Authors Electric

It seems we've all become obsessed with having thousands of Friends. And it's not hard to grow obsessed when the system feeds the mania. You've barely opened your account when the deluge begins: Friendship requests from strangers who don't know the first thing about you--or care. They hope to sell you their own books or plots of land in Katmandu or phone sex if you're generous and swear you can land them a date with Bill Kirton, Peter Leyland or, dare they hope, John Logan. Even so, though the smarter part of you knows most of your 5000 Friends are utterly in it to win it--surely at least a few hundred will buy what you're selling...remember your birthday...or enjoy a ridiculous pun. But recently I concluded that, for me at any rate, FB's heartless algorithm was whipping my poor tired butt. Though I'd pruned my list from 3000 to 1000, almost none of my posts made their way into the Feed. Fewer than two dozen names responded to my posts. And, of that numb...

Say we all contain two sides--the Impractical and the Practical--and they're seldom evenly balanced.    And they're never more out of whack than they are with writers. From the get-go the pressure's on to give the P's the upper hand: good grades lead to better schools which pave the way to better homes, cars, marriages, credit scores, job advancement, etc. And the debates grow shorter and shorter between such staid P's and wild writerly I's like sexual adventure, wanderlust, wild living, bucking the Establishment, etc. From Byron to Pushkin to Hemingway to Mailer and on and on and on, wild and crazy role models call to us like Sirens. Self-destructive lifestyles still make for boffo Post Mortem book sales and movie tie-ins. But the publishing industry's changed now. And more than ever IQ and PQ are on everybody's minds. Wild men and women are far less in demand. The powers that be demand higher IQs: media savvy, Facebook presence, fanatical convention at...

  No. no, Austin Powers! I don't mean shake your booty, I mean move your butt--as in relocate from coast to coast, state to state, possibly country to country. Lord knows, I've done them all for a grand total of some 30 moves. So you can imagine my consternation, as an expert on the subject, when I found myself hamstrung and befuddled in the middle of  a move: from Seattle to Tucson, Arizona.  With just three months to go before D-Day in August, and with a strong foundation already in place, my head had started spinning from thoughts of the puzzles I couldn't complete:   --How, on a limited budget, could I afford a professional mover and a junk remover?   --How could I adapt to the changes since 2014, when I moved to Seattle with only a steamer trunk and four boxes? Amtrak will no longer handle a trunk--or allow checked luggage for relocation. Plus, in the past eight years, I've acquired a slew of possessions I value--not the least of them being new books. ...

Img-Eleanor Spiess-Ferris/ Ds-Roger Carpenter Perhaps this will sound gushy to the prolific masters of mystery novels among my distinguished colleagues here at Authors Electric . But I can't help being over the moon at the moment -- and deserving of a pause to enjoy! I reached another book publishing milepost the other day --  creating a cover for my latest book, putting production on it's final leg towards release, promotion, and, I hope, sales. It's a kick no matter how many books I've published, no matter how many candles on my author's cake. You can't judge a book by its cover. but the cover can get us to buy one, often as not. It sets the tone, particularly when it comes to fiction. It gives us a taste.  The best ones intrigue, tease, whisper compelling secrets and become an icon for the novel, its sequels and adaptations. Sometimes it's clever, morphing typography that tells the story, for example, Joey Hi's design for Lauren Beukes' Zoo City ....

I’m naturally anxious to remind the august membership of Authors Electric that I’m still a keen follower of the group’s comings and goings so I’ve decided to use one of my occasional guest visits to help prolong the relentless gaiety of the Christmas and New Year observations by offering a little light-hearted challenge designed specifically for members' tastes and talents. In fact, it’s a variation on one I published several years ago by way of response to a Facebook posting. Facebook is a strange place for all sorts of reasons – some good, some less so. Just by answering a few questions, one can, for example, find out really useful things, such as which 18th century politician, Renaissance painter, Jane Austen character, or medieval landlord one most resembles in terms of one’s susceptibility to certain medical conditions. Other queries help one decide whether, temperamentally, one is closer to a porcupine, a swallow-tailed butterfly, or a haddock. Or there’s the simple process...

  ‘You have been a grate riter…’ So begins the message on a card from my granddaughter which I've kept and treasure. She made it quite a long time ago to welcome me on a visit to her and her parents. The greeting didn’t then go on to analyse my opus or offer any exegetical criticism, constructive or otherwise, so back then I couldn’t really ask her to elucidate her choice of tense, but I found it interesting. ‘You have been’ doesn’t have the negative implications of   ‘You were’. ‘You were’ means you’re no longer whatever it is, as in ‘You were a grate riter but now you’re crap’. However, ‘have been’ still does give you the feeling that it needs to be qualified in some way. You expect it to be followed by ‘but’, as in ‘You have been a grate riter but you need to pay more attention to your use of the imperfect subjunctive’. Playing with tenses is great (or grate). There’s a very active sequence in Flaubert’s Salammbô where leaders of the mercenary armies get together and o...

