Authors Electric

The UK government is currently pushing ahead with a policy to give staff the right to switch off outside normal working hours. Whether you agree with this policy or not, I believe it addresses a much bigger issue that is slowly but surely imprisoning us all in a virtual world of artificial intelligence. There is a general assumption, especially among the internet generation, that we are all online 24/7, ready to dance to someone else's tune at a moment's notice, with no real life of our own. Whether we are having 'fun' online, or we're there for 'work' - and I use those terms loosely, since they are not separate entities - we are still in danger of becoming slaves to the machine. Jaron Lanier's 2018 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now  explains in frighteningly clear terms the ways in which these platforms are manipulating our behaviour and changing us as human beings. When you consider he published this book before the...

This winter we've had one storm after another, each wilder than the last, and often combined with heavy rain (the Hollywood type where they throw buckets at windows so you can really see it on screen). But spring has arrived in Devon this week with trees everywhere bursting into pink and white blossoms in preparation for a summer of fruit. Blossom can be seen in its full glory at  National Trust properties  around the country, with several events planned to show the flowers at their best (see link for details). Even a walk through your local town might treat you to a show - or, on a windy day, maybe a shower? - of delicate petals from the trees in urban parks and gardens. Cherry blossom, in particular, is beautiful at this time of year, and is celebrated across Japan as Hanami  or "flower-viewing" - a long tradition dating back to the first century, when the emperor and his court would party under the flowering trees and write poetry as an aristocratic pastime. Hanami - M...

My magical cover quest for  Spellfall began back in 2000. In those days, publishers took care of everything except the writing. They took my manuscript (this book was originally written on a typewriter!), edited it, proofread, formatted, typeset, commissioned the artwork for the cover and sent the resulting book to the printer. They also did most of the publicity, secured reviews and started my book on its journey from warehouse to bookshop, where it could make its way into the hands of my eager readers... provided they liked the cover. Because, no matter how brilliant your story or your editor or your publicist, most of your wonderful words remain hidden inside that cover, and somehow you have to persuade a potential reader to pick your book (from among the hundreds on offer) and open it to see what lies within. I loved my publisher's first cover for Spellfall, and thankfully so did my readers because the hardcover sold out and the paperback went on to sell well, too. SPELLFALL (...

Maybe it's a post-pandemic desire for escape from my own four walls, but I find myself increasingly drawn to TV series such as Kate Humble's Escape to the Farm,  and Ben Fogle's  New Lives in the Wild.  These series build on the formula of old favourites like Escape to the Country , where home buyers (with normally healthy budgets) seek an idyllic country pile as an antidote to urban living. But they go a step further, in that they feature a whole lifestyle change that ties in with a desire to protect the planet and its wildlife, and the people featured are not always those you would expect. I was particularly fascinated by a recent New Lives in the Wild episode, where presenter Ben Fogle stays with Lynx, who once lived alone with only Stone Age technology, and is currently setting up a community project to "rewild" humans called Lithica. https://lithica-rewilding-humans.org/ The aim of this project seems to be to secure large areas with natural resources where p...

January Blues in my 'rich and famous' author days. January always seems the wrong time of the year for making resolutions, let alone keeping them. It's dark, it's cold, it's usually wet. Christmas has been and gone, and drained the bank account on its way out. The pretty lights and baubles have been packed away in the loft. All I really want to do is curl up in bed under the duvet with the cat and emerge sometime around April, when the spring flowers are in bloom, or perhaps take off skiing in the Alps like I used to do back in the heady days when my books were in the shops, before Brexit fears messed with the exchange rates. But since this is my posting day, and I'm only dreaming of the Alps this year, I've emerged from hibernation for a few hours to tell you about my 2017 resolutions. Or three of them, anyway. Resolution One I 'closed' my personal blog  Reclusive Muse  at the end of December (you can still read the posts, but you can't...

This month, I bought a car for the first time in ages, trading my faithful 13 year old Renault Clio in part exchange for an eco-friendly zero road tax three year old Peugeot 107. The whole process has in the meantime moved online, so there is no signing and posting off various coloured parts of the V5 logbook, no queuing at the Post Office clutching your MOT and insurance documents to buy a pretty paper tax disc to display on your windscreen, no real MOT certificate even, although you do still get a printed confirmation from the test station. You don't need any of the paper documents any more. It's all there on a computer somewhere in the vaults of the DVLA, and changes are done instantly online. You can even check the tax and MOT status of any car you fancy on the DVLA website by entering the registration and make... which could become quite a hobby if you live on the kind of road I do, with all sorts of vehicles passing up and down at every hour of the day and night. It...