in America’s growing economy. The period is known as the Gilded Age, and some of these houses and the wealthy people who owned them are said to have inspired Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The families have now long gone and many of these fine houses been demolished, sadly, or (much better fate) turned into museums. Our friend took us to see one, Coe Hall in Planting Fields Historic State Park , a Tudor-style hous...

  Writing about them, though?   Hauntings: Nine Haunting Stories   More than happy to write about spooks. I've always loved ghost stories.     Overheard in a Graveyard  "Who weeps on my grave, who keeps me from sleep? Is it you who unearths me to this cold rain, this dark, this wind and all its grief?"   Nightcomers     "I'll tell you a true story -- how my dad met the ghost dog..."   It is a true story .  One my dad often told me.     But 'Cold Silver', one of the other stories, is ghostlier . It's based on old folk-lore, as many of my stories are.       But never mind the quality, feel the width! I can do you book-length occult, ghosts and soul-sucking, as well as short stories...       The Bearwood Witch tells of Brummie witches consulting demons and generally getting up to no good...             While The Ghost Wife is set at the time of the industrial revo...

Comedy, we’re told, is the hardest thing to write.  Well it must be, because frankly there’s so darn little of it around nowadays. And while I await outrage from the Edinburgh Fringe and the innumerable standup comedians and their audiences up and down the country (all eager readers of this blog, obvs), I’ll try and explain what I mean.  Dark comedy there is. Self-deprecating individuals telling their difficult life stories on stage, one wise-crack after another at their own expense (because no one can have a go at them if it's their lives, after all)… legion. Witty, cleverly written TV ‘sitcoms’ centring on a tortured heroine’s hapless attempts to negotiate some way of living… yup, those too, ever since Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s groundbreaking Fleabag . Which, I maintain wasn’t a sitcom, as the Guardian dubbed it , at all, nor even a comedy-drama , but a novel. A novel released in 12 instalments, perhaps the modern equivalent of how Dickens’s works first found their readership....

The Silly Season is upon us. Indeed, some might say it began early this year... but that’s enough about the state of the UK government.  Since the heatwave has filled my mind with thistledown, this will be a post all about trivia. Verbal trivia, that is. Specifically, some of the proverbial metaphors we pepper our speech with every day (see what I did there?).  Recently, when describing a sudden realisation I’d had to a friend, I used the phrase, ‘the scales fell from my eyes.’  I like that image. My friend knew exactly what I meant.  Fish scales. Odd to have them covering your eyes. Photo by Engin Akyurt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ close-up-of-fish-scales-with-natural-texture-33654489/ It was only, some time later, it occurred to me to wonder… what did I mean? Scales? Eyes? Why would there be scales on my eyes in the first place, and what kind of scales? Fish scales? Piano scales? A weighing machine?  These kitchen scales would give 'heavy-eyed' a whole new ...

Writers all: Bow your heads and have your offering of wheat cakes and olive oil ready. Here, I introduce you to your patron God.  Herald and Messenger Back in the day, Our Hermes— or Mercury, if you prefer— was a busy lad. He was the Gods’ Messenger, or Herald, divine representative of all those mortal heralds with the fraught job of carrying messages along dangerous roads, to equally dangerous people who might be extremely pissed off by what they had to say. As the Gods’ Messenger, Hermes had to give the hard word to characters even worse than the average human king: to giants, witches, monsters and other Gods (who could be so difficult). Hermes was a diplomat, a fast, smooth talker, a charmer, a deft bender of the truth. As no doubt human heralds were. Each herald carried a version of the God’s snake-wrapped staff, as a sign of the God's protection and a reminder that you really did not want to mess with the Olympian Gods. (You could end up as a shrubbery, or an interesting ...

The servants' view:  Longbourn by Jo Baker Look, I don’t usually bother with this sort of thing.  Yet another rewriting of Pride and Prejudice . We’ve had it from the servants’ point of view (Jo Baker’s Longbourn ), it’s infused Bridget Jones’s Diary , and been recast as a comic horror film,  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,  starring the Undead. (This last version may be a kind of backhanded compliment to Jane Austen on the deathless status of her most loved work, I couldn’t possibly say.)  And now, heaven help us, we have Mary Bennet’s story.  Suffused with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice : Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding That’s right. The hilariously tedious, pedantic, verbose, two-dimensional middle sister whose only function is for us to laugh at her. Whether or not you find her a believable character, or feel there’s a touch of cruelty in her creation, there's no escaping the fact that this is how Jane Austen wrote her.  But guess what....

I’ve been reading a number of memoirs recently, thanks to Slightly Foxed Editions, the publishing wing of Slightly Foxed magazine. Mostly this has been a sheer delight. While the writing quality may vary, what doesn’t is the fascinating glimpses of detail of peoples' lives in the past .  To War with Whitaker by Hermione Ranfurly My Grandmothers and I by  Diana Holman Hunt I was going to write ‘ordinary peoples' lives’ but that would hardly fit My Grandmothers and I , Diana Holman Hunt’s hilarious account of being brought up by her two grandmothers, one of whom was almost dangerously eccentric (guess which one). Or Countess Ranfurly’s determination to follow her husband into battle during World War 2 ( To War with Whitaker ). Other volumes in this series don’t have quite the same glamour but provide invaluable accounts of growing up in wartime London, for instance (V S Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door ). Or learning traditional farming, complete with horse-drawn implements such...