Authors Electric

 Jo Carroll cannot write her post this month. So here's a golden oldie from 2019.  ______________________________________________________________________________   I've begun another novel. I love the idea (I'm not sharing that yet). I love the research - I've wallowed in books, taken myself off to tramp up hills and down a coal mine. My notebook overflows with lovely characters (and some not so lovely). So why is it so hard to write? I have distractions - we all have distractions. I prevaricate - thousands of us prevaricate but still get words down. I make myself sit at the computer almost every day. For the first time I've given myself word count targets. When I wrote  The Planter's Daughter  I had no need of word count targets. My head was full and the words flowed. The first draft was messy of course, but that was fine. I had something to work with. And that's what keeps me going now. I dare not reread, not yet - in case the extent of the...

 A daughter took me to Highclere House recently - a belated birthday present. You might know it as the setting for Downton Abbey. The family no longer live there: it is mostly used for weddings and as a place to stay for the hunting, shooting and racing fraternity (it's not far from Newbury racecourse). Open days are rare, and crowded - although that is carefully controlled in these Covid days. The house, like most stately piles, is impressive. And visitors linger over well-known scenes - this is where Maggie Smith would sit, this is the main bedroom, these are the passages ... you get the idea. I confess I've watched it only once and so was in a minority of one when it came to admiring all the TV references.  And then, the house duly drooled over, there is a second exhibition, in the cellars. An afterthought, if you like, only for those who might be interested. About Lord Cardigan - That Lord Cardigan - the Lord Cardigan who funded Howard Carter and enabled the expeditions th...

I’ve always known that libraries are important. I’ve retweeted posts that insist they are kept open, liked FB pages that support those that are struggling. Like millions of us, I recall many happy hours in my childhood spent in libraries, and they kept me sane when I was without money to buy any books at all. But it wasn’t until I volunteered for my local library that I truly realised just how important they are. I feel strongly that everyone who works in libraries should be paid. But cut after cut after cut means that many libraries can only function with volunteers. Should the money ever be found, I’ll be the first to move aside so someone can have a job. Meanwhile, I help keep the show on the road. I love it. It’s ‘only’ shelving - but it’s oddly satisfying taking a heavy trolley full of books and finding a home for them all. But it’s while I’m tucking the latest Katie Fforde back into place that I become aware that the library does much more than lend books. The t...

Is everyone else super-person? I can only speak for myself, but I’m struggling to fit everything in. There’s stuff I have to do, like basic cooking and eating and cleaning and having a shower. I know it’s tedious but it’s necessary and takes, let’s say, an hour and a half each day. And sometimes I have to go to the market for fruit and vegetables, or nip round the corner to the supermarket for milk and bread and coffee - another half an hour. If I’m to stay healthy, I need regular exercise - my exercise of choice is walking in the open air. If the weather is kind I can stride beside the canal, breath sweet air and hear the birds sing. That’s another hour. (If the weather is rubbish, I go for a swim - by the time I’ve gone to the pool, changed, swum, showered, changed again, and walked home, there’s not much change out of an hour and a half).  Then, I’m told I need to practise mindfulness - given the sensory soup of walking, and then the bombardment of useful and usele...

I’m doing a short, online course. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll not tell you which one - I may review it when it’s done, but right now we’re in the thick of it and it’s too soon for reflections. (Just in case any fellow-participants should drop by this blog, I never name or shame anyone! In fact I don’t write about anyone without their permission.) No, the reason I’m raising it here is to highlight the reason I’m doing the course in the first place. I’m playing with another novel - it’s simmered for long enough and I must either write the wretched thing or give up and start something else.  But I’m finding this beginning really hard. Not the first sentence - I’ve got that. What’s hard is settling into the obsession that comes with writing anything as big as a novel. Resistance takes the form of: additional research (including all the spin-offs, reading everything that is interesting but irrelevant), writing character monologues so I can get to know them better, then...

We live in grim times. Those of us in the UK are faced with a government busy eating itself, unable to manage the competing demands of the negotiations that will sever us from Europe, the consequences of austerity that sees the NHS at breaking point and poverty spiralling out of control, and a blatantly racist discussion about who belongs here and who doesn’t. Our environment is drowning in plastic. Even our weather is non-compliant. (It’s not for me to comment on presidential difficulties in America).  One solution to this madness - distracting the electorate from things that really matter by bombing a country thousands of miles away.  People (by people I mean readers) need fiction more than ever. Fiction that not only addresses the deal and meaningful, but also provides some light relief, entertainment, brain-space away from all the guff that fills the newspapers and leaps at us from the internet. What a responsibility for us writers! How wonderful it is to be ...

