Authors Electric

                                                                                                                  Sefton Park, Liverpool 1970 Looking Forward, Looking Back   As you may know I am a frequent Twitter user and now that it has changed to X, despite some misgivings, I have continued to interact the with the site. So it was that during December I became the follower of another Twitter user, Beci, who had posted there a recording of a poem by Charles Lamb, poet and essayist, who had lived from 1775-1834. I knew very little about Lamb apart from the fact that he had written  Tales from Shakespeare together with his sister, a book designed to make the plays more accessible to children - I h...

  The world never tires of telling us that we're not Real Writers now and we never will be.  In the beginning, we all were Too Young...when we dreamed of writing books like the GOATs we loved. Then, when we'd written scores of stories or poems and had finally chiseled our own voice and style, the rejections began coming in. We encountered a chorus of form rejections convincing us we weren't Real Writers. And the charge was echoed by everyone we met: if unpublished, we couldn't be Real. In time, against all odds, we actually sold a book to a traditional publisher or to a small press. Either way, the initial rush and sense of validation crashed: the book had a limited press run, appeared on no bookstore shelves, gathered almost no reviews, and sold seven copies. The next book did not better, leading our publisher and agent to conclude they'd been wrong: we weren't Real after all. We were dumped. But even if our books enjoyed limited genre success, strangers lost i...