Authors Electric

" The more things change, the more they stay the same," French journalist  Alphonse Karr wrote in an 1849 column.  Change is a constant of life, usually by increments in culture and politics, occasionally accelerated. This is one of those times. Like most Americans, this past week my inamorata, the noted artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris , and I watched seemingly earthshaking events unfold daily. July 2024 shifted .  It feels like 1968, a year of assassinations and upheaval that shaped our personal lives along with politics. Inspired by Don Delill o's masterful novel  Underworld  mingling characters' inner lives with the Cold War, I made the first six months of 1968 a protagonist in my memoirist novella, " Our Own Kind , " featured in my 2018 collection: " Sometimes Ridiculous ."     Eleanor and I are old enough to remember moments when we experienced political change as personal, not just as a spectator sport in Washington.  Karr's cynical quote...

  I've always been ambivalent about having cut my teeth in the cigar-hazed city room of the Los Angeles Times , then a 1960s metropolitan newspaper with more editorial lineage than any other nationwide. That was back in the days when "stop-the-presses" could be taken literally! I can never figure out if that initiation by printers' ink sharpened or dulled me as a latter-day author. My early years as a journalist, followed by decades of magazine freelancing and sitting behind an editor's desk certainly instilled me with deadline discipline and fetishes for facts, factoids and specificity. I've always feared my nose would grow if I didn't get whatever I was writing right. It was always a balancing act on the high wire of deadlines. Self-doubt and existential angst be damned! Get it right, or leave it out. Get your best in on time.  But no dithering. To succeed, the working journalist must become tougher than the average literary bear.  Mary Ford - author of...

Good titles often whisper sweet nothings in our ears to keep us on track as we work on our books while letting readers know what to expect. A color can remind us of the mood or tone that we hope to sustain. John D. MacDonald knew all about that: The Turquoise Lament, Darker Than Amber , etc. The title of Lawrence Sanders's breakthrough book The Anderson Tapes alerted readers to the ingenious structure of the book and the author to his mission to stay on track with that POV tack. His two best-selling series, the Deadly Sins and the Commandments divided the offering into gritty police procedurals and shorter, lighter mysteries while his McNally mysteries offered comic froth. Ira Levin on the other hand had a title in Rosemary's Baby that helped him fix his focus on realistic details of Rosemary's pregnancy and the birthing to help ground the far-out horror in his mind and ours. These are all Type 1--or what I would call Onesie titles.               ...

My writing class I've been running a writing class every Monday for the last few years, so constantly giving out tips and advice to my students – or friends, as I tend to think of them these days, as they've been coming to classes for so long. Each week, I like to share a writing tip thought up by other writers, including some given by our own team here on Authors Electric. Some of you knowledgeable people kindly provided some 'words of wisdom' for my 'Become a Writer' guide – which I'm currently bringing up to date – so I'll be after you again, no doubt! But for this blog, I thought I'd share a few writing tips and quotes, that I've discovered or been given over the years. Hope you enjoy them. The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing. Ken MacLeod (Scottish science-fiction writer). Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil ...

Author Lewis Perdue A long-time friend from my San Francisco magazine days, author Lewis Perdue, recently began serializing his latest novel, The Nassau Directives, online, as a work-in-progress. The premise, typical of Perdue's techno-Machiavellian plots, involves a rogue drug-war agency cabal to poison millions of addicts as the “final solution” to narco-crime. The tag line reads: “A serial thriller from NY Times bestselling author Lewis Perdue. Even Lew doesn't yet know how it ends.” I perked up at the news – a high-wire digital writing act to be sure, just the kind of creative enterprise that my colleagues here at Authors Electric might relish, if not already practice (or think of practicing) in some form or another, myself included. Lew comes the closest to being a contemporary Renaissance man that I know. Quick, loquacious, energetic, a gourmet who is always down-to-earth, he never makes a big deal of being accomplished in technology, science, history, oenology...