Authors Electric

Gone are the days when I could be so into writing a book that I’d be in front of the computer at 6am, eat all my meals there, and go to bed at midnight having written several thousand words. And I’d still be the same weight the following week, without having had any form of exercise whatsoever.  I wrote  The Divide   in three weeks, all 70,000 words of it. It needed editing, obviously, but not as substantially as you might think. I’m 71 now. My 70 th birthday really upset me, and I hated it. On one level I simply couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. I didn’t like 40, but 50 and 60 were fine. But 70? That’s old . So how has ageing affected the way I write? Far more substantially than I might have wished. I get up early, that’s no problem, but there always seem to be so many jobs to do before I can settle down in front of the computer. For an hour at most. Because then it’s time for breakfast and after that, The Walk. Wrist problems rule out a lot of other forms of physical...

The fourth leopard   I am going to be totally self-indulgent with this, as I had a number of comments about the last post, and I’ve recently been a winner in the Exodus travel writing blog competition. I had my first piece of travel writing published in a local newspaper when I was nineteen. I’d been on a Land Rover trip to Morocco, an unusual destination in 1968, and we’d camped in a wadi – just the way my geography teacher had told me you shouldn’t – and after innocently watching a spectacular lightning display in the Atlas mountains and not putting two and two together it flooded in the middle of the night. I didn’t speak up when the campsite was first suggested; when you’re nineteen you always assume your elders know better. We were all okay, but only just, and I’ve carried on camping in dodgy places ever since. It’s addictive.             So. Wild camping in Botswana. Wow. It was one of the most exciting holi...