Authors Electric

First it's ME ME ME, then a plea for more deserving cases, being helped by the amazing Mark Frankland, who I've written about before. He helps run a charity in Dumfries called First Base, and they need cash. They help people - mainly ex-servicemen - to survive  and now they need help to survive themselves.  MARK WRITES: One donation stands out of course. £5000 from Mark Jardine. Unbelievable generosity. I am pretty sure Mark won't want me to write much about this. He's not that kind of guy. Well, tough. Mark is a funeral director and all too often over the last thirteen years he has buried clients of ours. Average age? Maybe thirty. How? The usual. Drug overdoses. Or the gradual physical disintegration Class A's bring to the party. Or the slow inexorable drip, drip poisoning that is alcoholism. Or suicide when life has just gotten way too dark. Or the sharp end of the violence that stalks to streets of addiction. When young people die from drink,...

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...

There’s a lot of agonizing, in a quiet way, involved in being a writer. Although I wasn’t fooled by Julia Jones’s non-claim to be in an ice storm in Antarctica a fair few people were, apparently, and agonized about whether it made them foolish gulls, or Julia a sort of naughty troll (The infantilisation of language in the age of social media is another story) for “kidding” them, even inadvertently. Others of us agonise (note the s this time; who can guess what a computer’s going to do from one sentence to the next?) about completely different things, some serious (real life) some to do with the mysteries of our “trade.” A couple of blogs ago I remember worrying about the ethics of altering new e-editions of already published books just because I thought some of the stuff I’d written was baloney, or maybe rather clumsy or whatever. Good golly, I pondered, in the long watches of the Arctic night while Julia kept herself amused with a frozen hand of virtual Scrabble, do I have an...