Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.   Firstly, may I wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. Secondly, may I hope you receive many wonderful books as presents.   One of the joys of the post-Christmas and pre-New Year period is having more chances to curl up on the sofa with a good book. I make the most of this. My Christmas reading consists of books I receive on the big day (these always jump up my To Be Read pile) plus I catch up on writing magazines.    In the run up to Christmas I take in a number of related stories usually via film. To my mind, the best rendering of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is The Muppet Christmas Carol. Sir Michael Caine is superb in that. After that, comes the Patrick Stewart version.  Hogfather by the much missed Sir Terry Pratchett is the Discworld’s answer to Christmas and the story is a cracking thriller. Who is trying to get rid of the Hogfather and why and can Death, assisted by h...

 Happy New Year! To be honest, it's a phrase I don't say with a huge amount of enthusiasm, especially after the last few years. I remember, as we ticked over into the Twenties, having a good feeling about the new year - 2020. How wrong was I! I've always been inclined to a bit of January blues but the last two have been particularly bad. So, how to beat it this year? Well, to start off with, I have a first draft of my DI Bernie Noel book four to edit. It needs quite a lot of work as well as some research. I also have a deadline of sending it to my editor at the end of February. There are lots of others things I need to do as well to get my head round self-publishing. At at the same time, there's another book idea that's brewing at the back of my mind. I see my stories visually so it sometimes helps to 'cast' my characters. James Norton is my baddie so I'm having no problems thinking about him! In another bid to banish the blues, I'm trying to set up ...

The new year is steadily marching on and I am sure you may have had your fill of New Year posts. So, you may be wondering what on earth I am doing writing another post and where I might be going with this. Let me start by saying, December should have been my last post with Authors Electric and I was planning on handing over my weekly post to a new author. However, during my planning for this coming year I found myself planning posts for my monthly Authors Electric post. I may have thought I was finished with AE but it turns out I was not, which I am actually frightfully excited about. This started with planning and it is planning I want to talk about today.  Usually, when we plan and set out our goals for the year ahead we decide what we want to achieve and what steps need to be taken in order to achieve those goals. Often this means giving up other aspects of our writing and publishing life. I have learnt a valuable lesson during this process, that being I should think carefully a...

Following a temporary planning meltdown towards the end of last year, New Year’s Eve found me hard at work on my 2023 writing plan. I’ve long given up making New Year resolutions, but if you are looking for one that sometimes works, you could do worse than use an old one of mine: ‘I won't say I can’t be bothered’. I think it’s the specificity of this that makes it work, as it’s much easier to stick to not saying it than it is not to feel it. So instead of resolutions I always make a writing plan for the year. Last year’s was oddly regimented, with a page of notes about what kind of things I would write, and then a second page listing the months of the year with a sentence or two about the project I’d be working on during each month. It was this second page that turned out to be fatally flawed, perhaps not surprisingly, so this year I’m starting with just the general outline, now with only vague ranges of months pencilled in against the writing tasks, which in any case are more or...

  When writing the first blog of the year it always leaves me wondering what I should say. As this one falls on the 16th of the month all the usual New Year's Resolutions have been covered and most people are gazing in dismay at the bills from Christmas. Add in the added pressures of COVID (there I said it) and lockdown and it really leaves me wondering - what the heck can I do to make this better. Well, I'm a definite glass half full girl and a great believer in making lemonade from the lemons of life. So, I handed myself a challenge to think about what good has, or could, come out of this as a writer. So let's see what it's like on the bright side.  The first thing that has happened since last March and the first lockdown is that I have had to stay at home. When I say stay at home, I don't just mean inside my house, I mean no travel and all speaking engagements have had to be cancelled. Usually I spend many weeks of the year travelling which I love. However, it me...

As I write this, we have not quite reached the end of the year, and on this morning of 30th December I've just completed the first draft of the novel I've been working on and also the final version of the family history research write-up I've planned to do for a couple of years. There is something unsettling about having finished both these projects at almost the same time, and I have a terrifying vision of the next year stretching out ahead of me as a blank canvas, or a stretch of fresh snow, just fallen and untrodden by any human foot. This has been a whole year of endings. My mother-in-law died in Februrary at an advanced age after a good deal of illness, and my husband died in November, somewhat more unexpectedly but after eighteen months or so of poor health.  I suppose only a writer could compare the blankness of the end of a project to the blankness of losing someone who had been part of her life for the best part of fifty years, but I've found it rather similar....