Well, if it’s not bought, wrapped, or posted by now it never will be. For the whole of the ‘Christian’ world is shutting down for a few days to celebrate Christmas. (The inverted comma reflects my own view that this now bears little relation to any religious festival and is now a homage to capitalism.) For months, the press and social media have been full of stuff we must buy. Aunt Nellie and Uncle Jack will be bereft if you fail to spend a week’s wages on something that will sit at the back of a cupboard until they get round to taking it to the charity shop. No home is complete without emptying the supermarket of mince pies and sausage rolls and sprouts. You thought you could re-use last year’s tinsel? Pah! Flashing fairy lights are essential. And yet, as the Big Day approaches, the tone of newspapers changes. We now have to learn how to spend a whole day with Aunt Nellie and Uncle Jack (who will fart unmercifully after a sprout or two) and not want to slap them. Families, w...

I’m possibly speaking only for myself here - but when I read a blog or a newspaper online I read the title and the opening argument and then decide I’ve got the gist of it and decide if I want to skim from there or if it’s going to repay the time investment to read it thoroughly. These days more and more pieces are skimmed - it’s so easy to get the general idea and then click on something else. Many online newspapers make the process easier by confusing sentences with paragraphs - everything is divided into three-line chunks. Facebook posts - if someone has something deep and meaningful to say, they need to grab me in the first couple of sentences.  And then I sit down to read a real book. I curl up on the sofa with tea (or wine). I have an hour or two to wallow in real print on real paper. But after half an hour I’m restless - it’s time to move on to something else. A few years ago I could read the clock round and move only when I needed a wee. I sit down to research som...

I don’t have an answer. But anyone glancing at social media during this past few weeks can’t have missed the sheer numbers posting under the #metoo hashtag - each one disclosing how she, too, has experienced sexual harassment or assault. I don’t know any women who are surprised by the numbers. It’s just something we’ve lived with for decades and felt ashamed to speak about.  But no longer. So what are the implications for us as writers? This experience is clearly ubiquitous and yet I can’t think of any novel that includes an acknowledgement that everyday harassment is just something we’ve learned to live with. There are, of course, films and novels that look at rape. I have a problem with rape being seen as a subject for entertainment - I recall seeing Sleeping with the Enemy, many years ago, and cringing when the assault lasted for hours and then the woman spent most of the rest of the film terrified that the man would find her, and all that happened to him was a qui...

Last week I spent a few days looking after someone who is terminally ill so her partner could have a break.  It was a quiet, reflective few days - for both of us. She spent a lot of time talking about her working life, the friends she has made and the legacy she leaves behind in her field. (I'll not tell you more than that as it would make her identifiable and I don't have her permission). She is - rightly - hugely proud of everything she has achieved and has been able to live long enough to see that systems are in place for her to be remembered, and celebrated, for all she has done. She has no children. I have no idea if there were decisions behind that or if it is happenstance - though it did make me wonder if her need to talk about her working life would have been as urgent if she had children and maybe grandchildren to pass her baton to. Which set me wondering. As writers, we will - inevitably in this digital age - leave our words behind. But, when stripped aw...

When I first flirted with the idea of publishing, I was told that I needed an online presence - beginning with a blog. Well, that was easy - I'd begun a blog when I first went travelling, not for any literary reason but simply to keep in touch with friends and family at home. So extending that to write about writing wasn't so hard. Then - that wasn't enough. I needed a website. So I set about teaching myself HTML, wrote my own website and, with a click of the mouse, it was live. It's a bit amateur, I know, but I can amend it myself, which feels important to me. ( www.jocarroll.co.uk ) Then - that wasn't enough. I had to be on Twitter. That was where all the fun was, where people could set up a chatty platform and leap from there into promoting books. So I joined Twitter, spent some time getting my head round it, and it was, for a while, fun. Though I've no idea if it sold any books. Then - that wasn't enough. I had join to Facebook. I'd res...

We live in dangerous times. Not that you need telling - unless you’ve decided that the news is just too terrible to watch any more. I know someone who rations her news-watching to once a day, as she finds it too distressing. I get that - if we allow ourselves to think about the full horror of everything that is going on (not just here in the west but all over the world) we can easily by paralysed by it. But where does that leave us as writers? I present this as a dilemma - I have no solutions. For if we are going to write about the fires and the terrorist attacks and the political shenanigans and the civil wars and floods and droughts … where do we begin? Is it possible to write about all this in a way that is new, and different, and enables the reader to think about things differently? Are there any new words for horror, or trauma, or tragedy? Is it possible to tell the story of one man or woman in the middle of all this and let that stand for all the others - when each stor...

I've been home from Malawi for a few weeks now, and a little ebook about my travels is taking shape. At the same time, I've been trying to market a novel. And this has got me thinking. Although the novel was inspired by a vignette I found in the museum in Hokitika, New Zealand, most of it is made up. I had to find characters in my own head. I went through the long process of getting to know them all, how they spoke, why they did what they did. It's a long unravelling - and I loved it. I love the unpicking of a character and throwing them into new places - I have notebooks full of scribbles as I let each character find his or her voice, and only then did I know them well enough to drop them into the novel. Then came the task of inviting the reader to go through a comparable process - of meeting each character, unpicking why they do what they do, even responding on an emotional level. (Looking back, I think there is still one character that I don't know well eno...

