Authors Electric

I have only known one, for-sure, Russian spy in my life. I keep wondering what he would have had to say on the spreading oil slick of revelations about contacts between Trump minions and Kremlin agents meddling with the 2016 election. He'd very likely have deja vu, given his experiences with the Soviet (now Russian Federation) oligarchy and the KGB (now FSB). It's all in our book, High Treason : Revelations of a Double Agent . I met Vladimir Sakharov in the spring of 1979. His Russian accent - rich as Stroganoff - didn't fit with the name he was using then, Bill Stiller, an alias given him by the CIA, I was to learn. He was supposed to be from West Germany according to his fake dossier. When I got around to asking him how he felt about that, he shrugged stoically. "I keep it to myself. You learn to live with paradox," he said. Barbara Lowenstein , my then New York agent, had given me a phone number and very little else except that it would connect me with a ...

Jan Needle           All writers are different, but all writers want people to read their books, preferably in sufficient quantities to finance the odd bit of high-life (like putting filly con carne on the menu occasionally. Sorry – not my joke, I got it off Facebook.)           Now, some of our AE members are a lot more energetic and knowledgeable about promotion than I am, or ever will be. To name a couple at random – John A.A.Logan and Julia Jones. Follow them for any length of time, and you see two people who are working their socks off at far more than the original grind of writing. They enter competitions, they follow other people’s blogs, they review, they respond to comments, they make comments themselves.           I don’t know John (although I’d like to – I love his writing) and I do know Julia. Love her work, too – and she also has...