Authors Electric

Imagine living under an all-powerful leader who has gone insane. One act of madness follows another, until even his closest advisers and friends begin to realise he is not who they thought he was when he ascended to power. No, I'm not talking about a 21st century leader - however tempting the comparison! I am talking about Rome in the 1st century, when we were merely a barbaric outpost known as Britannia, and the Emperor Caligula was in charge. Caligula was a nickname, given to the emperor when he was a small boy and accompanied his father on campaign wearing miniature war sandals. It means 'Little Boots', which sounds rather sweet to me, and maybe he was sweet at that age. But, after he ascended the throne in AD 37, something changed. Acts of madness and cruelty abounded, until Caligula's reign as emperor ended with his assassination in AD 41 and his uncle Claudius took over. It was a turbulent period in Rome, giving rise to many rumours, including one that Caligula ma...

It's taken me a long time to realise this, but now that I've been 'writing with the expectation of earning money' for over 15 years, it's increasingly obvious that a creative career is not the kind of career you can plan in a linear fashion from your first stumbling steps until some time in the hazy distance when you get your pension... that is, starting on the lower rung of an imaginary ladder and climbing to the top, where you hit the dizzy heights of your chosen career path, buy yourself a big house and a yacht, and lord it over all the minions eagerly scrambling up after you on the same worn old rungs. Ladder of Divine Ascent About the only time the ladder image might apply to a fiction-writing career is in the beginning, before you publish your first book, when there is (or at least used to be) an accepted path to publication. Many industry professionals will still tell you that it's the only ladder available, and you'd better start climbing it i...