Authors Electric

Alas, poor Yorick! from Hamlet. By Eugène Delacroix - The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? curid=150167 Now here’s something I never expected.  I knew there had to be a word for a false collective memory of a line in a film or play, famously always slightly misquoted because it sounds right. ‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well,’ for instance, instead of what Shakespeare actually made Hamlet say, which was ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.’ Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca By Trailer screenshot - Casablanca trailer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=1757187 Or, ‘Play it again, Sam,’ which feels much more prosaic than the haunting, ‘Play it, Sam, play it,’ from a dewy-eyed Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca .  So anyway, I googled the phenomenon, of course I did, and you’ll never gue...

This fabulous song by Cream has been in my mind this week, primarily because of the first line of the lyrics, which is the title of this post. I work as an editor, and over the past week have edited a mystery novel, one collection of short stories that are acting as a novel when put together, and five mini pieces from five different authors as part of a small workshop I held, and they were one mystery, two sci-fi/speculative, two memoir/non-fiction. And as part of this week's editing I have encountered a few times what I have come to think of as "the white room," and with that, because that is just how my mind works, the Cream song quickly follows (I do love that song, so maybe any excuse? I mean, those lyrics are great!) Other than containing the white room, the Cream song doesn't actually apply here, but maybe it will help us remember the concept. And perhaps a famous author we have all heard of was also inspired by the Cream song, because she is the correct age to ...

Daisy Ridley's Ophelia swims with the fishes It's a writer's nightmare. You've put everything into a novel based on an idea that you thought was original, only to discover that it's already been done - maybe better, and perhaps famously. How did you overlook it? Just like that, your shiny new bicycle has a flat and you're out there pedaling with no pants on! No matter. Call it "a reimagining" and carry on. Writers have done it for thousands of years, most notably, William Shakespeare, that all time master of tales retold in iambic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet , was already a popular Italian tale when the Bard made it the subject of his masterpiece, as were other most famous plays. He based Hamlet on a very old Danish play entitled "Ur-Hamlet" which in turn was derived from a lengthy, 1200 A.D. compilation of Norse legends written in Latin: Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum, or History of the Danes , telling of the rise and fall of t...

I meet the most interesting people in the course of researching books. Tycho Brahe is one of the most memorable. For example,  I got to know great Danish astronomer Tycho Brae from  researching  Ophelia Risin g . I couldn't resist putting him into the novel and improvising a bit on his biography. Of course, perforce, "real" historical figures become fictionalized soon as they come on stage. The author gets to spin them into all kinds of hybrid narratives, as long as they seem believable. To wit, I wondered: How would Tycho have crossed paths with the Melancholy Dane? Tycho Brae shows up again in  Ophelia Regina , the third and final volume-in-progress of what is to be an Ophelia Trilogy. Now seems a good time to reflect on Brahe's history and the particular twists I gave it in the first novel that I must now adhere to as backstory, like it or not. Ah, what tangled webs we weave. I won't apologize. Shakespeare did it all the time. The Bard even made an obl...

Lately, I've been reading – or I should say, tripping on –  The Beginning of Infinity  [New York, Penguin Group, 2011] by  Oxford theoretical physicist  David Deutsch , also best-selling author of  The Fabric of Reality . Professor Deutsch  speculates that much of what happens in fiction is close to a reality somewhere in the  multiverse . As a writer, I find that comforting, especially when I postulate that Deutsch's projection could just as well apply to the abandoned narratives that litter my garden of forking drafts.       Maybe the happenings in my uncompleted drafts actually occurred in dimensions where momentary universes collapse due to off-kilter physical laws. Not being a mathematician, I can't work out the equations, but this projection might serve me well in offsetting blame for failed drafts. It wasn't me. It was those darn skewed dimensions. Indeed, a draft can seem copacetic one day, and melt off the page w...

          If you're not careful, one of the troubles with preparing books for Kindle is being so preoccupied by making sure the formatting is right, worrying about judging the price, hoping the books look like something you intended when they are published, even sorting out which books you'll subsequently allow to rise from the dead, that you forget about the new writing you should be doing.  And when you remember, the awful thought comes that you may have forgotten how to.  I'll be talking later about which of my o/p books are slated for resurrection: now I want to mention something which came directly from my musings about them and suddenly jerked me into a completely d ifferent frame of mind.           I was looking through an old file in which I'd stored reviews dating from the 70s.  And one of them pulled me up sharply.  It was written in 1984 by one of the great names in...