Authors Electric

I had in mind to write something cheerful for the first day of 2024 because, heaven knows, there’s so much horror in the world right now and some counterbalance is desperately needed – and I will, bear with me – but some sad news arriving just before Christmas must take precedence.  Clare Weiner, friend and fellow Authors Electric blogger, died suddenly and unexpectedly on 7th December. Hard to believe that the author of a bubbly blogpost on the joys of the Art Shop in Oxford on 22 November could be gone, just like that, less than 3 weeks later.  Farewell Fifteen by Mari Howard Clare was one of those people whose creativity expressed itself in more ways than one. Writing as Mari Howard , she was about to launch Farewell Fifteen, book 3 in her Mullins family saga that pits scientific curiosity against traditional religious faith. She was also a poet, a painter and a photographer whose nature shots revealed a closely observing eye and strong sense of design. I first got to know...

The Art Shop: delightfully situated in an old traditional row! Earlier this week I visited our local Art Shop… Why was this significant enough to post on Facebook (my only regular one of ‘ the socials’ )?  Maybe it’s continuity – continuity, like community, is important to human life. In my post, I also told readers that the Art Shop was a very human place. It is. For artists, crafters, sewing and modelling creatives, the art shop is an essential. Its raw materials – paints, canvases, sketchbooks, embroidery thread, pastels, drawing pens – and that essential art-shop smell… remembered from childhood, the Art Shop, with it brown painted outside, and its inner scent of pencils… Noticeably, this art shop post has attracted the longest list of ‘likes’ I can remember having – friends (‘real life’), friends (FB, only), and relatives crowded to endorse the good vibes of of a shop selling artist’s materials... Evidently, all regarding the Art Shop as a humane and satisfying place! So, why ...

Are you a plotter or a pantser? This question is not infrequently found in online writers groups. Spike, the dictionary cat... It’s one I had never thought about until I joined the rather diverse community of a couple of online writing groups. One was pretty useful, the other maybe less so... There I soon learned how many of us humans decide at a really young age that, contrary to what used to be the memes about racing drivers, explorers, even sports stars or nurses, what captivates the imagination of the young child, sometimes even under the age of learning to read, is to be a writer! This particular career had never occurred to me: surely writers were elevated people such as Beatrix Potter, Arthur Ransome, the Brontë sisters, the slightly risqué Lynne Reid Banks, the more conventional Anne Tyler, and of course whoever it was who wrote Winnie the Pooh? Of course having a mind stuffed full of this and that diverse content and ideas, and having attended university rather than art sc...

Desk and tools! Some writers say ‘I always wanted to write’ and they can point to reading out to the class a story they had written, aged about six. My stories were always drawings, but always ‘narrative’ drawings, as the A-level art teacher described them. Writing, as such, evolved much later, after school, after university.   My stories come straight from my interest in people, their motivations, their underlying cultural beliefs, what they want from life. School is a microcosm of society and it’s where aged five, I first realised the enormous differences between me and the other children. Why, for example, do some kids bunch together as a group in the Wendy House, and then disallow any others to join them? It seems some of us arrive at   school to discover we attended the “wrong” nursery! What makes kids think “us and you” style? Why does someone come behind and pinch you, or kick you under the table in class? So, I became fascinated by people and observed them, trying to f...