Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.   Firstly, may I wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. Secondly, may I hope you receive many wonderful books as presents.   One of the joys of the post-Christmas and pre-New Year period is having more chances to curl up on the sofa with a good book. I make the most of this. My Christmas reading consists of books I receive on the big day (these always jump up my To Be Read pile) plus I catch up on writing magazines.    In the run up to Christmas I take in a number of related stories usually via film. To my mind, the best rendering of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is The Muppet Christmas Carol. Sir Michael Caine is superb in that. After that, comes the Patrick Stewart version.  Hogfather by the much missed Sir Terry Pratchett is the Discworld’s answer to Christmas and the story is a cracking thriller. Who is trying to get rid of the Hogfather and why and can Death, assisted by h...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. I don’t write many seasonal stories. One exception is now when I write festive flash fiction. Sometimes I get ideas for festive tales during the summer so will write them up ready to send later. Festive flash is lighthearted and I’ve had some broadcast on an internet radio station. I usually finish my weekly column for an online magazine with a festive flash roundup and share a story. All fun to do (and I hope for others to read).  On the reading side, I ensure I watch and/or read Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, Discworld’s equivalent to Christmas.   Naturally Dickens’ fabulous work, A Christmas Carol , is on the agenda though usually in the form of the best film version ever made - The Muppet Christmas Carol . Yes!   Michael Caine plays it straight as Scrooge and genuinely comes across as sinister. The Muppets are true to the book - they’ve just added some songs (good ones too, I’m fond of the...

I've just read John's 'Rage of the Fleas' blog and feel almost inhibited from writing any blog at all this month!  The chasm between the brilliant and the workaday is going to be rather marked. No matter. Here we go. An aspect of this wonderful new world of Createspace and its lovely-looking paperbacks which seem to come from nowhere is the possibility of 'bookmaking', which Lynne hinted at a few days ago and which I hadn't quite appreciated until I got hooked on the whole Createspace process. It's a temptation which could be satisfied by producing ebooks but which somehow isn't. Like most writers, I suppose, I have a scrapbox full of stories which haven't been published. Some were written for projects which publishers accepted and then axed half-way through even though they'd already paid me (who says publishers can't be generous benefactors?) Some were rejected outright - often deservedly. Some of these were quite beyond any attem...