Authors Electric

I’ve finally made the jump from what was formally Twitter to Threads. I do feel it is putting all my eggs in one big Meta basket, but I quite like the way it cross posts between platforms. We could debate the merits or downsides of social media all day, but as writers it is one of the best ways to build and connect with potential readers, which in turn hopefully leads to some sales, maybe reviews and thereby more sales… this writing lark is such a merry-go-round, when does anyone find time to write? I’ll address that one next month. I have tried to fill my threads timeline with mostly writers and creatives, I’m not following so many pollical accounts. All is calm and soothing – ish. You get the odd thread of how do you pronounce a certain word and how it freaks Americans out the way we say some things in the UK. I confess I tumble down a few of those rabbit holes, but somehow, they go in small circles. I get that sense of déjà vu and remind myself this is immaterial in the grand scheme...

Either because of  an inevitable slowing down that comes with age, or because of various seasonal factors, it has taken me far longer than I wanted to finish the edits for my latest novel. Of course I hope it's just the latter, and in fact I do have a full set of excuses to hand, ranging from having to collate and send out the paperwork for an AGM held inexplicably in mid-December, to the largest radiator in the house having sprung a leak about the same time, just as the weather turned colder and we had a series of winter storms. Because of the resulting low temperatures downstairs in our house I have had to spend more time upstairs than usual, and as a result of this I've almost never had the right computer in the right place with all the notebooks, diaries etc that I rely on to keep myself on track. At the time of writing the heating engineers have just replaced the radiator with a very nice new one so I am hoping that's the signal for my brain to come out of hibernation,...

 An old friend and I have had season tickets for the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh for as long as I can remember - somewhere between twenty and thirty years, with an inevitable break at the height of Covid lockdowns. Even then the Lyceum was one of the theatres that produced online content,  including a Christmas show filmed on their own stage but without a live audience during one of the early lockdowns, which must have been very hard for the actors but was a treat for the viewers at a time when they were trapped at home and starved of entertainment. We've also experienced a break from going to the theatre together during this past eight months or so, thanks to my hip injury and some further illnesses for both of us. Neither of us is as steady on our feet as we were before, and actually getting to the theatre is quite an adventure at the moment, so I thought going out to the Christmas show at the Lyceum might get us back into the mood so that we could begin to make use of...

  For as long as I can recall, I've been someone who likes to rush at things, trying to fit too much into the time and only getting it all done by a ruthless system of prioritisation, so that eating biscuits (for instance) always gets done and sweeping up the crumbs never does!   My mother was the same, only worse, and often quoted her own mother's motto, 'Better to wear out than rust out.' I suspect I am wearing out physically at a somewhat faster rate than she did, but that's beside the point. Inside view of a props cupboard where some things do rust out over the years, while others seem to be destined to appear in almost every show. The point is that I've recently had to modify my approach to writing in order to get anything finished, and I'm currently reflecting on whether this might actually be a good thing. Ever since I first took part in NaNoWriMo in 2006, I seem to have been operating according to its rules every time I sit down to write. This is a g...

  For reasons I won't go into here, I have been preoccupied lately with the logistics of writing. None of the options I've tried to date has been entirely satisfactory, but some have been much better than others, so I thought I would review them here in case anybody else lands in a similar boat to mine - though I very much hope they won't as I happened to be working on three different novels when I unexpectedly landed in a hospital bed, and it was very frustrating not to be able to continue with my usual writing routine. The worst thing was that I had just finished the draft of one of the novels and made notes for the edit. One of the first things I asked the family to bring in for me was a notebook, and eventually I wrote several chapters of the project I had intended to start on that month in it. Writing by hand is not ideal for me, to put it mildly. It isn't a case of using a special fountain pen and inscribing carefully chosen words in an elegant copperplate hand, b...

Years ago, when I was a teenager, I happened to see a short snippet in a newspaper from someone in Japan who was looking for a British pen-pal. I was a very prolific letter-writer in these teenage, pre-email days. Hard to remember the time when people could even communicate without having social media at their fingertips. Though it was much more exciting to get an actual letter from somewhere overseas, with different stamps on it – my brother collected stamps – and a different style of handwriting, than it is to receive an email. I suppose for a while I collected pen-pals the way my brother collected stamps. I had several pen-pals from inside the UK, and during my teens I also acquired pen-pals in the USA, Russia, Pakistan and Germany as well as in Japan. I have to say the Americans were the most fun to write to – although we may be divided by a common language, it was easier to write in the knowledge that they would probably understand most of what you wrote and vice versa, and yet th...

Not long before my recent unplanned trip to hospital via the sea wall at Silverknowes (see picture), I completed a short series of sessions which involved writing 5 very short stories in 5 days in a genre I’d never consciously attempted before – creative non-fiction. It did occur to me that maybe my family history account would ideally fall into that category, though as the 5 days progressed, I realised this seemed like a different thing altogether. Most of the stories I saw copied to the associated Facebook group as the week progressed seemed to be based on memoir, sometimes with a lot of emotion and soul-searching, though as far as I know these are not essential to the genre. But perhaps that was because the writing prompts steered us towards this kind of thing. There was a theme for each of the 100-word stories. The word count was very precise – I realised afterwards that I had written a number of Drabbles of that same length, but they were fiction, which I found much easier. I ...

