Authors Electric

It happens to the best of us on both sides of the Pond: we sigh goodbye to our Sexy in time. Then we wonder endlessly how to get it back. Now, of course, in an elegant group like AE we're far more likely to discuss our plumage than our poundage. Nor do we begrudge the few who never lost their Sexy: Tom Wolfe                      Donna Tartt George Bernard Shaw                   Yukio Mishima Still, as some Italian or other once said, I found I'd come to a dark wood. And in that wood I feared the loss of the wild young stallions who'd coursed through my soul. You know, those writing Glory Days: before we find ourselves saddled with rules laid down by addle-brained agents...and fear of rejection or failure. Pay attention. This next part's important:  You may not know your Sexy's gone until it's hit the road. Or as some say in the UK: until it's upped and left ...

It's all in a day's work for the average hack: recycling gore from old movies and books...without any sense of the real pain involved. I, on the other hand, was bitten by a Viper and stabbed over and over and over again while writing Caesar's Ghost. The book features some tactical weapons I'd researched online for months. Was that good enough for the Ghost? Not a chance. The Ghost wanted me to own them. How could the scenes be lifelike if I hadn't actually held these things? Could I even guess at their real power if I hadn't felt their heft and weight? I needed more of that verisimi-something. Well, before I knew it I'd shelled out a small fortune on a slew of lethal 'toys' illegal in many states. And I approached the action scenes with a little more strut in my stylistic walk. Example: Caesar's Ghost features a stun gun and I'd purchased three. Reviews, research and instincts told me that two of the three weren't right. One, desi...

Writers may come in all sizes and shapes...and some shapes are stranger than others. But in the end they all belong in one of two great camps. FIRST CAMP First off, you have the outliners. Their argument is simple: a  book is a journey and you can't get There till you know every Here on the way. P. G.Wodehouse's outlines ran to to 30,000 words and were done on index cards mounted all over the walls. Horror writer John Saul's outlines may reach a hundred pages while John Grisham's run to fifty. Even Tom Wolfe once lamented that one of his books took a decade to write because, with no outline, he found himself lost. And we can be certain that Virgil had an outline for the Aeneid: an epic divided into two parts of six Books each, with each part containing the same number of lines. SECOND CAMP But the other camp is as large and as loud: non-outliners who insist on going with the flow--letting the book, as it were, write itself...sometimes on rolls of paper...

“There is a tide in the affairs of men   Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…”                         - Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3 This may be very true, but it is not quite the kind of tide I have in mind. That said, it may be that all the High Tides source from the same Well-Spring. I can also apportion these Tidal Phases to certain discrete periods in my own reading life. Period One: Aged 11 years and under – it was during this phase, the primary school years, that a great deal of varied material was imbibed, much of it forgotten now, though still present in the subconscious as shadowed form, the great edge of some dark beast’s ear, the looming shoulder of some half-formed presence. This period, for me, was in the 1970s. First, all the Peter and Jane books at school were devoured, from adventures with golden labradors, to sunned...