Authors Electric

I suspect that most, probably all, of the other Authors Electric either don’t watch TV at all or concentrate on programmes devoted to culture, the arts and serious discussions of crucial social issues. I imagine them sitting back on a Charles Eames chair, sipping a glass of Château Pétrus and enjoying a serialisation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on the latest Bang and Olufsen. My own diet, on the other hand, is predominantly of football, rugby, cricket and golf viewed from a Scrabble-named IKEA chair as I scoff a tub of peanut butter ice cream. A Charles Eames Chair Fine, it’s a very popular, quite addictive medium with highly professional writers, actors, presenters, producers and the rest who cater for almost all tastes. Even the despised commercials show levels of creative and professional excellence way beyond those of some blockbuster movies. But I really don’t like what it’s done with the notion of ‘reality’. I know it’s a cliché, but one of the reasons is t...

Last month, Ann Evans wrote  an interesting and knowledgeable blog  about her experiences of collaborative writing. By chance, its timing coincided with the appearance of a short story which I co-wrote with Eden Baylee, a Canadian writer with whom I’ve already co-written 3 other stories. Our combined efforts were written to be read by us on R B Wood’s Word Count Podcast .  The picture prompt for our story I’m choosing this as the subject of this month’s blog because each time we’ve written together, the results have been very satisfying to both of us and I think it’s an exercise that’s well worth trying. I’ve written before about how fictional characters seem to act autonomously and how those in my books often surprise me by seeming to take directions which have nothing to do with me. In our collaborations, they behave in the same way, but with the added twist that, even though I may have created  one, given him/her a specific identity, and sent him/...

The man himself I’m a Flaubert bore. I often mention him. It’s both a hangover from when I used to lecture on French literature (that was my day job and they paid me for it. Amazing.) and it’s because his writing is so deceptive and so challenging. This is a composite of two blogs I wrote on my website a few years ago after reading Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale. It’s a fascinating read about adulterous goings-on (or maybe not) in Victorian England. I was reading it on my Kindle and seemed to be getting to the end but was a bit puzzled to see that the percentage indicator showed that I was barely halfway through it. The reason for this was that the second half of the book is a reproduction of the famous translation of Madame Bovary by Eleanor Aveling-Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl. The author had included it because Emma Bovary was also an adulterous Victorian wife. (But then, apparently, so was Eleanor.) Anyway, I read a few passages of the text and the tr...