Authors Electric

Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There  was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts...

As anyone who’s ever bought a stereo system knows – who, after excavating it from several carapaces of polystyrene, and connecting red and black wires to tiny metal jaws, has in exhaustion simply set up the speakers in the corner of the living room, from where the sound is muffled and too far below ear height – there eventually comes a time when you have to make a stand. Boom! Boom! Ah, Independence Day. I remember when that film was released. A friend saw it with me and left the cinema raving that it was the best film he’d ever seen, except possibly for Dirty Harry. So he went to see it again, and came out wailing that it was the  worst  film he’d ever seen. That’s a neat trick for a director to pull off. I’m sure it takes real skill, to engineer enjoyment that is so  in the moment  that it simply cannot be recaptured. I think the Roman poet Catullus made a similar observation, after he went to see Jurassic Park (or it might have been about love or som...