Authors Electric

I had in mind to write something cheerful for the first day of 2024 because, heaven knows, there’s so much horror in the world right now and some counterbalance is desperately needed – and I will, bear with me – but some sad news arriving just before Christmas must take precedence.  Clare Weiner, friend and fellow Authors Electric blogger, died suddenly and unexpectedly on 7th December. Hard to believe that the author of a bubbly blogpost on the joys of the Art Shop in Oxford on 22 November could be gone, just like that, less than 3 weeks later.  Farewell Fifteen by Mari Howard Clare was one of those people whose creativity expressed itself in more ways than one. Writing as Mari Howard , she was about to launch Farewell Fifteen, book 3 in her Mullins family saga that pits scientific curiosity against traditional religious faith. She was also a poet, a painter and a photographer whose nature shots revealed a closely observing eye and strong sense of design. I first got to know...

Are you a plotter or a pantser? This question is not infrequently found in online writers groups. Spike, the dictionary cat... It’s one I had never thought about until I joined the rather diverse community of a couple of online writing groups. One was pretty useful, the other maybe less so... There I soon learned how many of us humans decide at a really young age that, contrary to what used to be the memes about racing drivers, explorers, even sports stars or nurses, what captivates the imagination of the young child, sometimes even under the age of learning to read, is to be a writer! This particular career had never occurred to me: surely writers were elevated people such as Beatrix Potter, Arthur Ransome, the Brontë sisters, the slightly risqué Lynne Reid Banks, the more conventional Anne Tyler, and of course whoever it was who wrote Winnie the Pooh? Of course having a mind stuffed full of this and that diverse content and ideas, and having attended university rather than art sc...

Another from (soft) science writing? Liminality : I stared at this word, wondering whether I’d seen it before, and what it meant. Was it actually a mistake, for something I could imagine: ‘luminality’ ? Luminality made sense of a kind: the writer probably meant whatever possessed this quality in spades — it illumined, or lit, things, rooms, extremely well. I then returned to my normal self and understood: liminality was the name of an Easter art exhibition which I’d recently contributed to, about the ‘liminal’ or in-between time between, for example, career or job changes, between taking exams and receiving your degree results, and in this particular case — this Easter exhibition — the Saturday between Good Friday, the Crucifixion, and Easter Sunday, the Resurrection… ‘Liminal’ — a somewhat poetic word — has entered popular use rather recently (it was 11 times more frequent in 2019 than in 1980). What I was reading used its ‘ality’ noun ‘liminality’ (10 times more frequent in 2019 than...

Desk and tools! Some writers say ‘I always wanted to write’ and they can point to reading out to the class a story they had written, aged about six. My stories were always drawings, but always ‘narrative’ drawings, as the A-level art teacher described them. Writing, as such, evolved much later, after school, after university.   My stories come straight from my interest in people, their motivations, their underlying cultural beliefs, what they want from life. School is a microcosm of society and it’s where aged five, I first realised the enormous differences between me and the other children. Why, for example, do some kids bunch together as a group in the Wendy House, and then disallow any others to join them? It seems some of us arrive at   school to discover we attended the “wrong” nursery! What makes kids think “us and you” style? Why does someone come behind and pinch you, or kick you under the table in class? So, I became fascinated by people and observed them, trying to f...

  Murder in the Highlands: a Sophie Sayers Cozy Mystery by Debbie Young. p/b Boldwood 9.99 / Kindle 2023   A Perfectly Good Man by Patrick Gale p/b 4th Estate 2012 It’s said that writers should read widely. Over Easter, I’ve been reading in two very different genres, but both stories are set in a village and take advantage of the resulting restricted cast of characters. Cosy mystery, often, if not always, takes place in a lovely quiet village, and is solved by a female protagonist, who is an amateur sleuth. For a writer who has lived in a beautiful Cotswold village for at least half her life, it’s the obvious choice. Author Debbie Young has created a wonderfully wide-eyed young female sleuth, Sophie, a new arrival in her cottage home, and a complete contrast to Miss Marple. And this village boasts something rare – a real bookshop! Quite how Hector, the young man who owns and runs it, made ends meet before Sophie arrived is unclear, but nowadays, she’s not only his shop assis...

Summer term, the mid 1970s. Two small girls who’ve reached the top of the village primary school, lie on their stomachs at the back of a large Victorian house, staring down into a basement room. The house, suitably converted, is the local GP surgery, the basement, one of the consulting rooms. Jenny has brought her soon-to-be stepsister Daisy here to view the place where her mother (who’ll soon be Daisy’s stepmother), works. They watch, full of curiosity, as Jenny's mother examines a young woman, whom they recognise as a shop assistant from the local town. Until, discovered by the receptionist, they are roundly told off… This passage was written as the opener to a story which takes up these two characters some years later. Jenny is one of the central players in a complex story involving the two girls in some risky occurrences, a medical mystery, and romance. At the time, it seemed to fit perfectly as the reader’s introduction to several central characters, giving a portrait of Jenny...

Ritual -- what does this mean to you? Rituals can be traditional, religious, political: think of all the rituals we love (maybe the family time-honoured way to do Passover or Christmas -- those little add-ones which are especially ‘ours’ woven into or onto our religious or traditional festival practice. Our favourite way to celebrate family achievements such as anniversaries or graduations -- even publishing a first book.)   Rituals have honoured the arriving, mating, passing, process as far   back as -- well, as far back as human life can be traced. In ritual, we as humans find satisfaction, celebration, closure. In a known ritual, we find satisfaction or comfort. So when locked down by the pandemic, or even beyond that, for those of us who need to be a bit more careful as we move back into the ‘normal’ world again, ritual is much missed. We haven’t celebrated, or honoured, important life events of family and friends along with our circle of family and friends.   In the ...

Speckled Wood “As writers, as a group, readers of this blog take words and their meanings seriously." Life in the world beyond books, blogs, and articles, however, demonstrates that large numbers of people don’t. Take the heading ‘NATURE RESERVE’ on a notice: is this a place set aside to provide a safe and suitable habitat for wildlife, native plants, trees, maybe a wetland area?   A location where a handful of rare species have been seen to hang out? Even the slow worms in our 7-hectare local nature reserve are counted to make sure they are doing okay.   Or is it, as a runner recently put it, ‘just a place for everyone, and dog-walking…’ As fiction writers, we’re in the business of creating both environment and inhabitants, which will include inhabitants who don’t think like ourselves, and environments we’d find strange, hostile, uncanny, as well as beautiful, welcoming, or exciting. Possibly more often than not these environments will indeed be in the negative, at least for...

  Imagine: We are at a party – the grown up sort, colloquially, sometimes referred to as a ‘stand up and shout’. Maybe it is a party for our school graduation year, now many moons away… whatever, it is a party for educated professionals and their (present) partners, so some degree of an embarrassing questions may be expected. ‘As a writer’ (and probably in the company now of many others who have published books) the questions you ’ re asked  might go like this: From a friend who kept in touch in our forties, when we each began doing stuff we had wanted to, but hadn’t’ yet because of   family commitments: ‘And are   you still writing?’ Well now… what does this question really mean?   Is it ‘ Are you still plodding on with that first novel of yours, now at page 1,047, yet nowhere near finished and with no hope of publication or the Booker Prize?’ Or, ‘I suppose you keep trying to interest a publisher, but those rejection letters just keep coming through your door?...