Authors Electric

Dear Aunty Debbie. I’m so happy!  (utterly deadpan) Why’s that then, Happy Writer?  HW: Because I’ve had an email from a company that’s going to make my book into a film!  AD: That’s amazing news. Which book is that?  HW: The one I put on Amazon last week. The one you told me needed editing and I couldn’t afford an editor, so I published it anyway.  AD: Okaaay. So what will this company do?  HW: Well, they found my book and they must have loved it so much, they told a producer friend who wants to make it into a film.  A D: They just came across it on Amazon?  H W: Yes – isn’t it incredible?  AD: (Totally incredible. As in not remotely credible …)  HW: And they won’t charge me anything.  AD: I’m sure they won’t. Yet. But this is what will happen:  The company’s representative – let’s call him John – will email you a few times, telling you how much they love your book (but oddly never mention anything specific to your story ...

  Over the last few weeks I've been sifting through a pile of short stories written by new, local writers. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first (and the most important) is to provide a critique that will encourage the author and help them improve their story. Secondly, I wondered if there would be any common themes identified which might form the basis of an article. Forty-three stories later (it was all short stories, 3000 words maximum - I am the first to admit I know almost nothing about poetry) there was a clear theme that stood out.   Dialogue tags.   Or rather, an over-enthusiastic approach to them.   I've read more ways to attribute speech recently than I care to think about: (S)he enthused, bemoaned cried, whispered, intoned, breathed, muttered, screamed, laughed, gasped…   I could go on. The point is, none of these options are wrong, when used in moderation. But if every sentence of dialogue has a different tag, it becomes hard to read, and...

I hate typos. I really do. They irritate me beyond belief, distracting me from what I'm reading and making me itch to pick up a red pen or a highlighter. They seem to stand out from the text, thumbing their little fonty noses at me. Naturally, when I proofread my own stuff I go through it very, very carefully. It annoyed me no end when one publisher airily told me, "Don't you worry about correcting typos. We have a very good team who are very good at dealing with that side of things. They are really hot at picking up typos." Dear Reader, they were not. Despite the fact that I corrected all the typos anyway, they not only ignored them, but just for the hell of it added in some entirely new ones. The one that especially made me froth (apart from the change of surname of a Famous Person in the index) was the change from 'Excerpt from a Diary' to 'Exert from a Diary'. Obviously the 'team' the publisher used was a computer spellch...

Anansi - by Lynne Garner It's that time when I look at my previous years sales and try to discover any patterns in said sales. Now as it's also my turn to write a blog post I decided to share some of my 2014 results with you. For the purposes of this blog I've looked at sales from September to December 2014 of my ebooks Anansi the Trickster Spider volume one and volume two  plus the physical book which contains both volumes . The reason it's not the entire year is I didn't upload these books onto Smashwords or create a physical version via CreateSpace until September. Firstly I looked at the sales of these titles as ebooks only. As you can see the Amazon sales dwarf sales from Smashwords. I also noted that on Smashwords my sales were 11%  of the total number of the free sample downloads (which is much higher than I anticipated).       However results become a little more interesting when I add the sales of the physical book. As you can ...

A t school I was voted the guy least likely to tear off his clothes and run into the sea. That’s not actually true. But it could be. I don’t do crazy impulses. I’m the man who holds up the coffee shop queue before ordering the same latte as ever. I use SatNav. On the train. You certainly wouldn’t catch me braving the English Channel in October, without so much as a towel to hand. And yet, on one autumn afternoon several years ago, I did. And I’m still trying to understand why. My wife and I were in Lyme Regis, in Dorset, walking along the sea front. We spotted a commotion in the water. In the midst of a group of swimmers, something dark kept bobbing up. We saw a fin. It was like a scene from Jaws, except the screams were not of terror but delight. Then shouts from around us confirmed it: ‘A dolphin!... A bottlenose dolphin!’ My first fear – that the creature must be in distress, to be so close to the beach – vanished almost at once. The dolphin was clearly reveling in th...

It’s out! My latest poetry collection ALL THAT LIVES , CSI:Poetry of sex, death and pathology, is now on Kindle as an indie, only about £2, as well as in paperback from Red Squirrel Press. So if you fancy dipping a toe into poetry, check out the book, though strangely there is no Amazon category for ‘science poetry about the dying brain, together with funny erotic poetry about post-divorce dating’. Yes there’s dementia and the science of dying, but also humour and joy (much more of that, later!). It follows years of research working closely with neuroscientists, anatomists and pathologists, in various fascinating Writer in Residence posts. (US link here .) I’ve also put my much-acclaimed related poetry installation SLICING THE BRAIN, an AV animated text film exhibited across Europe, onto youtube, in particular so that readers of the book can see the innovative dwindling sequence THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING BRAIN in action. See it here , but in full screen and highest re...

     Writers are often asked where they find their ideas. So to answer that question three of our team - Elizabeth Kay, Karen Bush and Chris Longmuir have got together to share where they find theirs.    Elizabeth Kay - visit website I find my inspiration f rom my travels, no question. Whether it's in Kiev, watching a political demonstration, or swimming in the pool at the foot of the Angel Falls in Venezuela, these are the memories that are the strongest.  It's not just the visual.   In Costa Rica it was the taste of gallo pinto, the smell of wild ginger, the call of the bellbird, the feel of the sand between my toes as I waded across an inlet. These are the details that make stories come alive, and why the written word can be so much more evocative than an image on a TV screen. Costa Rica was the most magical place I had ever visited, which is why I used it as the starting point for my children's fantasy ...

  I'm currently enjoying my first foray into writing science fiction for adults. A s I try to imagine what life will be like a hundred years from now , along with some of the wonderful things that computers m ight be able to do by then, I can't help wondering... who will be the writers of 2112? I' d like to think that people not so very different from ourselves will still be wrestling with characters, plots and dialogue. But I have a strong suspicion that we may have a bit of competition by that time - from electric authors of a different kind. Never, never, never, I hear some of you cry. A computer or a robot will never be able to produce anything that stands up a s a work of literature. At best, a parody, perhaps. S omething written to a formula, contr o lled by strict parameters. Fan fiction? But never, never, anything that might considered original or (heav e n forbid) win a major literary prize. Of course, there could be a market for the type of ...