Authors Electric

On Black Wednesday just past, Alex, Kay's granddaughter, wrote a plaintive message on Facebook: Thanks, Donald, for spoiling my birthday. Couldn't be put better! I thought I'd already started my November blog. It was on a subject which, on Wednesday, I suddenly saw as a miserable and insignificant self-regarding piece of triviality and I had neither will nor energy to continue. I may  return to it next month if the present fit wears off in time. I tried to think rationally about the disaster which took place on Tuesday night  and Wednesday morning but couldn't, though I may be on the way to doing it now.  I just wanted to express what I felt. But I didn't have the words. So I turned to poetry - other people's, not only because I can't write the stuff but  because I believe, with Shelley in his A Defence of Poetry , that 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' Why? Because, he memorably says (with the obtrusive ...

Two things to blog about this month, one run-of-the-mill, the other a bit special, which fully deserves the adjective 'inspiring'. First, the ordinary. While I'm sorting out the final draft of   The Nightmares of Invasion, the second in the Bright Sea Dark Graves trilogy, I'm also putting together another collection of short stories, some already published, others new, for my private JOSLIN BOOKS imprint. This is one of the many, many things I like about independent publishing. It's almost like being a poet making a retrospective New and Selected, something it would be really, really foolish to ask a publisher to do unless you are incredibly famous. And to make Createspace paperbacks out of them as well as ebooks gives the whole project a sort of three-dimensional quality, a mark of permanence. Even if nobody buys them, they are still there to be had and that in itself, is a great comfort. So this time I'm taking two already commercially published storie...