Authors Electric

First it's ME ME ME, then a plea for more deserving cases, being helped by the amazing Mark Frankland, who I've written about before. He helps run a charity in Dumfries called First Base, and they need cash. They help people - mainly ex-servicemen - to survive  and now they need help to survive themselves.  MARK WRITES: One donation stands out of course. £5000 from Mark Jardine. Unbelievable generosity. I am pretty sure Mark won't want me to write much about this. He's not that kind of guy. Well, tough. Mark is a funeral director and all too often over the last thirteen years he has buried clients of ours. Average age? Maybe thirty. How? The usual. Drug overdoses. Or the gradual physical disintegration Class A's bring to the party. Or the slow inexorable drip, drip poisoning that is alcoholism. Or suicide when life has just gotten way too dark. Or the sharp end of the violence that stalks to streets of addiction. When young people die from drink,...

Every month, to my surprise, I suddenly find I have this blog to write and I haven't got a clue. This month, what we writers laughingly call the pressure is even greater than usual, because I'm flying off to Berlin in a day or two, and I have other vital things to finish. Aw! It's me I feel sorry for… Sometimes, though, the suffering of other people is brought home with a bang. Julia Jones’s gruelling and frighteningly honest piece on the 9 th was a case in point. It was hard to read, and harder to digest. I left a comment because I wanted to show some solidarity, but I had not a clue what to say. Julia is wonderful, one of those people who makes one feel inadequate. I can only thank her for it. Good things can happen though. Northern Lights near Oldham Another terrific writer who has this effect on me is Mark Frankland - and he also runs a charity in Dumfries for victims of the military life. Not people who have been attacked or injured by the fo...

I had an interesting virtual conversation with John Logan the other day, which I’d love to refer to but can’t find in my new technology nightmare. I’m running three computers at the moment – big desktop Mac (never liked Big Macs, fries or no fries), which is old and slow and infuriating, a laptop Mac, which is good but prone to sulking now and then, and losing things I haven’t yet saved, and a PC laptop the bloke over the road gave me. This one’s good, but VERY old, and throws enormous wobblies if the document I’m working on is more than twitter length. The doc I’m working on at the moment is about 300 pages. Serves me right. John and I were conversing about nasty reviews on Amazon and why they happen. I’d had a couple of humdingers, which appeared to have a slightly orchestrated tang to them, and I think he was impressed (can’t check, sadly – see above!). But his idea was to embrace them with love and affection, because if they went on it would make an interesting...