Authors Electric

January, named for Janus the two-faced god: the traditional time to look back and look forward. For me, he can close his eyes on 2023, which wasn’t the best year by a long chalk. We had bereavements of a particularly painful kind – the sudden and unexpected deaths of very dear friends we had shared most of our lives with, who died within days of each other. Then there were various ‘bits dropping off’ – old age galloping on apace!  Sonnet: Old Age I saw you from a distance in those days The days of carefree, self-regarding youth The days when ‘how I want it’ stood for truth Your world unfocussed in my shortened gaze   What were false teeth, what walking sticks, grey hair? What was a ‘span’ of three-score years and ten? Beyond a fleeting frisson now and then Your presence was ignored: not my affair.   But since I have long passed the given span My vision is corrected, no short sight Can help me to avoid your company You’re here now. First you crawl...

Like many writers, I made up a random name for my publishing website when I self-published my first ebook, Done & Dusted .  It all started in a slow, meandering way when I discovered that The Guardian were going to make a book out of their Saturday magazine Space Solves advice columns . The copyright to my contributions was mine but they had the right to republish as well. I made enquiries as to whether I'd be getting paid. The answer was vague. I hopped up and down a bit in that old, pre-ebook, smallfry-being-ignored-author way that used to be all too common and got my then-agent onto it and all that. It didn't matter in the end, the book was cancelled. But by then I had thought well, if they're going to, so can I. I learnt, by trial and (much) error how to format and, for less than a tenner, bought a Mr Site easy peasy build your own website kit . This included a built-in shop which linked to PayPal and sent customers their ebook automatically, plus a domain na...