Authors Electric

  I've always been ambivalent about having cut my teeth in the cigar-hazed city room of the Los Angeles Times , then a 1960s metropolitan newspaper with more editorial lineage than any other nationwide. That was back in the days when "stop-the-presses" could be taken literally! I can never figure out if that initiation by printers' ink sharpened or dulled me as a latter-day author. My early years as a journalist, followed by decades of magazine freelancing and sitting behind an editor's desk certainly instilled me with deadline discipline and fetishes for facts, factoids and specificity. I've always feared my nose would grow if I didn't get whatever I was writing right. It was always a balancing act on the high wire of deadlines. Self-doubt and existential angst be damned! Get it right, or leave it out. Get your best in on time.  But no dithering. To succeed, the working journalist must become tougher than the average literary bear.  Mary Ford - author of...

Being an autodidact, I was not aware until a few weeks ago that Charles Dickens had written five Christmas novellas in the 1840s, not just " A Christmas Carol " - all, he averred, with "a strong moral message."  Most UK schoolchildren probably know the other four as " The Chimes ," " The Cricket on the Hearth, " " The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain " and " The Battle of Life ." Each of them delivers, as Dickens put it, "a strong moral message" and all but the last come with supernatural twist. I came across this jolly factoid cluster while researching an idea for a sequel to my own Christmas novella: " Milagro on 34th Avenue ." That 2015 novella, about which I've written here previously , gives homage to my favourite Christmas movie - Miracle on 34th Street (particularly the 1947 original with Edmund Gwenn, Maureen O'Hara and little Natalie Wood, directed by playwright George Seaton). I ...

 As our worlds have shrunk during the pandemic, the new experiences on which I rely for material is dwindling. The sight of a kingfisher on the river I now know like my back garden, an altercastion in Lidl, hunting down parasol mushrooms on the common, collecting sweet chestnuts from the downs. Biggest parasol mushroom this year All within walking distance, all things I have experienced before. Lidl doesn't change much, other than the designs on the face masks, and the altercations over trolleys - but the common does, the trees are going from green to gold and then to bare branches. Foraging has become more important as anything you can get that avoids the shops is a good idea. It was an excellent blackberry season; fortunately, I still have several tubs of them in the freezer. I made elderflower chanpagne this summer, but that didn't last very long... It's been a good year for sweet chestnuts, too, and they make a great snack whilst watching re-runs of things you last saw ...

The author researching at Riva's Crabhouse on Chicago's Navy Pier  When I get stuck writing, I pace and usually end up in the kitchen. I'm not really hungry. I'm looking for something to satisfy my creative appetite. I poke about cupboards and fridge, playing solitaire amateur Iron Chef  until something mouthwatering comes to mind. I need my improvised dish to be sufficiently challenging and tasty but within my abilities to concoct in an hour or two (I mean, I can't digress all day) -  a steamy aromatic Eggplant Parmigiana or a stir-fried apricot ginger chicken with snow peas will do. I like to vary the menu. I'm no master chef, but I love to cook, mostly, every dish a story that, unlike a novel, you can eat. Dishes go down well in novels too. Anthologist Diana Secker Tesdell highlights the historic theme of feasts and food in her yummy, 2015 compilation of edible literary passages, Stories from the Kitchen .  She includes culinary passages f...

Author Lewis Perdue A long-time friend from my San Francisco magazine days, author Lewis Perdue, recently began serializing his latest novel, The Nassau Directives, online, as a work-in-progress. The premise, typical of Perdue's techno-Machiavellian plots, involves a rogue drug-war agency cabal to poison millions of addicts as the “final solution” to narco-crime. The tag line reads: “A serial thriller from NY Times bestselling author Lewis Perdue. Even Lew doesn't yet know how it ends.” I perked up at the news – a high-wire digital writing act to be sure, just the kind of creative enterprise that my colleagues here at Authors Electric might relish, if not already practice (or think of practicing) in some form or another, myself included. Lew comes the closest to being a contemporary Renaissance man that I know. Quick, loquacious, energetic, a gourmet who is always down-to-earth, he never makes a big deal of being accomplished in technology, science, history, oenology...

A little while ago, I had a Facebook profile picture taken of me holding a pen and a sword – well actually it was a large wedding cake knife, but the message was the same – The pen is mightier than the sword. So I was quite surprised to learn that the person who first came up with that phrase was Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. Or in short, Lord Lytton. This caught my interest as I live in Lord Lytton Avenue. So, deciding to do a little more research on him I found that Edward Bulwer-Lytton was an English novelist, poet, playwright and politician. Born in 1803 he was hugely popular and wrote 27 novels, earning him a considerable fortune. Knebworth House, famous for its rock concerts (I've seen David Bowie and Queen there), was his home. Edward Bulwer-Lytton Through his writing, he came up with a number of phrases which have been turned into cliches, such as the great unwashed, dweller on the threshold, the almighty dollar, as well as the infamous opening lin...

My mind drifted into fantasy land at a very early age, and stayed there, more or less. Like my mother, I’ve never really thought of writing as a proper job, and the highs and lows of earning from it (which for most of us are getting lower all the time) never had much concrete reality. When I needed proper money I did a proper job (or worked on the grotty tabloids at least) until the financial choke-chain eased a bit, and for the rest of it – well, who wants to be rich anyway? Enough is as good as a feast; did any of you ever meet a rich man/woman who was happy? Me neither. Lately, though, my life’s been more grounded in reality, and I haven’t enjoyed it particularly much. People very dear to me and mine are falling gently to pieces, and I’ve been a minor part of the hands-on caring process. It’s made the idea of knocking off another novella or two, or taking much part in Cally Phillips’s Edinburgh ebookfest (both of which I actually want to do) seem a wee bit too much. Despite t...