Authors Electric

In the olden days, when typewriters and carbon copies and sending everything off by post was the way things were done, getting an agent was comparatively easy. It wasn’t something you could do by simply pressing a computer key; it took time, effort, nice plastic folders and a lot of typewriter ribbons. Not as many people bothered. I sent three short stories off to an agent, and was taken on straight away. She wanted me to write a book and so, full of confidence and the conviction that I could do something really different I went for speculative fiction, and my main character was an intelligent vegetable that could move and was used as a form of transport. I probably had some sort of plot, but I can’t remember it now. Astonishingly, she didn’t like it. I didn’t learn my lesson because, many years later, although I’d had a lot of short stories published and several radio plays broadcast I was still trying to do something radical. That time I set it 5 million years in the future; evolutio...

There are so many faces of the Buddha that it's more than a bit silly when somebody gets in your face about one: the beaming, Christ-like pacifist. And when critics condemn works of art that are false to the face they prefer...things grow worse. For the Buddha has so many faces. Second only to the PPS (Perfectly Passive Saint) is the PPA (Playful Party Animal). There are also images of the Angry Buddha, reminding us that Christ himself flew into a rage at one temple: Even the Buddha acknowledged the humanity of anger: And it should be obvious that not all Buddhists are Perfectly Passive, as this image attests: And these: Recently, though, I was taken to task for a short but graphic passage in my first piece of flash fiction. My antihero had learned just enough martial arts to deal with a thug on the street--ultimately learning that he knew a lot more than he thought. The short-short was character-driven, with an inevitable path to the end. Yet a dear ...