It’s probably a form of cheating but I’m going to open this October blog with exactly the same formulation I used last month. However, I do have what I think is a good reason for it. The blog (not the reason) begins like this: ‘For this month’s blog I had thought of conveying my despair, anger and profound sadness at the appalling inhumanity, cynicism, failures, and uncaring responses of those in power to such devastating news on all fronts’. In September I meant it, but it was also an excuse for offering what I claimed would be a little ‘light relief’ from the prevailing mayhem. Since then, however, the 'despair, anger and sadness' have been further compounded at a much more intense level by the details of the ordeal undergone by Sarah Everard at the hands of a serving policeman. Not only that but since he abducted, raped and murdered her, 81 more women in the UK have been killed, probably by men, and new statistics reveal that only 2% of reported rapes in the UK end in a pros...

For this month’s blog I had thought of conveying my despair, anger and profound sadness at the appalling inhumanity, cynicism, failures, and uncaring responses of those in power to such devastating news on all fronts. As part of my solution to many of the problems, I also thought of proposing an amendment to whatever laws govern elections that, as well as allowing us to elect candidates, would give us the option of comprehensibly preventing them altogether. But rather than compound the prevailing misery, I eventually reasoned that I ought to try to counteract it with some light relief. I hope this may provide a little. Regular visitors to Authors Electric  clearly have an interest in writing of all sorts. If they also happen (or want)  to be writers themselves, they may be looking for hints, inspirations, encouragements. If that's the case for you, you’ve come to the right place. To begin with, consider this: It is, of course, the signature of our greatest writer. But look at ...

I want to share an experience of no apparent import which has, nonetheless, proved to have a lot of personal significance. Many years ago, in a junk/antiques shop in Edinburgh, I bought a bundle of twelve old notebooks. They were some of the personal diaries of a lady called Joanna Hutchison, kept meticulously by her over the years from 1889 to 1921. I was fascinated to get to know whatever they revealed about the writer, so I learned to decipher her tiny writing and read through each one. It took several weeks and the personality they revealed left me with an even greater curiosity about her. Since then, they have sat undisturbed on the top shelf of one of my bookcases. Then, some weeks ago, a chance reference during a regular weekly online meeting with my five siblings reminded me of the diaries and, knowing the impressive research skills of my youngest sister, Lesley Taylor, I asked whether she could shed any further light on the mystery of Ms Hutchison, of whom I had only the f...

 To begin with: a disclaimer. I was mulling over ideas for topics for this contribution and first put finger to keyboard the day that Andrew Crofts’ New Stages of Life appeared here on the 27 th of last month. Serendipitously (or otherwise) while the topic I chose is somewhat related to Andrew’s, my thesis (NB ‘thesis’ = pretentious word for ‘stuff’) and ‘conclusion’ (NB ‘conclusion’ = the point at which it’ll stop) are not. Part of the reason may be that my response to Andrew’s current ‘grandfather to three’ status is simply to note that I am the eldest of 3 sisters and 2 brothers, the youngest of whom is already a great-grandmother of one. Thus dotage permits me to get away with most things and, anyway, there’s no connection whatsoever between our separate contributions. But, partly, like Andrew's, mine is also about age. I’ll start way back and to avoid overly embarrassing anyone, mainly myself, I’ll dress it up in semi-linguistic stuff. First, though, a (marginally relev...

 I know I’ve already used the title word as part of a previous blog, but recently, the phenomenon has recurred quite strikingly and so I think it’s worth stressing as a useful writing tool. Not that it’s something one can control – such as hitting the right keys, choosing a winning strapline, making sure one’s characters remain consistent, etc. – but it’s important to recognise and exploit it when it happens. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going all mystical, conjuring up spirits, relying on getting access to umpteen alternative dimensions or whatever, I’m simply recognising as a fact that, when researching and writing fiction, ‘real’ information can be much more than mere content. Recently, rather than being content to sip my Horlicks, prune the roses, do the odd bit of carving and wonder whether I should feel fortunate or damned to have survived long enough to endure the current woeful crop of nonentities and/or rogues who ‘lead’ us, I’ve responded to the suggestion of a few fri...