Following a temporary planning meltdown towards the end of last year, New Year’s Eve found me hard at work on my 2023 writing plan. I’ve long given up making New Year resolutions, but if you are looking for one that sometimes works, you could do worse than use an old one of mine: ‘I won't say I can’t be bothered’. I think it’s the specificity of this that makes it work, as it’s much easier to stick to not saying it than it is not to feel it. So instead of resolutions I always make a writing plan for the year. Last year’s was oddly regimented, with a page of notes about what kind of things I would write, and then a second page listing the months of the year with a sentence or two about the project I’d be working on during each month. It was this second page that turned out to be fatally flawed, perhaps not surprisingly, so this year I’m starting with just the general outline, now with only vague ranges of months pencilled in against the writing tasks, which in any case are more or...

 Today (I'm writing this on the 29th of November), I realised it was almost December. It shouldn't have come as a surprise, considering that quite a lot of social media friends and some city centres started putting up their decorations a few weeks ago, but as usual I've been writing my November novel for NaNoWriMo and lost track of time. I had even forgotten until today to write down my plan for November. It was only when I got out the notebook I keep my writing plans in to write my December plan that I found there was nothing for November. I think what caused this oversight was that, quite unusually for me, I hadn't been able to decide what to write for NaNoWriMo until the end of October. This was obvious when I looked back at October's plan, in which I had written, as a kind of second priority for that month:  'Consider options for NaNo - Max Falconer 4? Calico Cat development? Complete Heiresses 3 - or is it really Brighton Heirs 5?' As November loomed ev...

Something happened to me recently that gave me a terrible fright. (No, this doesn't have anything to do with Hallowe'en!) I completely lost my hearing overnight. I had caught a really bad cold, possibly as a divine judgement for enjoying a performance of 'The Book of Mormon' at Edinburgh Playhouse or possibly because I'd spent an afternoon playing with my grandson and some bug he had picked up at nursery had breached my defences. At first it was just a normal cold, and then I woke up three nights in a row with earache and had to sit upright in a chair for a couple of hours each time until I was comfortable enough to lie down again. After the third night of earache, I woke up and found I couldn't hear anything. Only the previous day I'd been able to hear music, and audiobooks, and the sound on television, and then suddenly I couldn't. I couldn't even ring the doctor to ask for an appointment, so my son had to do it for me, and then he had to come with...

 August has been a strange month, which has traditionally been the case in Edinburgh anyway with its multiplicity of summer festivals. This year I managed not to go to any of the official Festival or Fringe shows, but I did get to a Book Festival session which was excellent and also gave me an idea of what the 'new' Book Festival venue is like (it's very nice).  I had started the month intending to finish a novel in my historical series, but something made me change my mind, and instead I shelved it at 40,000 words and started work on the 25th in my mystery series. I wasn't sure what made me do this, although now, a few weeks after my change of mind, I feel it was the right thing to do, because I've taken my series characters up to Highland Perthshire and I wouldn't have wanted to leave it any later than the autumn to do this because of the weather! Also I love Highland Perthshire and ideally I would have gone there myself this year, but after catching something...

 As I write this, it's the last day of June, and despite having signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo in July I feel I can relax for the first time in a while. This wasn't really what I expected when I retired from my day job! There are various reasons why June has been exceptionally busy. The first reason was a self-imposed one, and as usual, it is that I had given myself more writing deadlines than I should have done. I'd been working for some time on creating a coherent longer story out of five connected short stories I wrote during June 2021 as part of a short story challenge. During May I seemed to be nearing the end of this process and had published a mystery novel I'd also been working on, so I signed up both for July's Camp NaNoWriMo and for a new short story challenge this June. This entailed writing a short story every day based on a prompt that arrived by email at around lunchtime every day. It was a bit more flexible than last year's challenge, and occasional...

Edinburgh Castle For some reason lost in the mists of time, or possibly dating from the Scotland Act of 1998, the Scottish census is separate from the one carried out in the rest of the UK, and it is only just in progress as I write - I think the theoretical date was the 20th of March 2022, but there is some leeway about completing the form. I've noticed people complaining about it on Twitter and vowing not to fill it in at all, so it will be interesting to see if they complain more if someone from the census team comes round to their house to try and persuade them to take part, and even more if they are fined for not doing it. As someone whose family history research has benefitted a lot from looking at historic census records, I am fairly happy in principle to fill it in. I wonder how different people's occupations will be in a hundred years' time when researchers might be able to look at the census records of today. Ours are quite a bit different from the occupations men...

As I suppose is the case with many people at the time of writing this, my mind has been taken up with monitoring the news via various sources. There is only so much of the current news footage I can cope with at one time, and I don’t want to comment directly on what’s happening now. However, as I get older my mind tends to wander back to things I had almost forgotten about, and so the other day I found myself remembering a conversation I once had as a teenager in a park in Leningrad (St Petersburg). I was fortunate enough, although perhaps that isn’t the right word for it, to be able to study Russian and German at school instead of the more usual French and/or Latin. I found Russian was much more difficult than German because of all the endings that had to be learnt, which in some cases replaced the need for definite and indefinite articles, and sometimes made prepositions redundant. However I did persevere with it for six years and almost went on to study it at university, but I had...

 It's almost exactly a year since I published an account of my family history - under my real name, of course. It would seem quite odd to write something like that under my pen-name, although now that I come to think of it, a fictitious family history might be more interesting! After doing research on and off for years, I had been meaning to write it up for some time, and it turned out that the best time to do it was just when there was lots of other stuff going on in my life as well as in my writing. Actually I found it oddly relaxing to write non-fiction for a change, though there was a narrative thread running through this book as it was really the story of how I did the research, and I told it in the order the research happened, i.e. back to front in terms of chronology. I published it on Amazon, both electronically and in print, not to sell it to others particularly but to let the rest of the family, and some fairly distant relatives I've met in the course of my research, ...