Authors Electric

  Say you're writing a novel that's whipping along when you find yourself at a narrative block: a small but critical section--maybe just five to ten pages--must take place in a small town that you have no way to get to. You can't believe your rotten luck. The town is just eighty miles away and though you don't drive yourself, surely you can there by train, city bus, Greyhound bus, Greyline Tour bus. No such luck. Alright, then, what about Uber or Lyft? Well, they charge $150 each way. And if you have to spend the night, when all you want is a day trip, throw in hotel and maybe pet-sitting fare.  I found myself in precisely the same situation as I reached the home stretch of my WIP. I'd done a ton of research on Tombstone, the setting for a short scene. And Alex Shaw, a good FB friend and a terrific thriller writer, has recommended Google Earth to get the layout of any place and picture streets and buildings. Another friend, Cathy Geha, send me a link for an airport ...

It’s always interesting going to see a place that inspired a book – but to have inspired a whole genre? Consequently, I’m not really sure what I expected from Romania. It wasn’t the axe-throwing (at which I was surprisingly good). It wasn’t the bear hide (Romania has the largest area of unspoilt forest in Europe). It wasn’t the wonderful food, where, however hard we tried, we couldn’t spend more than £20 per head on dinner – including drinks. The beer is really good, so good that I didn’t even get around to trying the wine. The ingredients are mainly organic from the surrounding countryside, and the cheese is exceptional. There are forests here; mountains, storks, swallows, and bears forsaking the reserves and begging for sandwiches at the side of the road… English is widely spoken, and the people are friendly and helpful. But of course, we were there mainly to visit castles.       Transylvania is, historically, the north-western province of Romania...

I'm going to assume, for the sake of argument, that everyone else is as knackered as I am after Christmas. I didn't get much of a break, because I had some urgent writing jobs to finish (damn you, Buster Crabb!), some very large plates of Christmas pudden to consume (damn you, Father Christmouse), and the most appalling chest, throat and nose and ears infection which I assumed was terminal and everybody else cruelly categorised as man flu. (Damn the lot of you; it's a pity I didn't die. That [might] have wiped the smiles off...) Any road up, here I am, just out of me sick bed, struggling manfully to carry on, and worrying about me tax return. Does nobody care about me? Jan Stoker Funny you should say that, because maybe someone does. Or then again, maybe not. You be the judge. It was Wilf, possibly the most eccentric of my many eccentric sons, who is studying in Glasgow, but claimed to have got me the most original Christmas present of all time. What's mor...

Are you sure it's only a figment of the imagination? A gorgeous botanical drawing of a Triffid by Bryan Poole for the Science Fiction Classics (1998) Dr Seuss allegedly invented the word ‘nerd’. Lewis Carroll gave us Jabberwocks, slithy toves and vorpal blades.  And no dinner service is complete without a runcible spoon, courtesy of Edward Lear. Everyone has heard of robots - a word popularized by Karel Capek in 1920, although he credited his brother Josef with actually inventing it. Following the discovery of a newly discovered particle called a positron, Isaac Asimov provided his robots with ‘positronic’ brains to help give the stories a more scientific feel, even though he admitted himself that it was a bit of spoofery. It was catchy, sounded right, and stuck, and has been used ever since by other writers - not to mention being incorporated into the names of any number of companies: even non-nerds will have come across the word. Personally, my fa...

The problem with writing a best seller is that then the pressure really is on to follow it up. Some authors do succeed: the seventh Harry Potter book reportedly had sales of 11 million during the first 24 hours, beating book six by 2 million sales. The series has come to an end, but eyes are once again on J K Rowling this month, with her first adult book due out on the 27 th.   Can’t say I’d like to be in her shoes as there are doubtless going to be a lot of people out there hoping to see her fail, and I suspect there will be a lot who run it down, regardless of its quality. Yes, trying to follow up a best seller must be a tough task. While Rowling has kept on writing and each of her books so far has outsold the previous one, some authors become literary one hit wonders - Wuthering Heights and Black Beauty spring to mind, although to be fair their authors had little chance for a second crack of the whip:   Anna Sewell died five months after publication of her masterp...