I'm home from Malawi, and have begun the process of teasing stories out of the scribbles in my notebooks. For there are stories - of generous, welcoming people who spend three rainy months of the year working their socks off to grow food, and the rest of the time eking out whatever they have grown. There are stories of people starting schools under trees. There are stories of people trying to provide health care with no running water. There are stories off illegal logging and people trying to plant new trees. There are stories of aid agencies, with their baseline studies and conferences. There are stories of lions and hippos and fish eagles. So you can see why I might be struggling to shape this into some sort of coherence that can hold together in a narrative. Bear with me, I'll get there. Meanwhile, I think these three pictures illustrate something of my dilemmas. This is the M1, previously known as the Great North Road. It is the main road north from Lilongwe,...

I'm in Malawi - lucky me!  I'll try not to go on about the scenery or the weather (or the snakes and leopards ...) As ever, I scribble in my notebook all the time I am away. I filled one exercise book (narrow lined) in the first ten days I here. I notice as much as I can, the big things and the little things and the strange things, and I reflect on how I feel about them all. The plan, when I get home, is to go through all this twaddle and see if I can find a story. For instance: my guide is called Everlasting. Surely his name a story in itself. Lilongwe, the capital, is divided into sections each with a prescribed function and housing density. Those in low density areas live behind walls and security, with gardens and swimming pools, and shop in one of the new supermarkets. The high density areas are alive with markets and people and bicycles. Is this the story? I stayed in Luwawa, where there is a huge pine plantation (planted to feed for a paper mill but abandoned) a...

You know how everything happens at once sometimes? Of course you do. It's Christmas Eve, and if you've five minutes to read blogs, I'm impressed. And Life doesn't stop because it's Christmas. People get ill, babies arrive, kids fall off their bikes, grandmas complain about their knees in the cold. The weather can be kind, or angry, or simply perverse. Central heating breaks down. Many are working their socks off so that others can spend the time with their families. Some young people have exams when they go back to school. You get the idea. So it was a pretty silly time for me to launch a novel. But having spent forever researching and writing and editing and generally faffing about every word, it is now Finished! So why not wait until the New Year to launch it? Because I'm off to Malawi for six weeks in January, and who knows what will fill my hours when I get back. So it was publish now and be damned. Of course you don't have time to fill you...

It's that time of year again. The nights are drawing in and our thoughts are turning towards the winter. Which means my thoughts are turning towards a winter trip. Where shall I go this year? I've long since abandoned any soul-searching about why I go away in the winter, leaving the rest of you in the dark and the cold. Just as I've long since stopped trying to work out why I write. I just do. And researching the trip has writing parallels as well. Firstly, to choose a continent: I want to go to Africa as it's the only continent apart from Antarctica that I've not visited on my own. (Would I explore a new genre for the same reason? Possibly.) Africa is huge. So I need to narrow things down a bit. Firstly: I'll stick to sub-Saharan Africa. That's still huge. So the next exclusion is anywhere obviously unsafe. In spite of all the hoo-ha, a trawl through the Foreign Office website and a couple of travel forums show that that most of Africa is fairly safe...

We all make them, don’t we? In that glorious rush to get words on paper fingers get muddled and our wisdom can emerge as gobbledegook. So we edit, edit, edit – honing our wonderful sentences until they say exactly what we want them to mean. Except sometimes they don’t. In our heads they are wonderful, because we see what we think we’ve written. But the reality can be wobbling tenses, repeated words words, missing punctuation so one sentence runs into another and the whole thing makes no sense at all and even speellings that hide in the sentence undergrowth and confuse here and hear. I know, you’ve read the thing six hundred times and are convinced that this time it’s perfect. And then along comes Nellie (probably aged about six, with a reading age of eight) and spots twelve mistakes in the first paragraph and it’s all you can do not to chew your own arm off with frustration because YOU ARE MEANT TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS STUFF! So – this is a plea – how do you spo...

          The 29th day of the month, and the introduction of a new page for Authors Electric.           The 30th - and the 31st, if there is one - have always been given over to Guest Posters, and that will continue, under the very able management of Debbie Bennett. Debbie, Guest Wrangler           The 29th was, until recently, Hywela Lyn's day - but we're sad to say that Hywela has had to resign, because her other commitments make it impossible to keep up with Authors Electric. Blogging is time consuming - thinking of a new subject every month, writing it, rewriting it, finding pictures, rewriting it... (Because writers obsessively rewrite: that's what we do.)           So we well understand Hywela's reasons for leaving us, and we wish her well for the future.         ...