Authors Electric

Write what you know is the maxim often bandied about at workshops for wannabe best-selling authors. Read in the genre that you want to write. Write in the genre that you read. Base your fiction upon your knowledge and experience. If - IF - we accept that premise then can a man write successfully from a female point of view, and vice versa? The answer, of course, is yes. But only if that author can immerse himself in the character and speak convincingly on their behalf. Shameless plug time:  It's easy to be shameless when what you're plugging is actually someone else's work. The Demented Lady Detectives' Club by Jim Williams is a cozy mystery written from a female point of view. To pull off something like this needs a lifetime's experience of the fairer sex and Jim, in all fairness, is as old as Methuselah so if anyone can do it he's the man. I have nothing else to add except the description of the book. In the pretty Devonshire town of Dartcross an ...

The Chernobyl disaster of 26 April 1986 is imprinted on the memory of everyone who lived through that time and continues to be known as one of the World's worst nuclear accidents. The Cold War had long threatened the planet with a nuclear cataclysm but Chernobyl surprised and appalled the population of Earth. An author with a knack for prophesy had written a novel based around a nuclear power accident in Russia several months before the Chernobyl disaster occurred. Farewell to Russia by Richard Hugo (a.k.a. Jim Williams) described a technically very different scenario to Chernobyl, with an even more disastrous potential outcome. But the point Williams made was poignant:   "...there remains a fundamental similarity in that both disasters have their origins in the way that the communist system operated. The Soviet Union was a rickety slovenly place behind its sinister façade and the circumstances of the imaginary disaster at Sokolskoye and the real disaster at Chernobyl s...

Warning: this blog post contains diabolical and excruciating similes - like a man who grows long black moustaches and greases them into twirls to make himself look more evil, whereas they just make him look like a lion tamer.           Ah, anthologies. The Frankenstein of the book world. Someone’s torso, a leg, an arm, all stitched together and with a bolt through the neck from the editor. Oh, don’t forget the head, and other parts.           My first anthology foray was a piece in our writing college collection Original Sins . That title was original in the way a fat man in a bright orange shirt is individual at a party attended by lots of other people in bright orange shirts, except the other people are all slim.           I’m not a short story writer, I’m a novelist, and my contribution was a cheat in that it was the first chapter from my (at ...

About five years ago the depressing odds of mainstream publication were clearly explained to me (the following “facts and figures” are plucked from memory and this was just before the real advent of e-publishing). If your submission letter to a literary agent is one of the handful picked out of several thousand they receive each year, if your manuscript is considered worth taking on, if the agent manages to secure a publishing deal, then any advance you will receive from the publisher will be unlikely to run to more than a few grand (unless you’re the Next Big Thing!) Writing novels isn’t a get rich quick scheme. Don’t give up the day job (so say people who’ve read my books). When a new title hits the shelves it has a few weeks to make an impact and a share of the sales proceeds will be offset against your advance. If the book stops selling before the advance is paid off then it will have failed to earn out and that’s the end of the road for that book. Bookshops will...