Happy New Year 2019 I think it was about this time last year, or maybe it was the year before as this is a perennial thing for me, that I made a resolution not to write as much as I had the previous year. This does seem rather a contrary resolution for a writer to make, but it was a response to a kind of pressure I was feeling to rush the next book out instead of taking my time and perhaps producing something better. Assuming it's an either/or choice, that is. Sadly, if it was indeed my 2018 resolution I have driven a coach and horses through it over the past year, at one point even completing and publishing two novels within a couple of weeks of each other. Being over-excited about the impending birth of my first grandchild was really no excuse, I told myself sternly. Actually I had several additional excuses lined up, including the fact that I wanted to enter one of them into the Kindle Storyteller competition which, with a typical lack of forward planning, I had only fou...

It is that time of year when, amid the bustle of Yule planning, we often pause to take stock of our lives; especially in the days leading up to the end of the year when many of us make resolutions for the coming twelve months.   Those of us who embark on these plans do so with every intention of achieving something important to ourselves or to those around us. It might be losing weight or writing that best seller or beating that illness, or perhaps getting (or keeping) that job. Few people set them with the certain knowledge they will fail. Yes, we all have that sneaking suspicion that we may be reaching a little far, yet we wade in nevertheless in the hope that fortune will be on our side. Sometimes we set the bar a little lower with the expectation of attaining an achievable goal and in my experience they are the ones that get broken the fastest. Possibly because they are frivolous, more often because they were never serious objectives in the first place. I recall ...

I have an uneasy relationship with New Year resolutions - and in fact, with New Year in general,  since I can't bring myself to enter into the spirit of it as I feel most Scots are expected to these days, particularly in Edinburgh, the Hogmanay capital of the world. Also, over the years, I've developed a strong feeling that  instead of both Christmas and New Year we should celebrate the solstice, representing as it does the start of the return of daylight to the northern hemisphere. Still, I don't think it's too late to wish anyone reading this a very Happy New Year. It has taken me a while to think of a suitable resolution for this coming year. My most successful resolution of the past was not to say 'I can't be bothered' and in fact this was such a resounding success that even now, years later, I usually catch myself in time to avoid actually speaking the words, although sometimes I can't help thinking them. So there is no point in making that...

Well, if it’s not bought, wrapped, or posted by now it never will be. For the whole of the ‘Christian’ world is shutting down for a few days to celebrate Christmas. (The inverted comma reflects my own view that this now bears little relation to any religious festival and is now a homage to capitalism.) For months, the press and social media have been full of stuff we must buy. Aunt Nellie and Uncle Jack will be bereft if you fail to spend a week’s wages on something that will sit at the back of a cupboard until they get round to taking it to the charity shop. No home is complete without emptying the supermarket of mince pies and sausage rolls and sprouts. You thought you could re-use last year’s tinsel? Pah! Flashing fairy lights are essential. And yet, as the Big Day approaches, the tone of newspapers changes. We now have to learn how to spend a whole day with Aunt Nellie and Uncle Jack (who will fart unmercifully after a sprout or two) and not want to slap them. Families, w...

"' Begin at the beginning. ' the king said gravely, ' and go on until you come to the end. Then stop .'" I'm thinking a lot about beginnings right now. This is not so much because it's January, though that's natural. I've never been much for New Year's rituals and resolutions. The universe gives not a rat's patootie that we don party hats and make noise at an arbitrary point in our orbit around second-rate Sol on the seedy outskirts of the Milky Way. Jorge Luis Borges pointed out that "time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day - perhaps every hour - is different." Indeed, this January seems very different from the last. It feels more like an end - maybe the end - than a beginning. We've had our cup of kindness for auld lang syne, yet can't forget the blood orange orb rising over Amerca. It's not a new day, but a brutish one ...

I hate New Year resolutions. It always seems to me that you’re setting yourself up to fail. And why January? After the excesses of Christmas, it’s always kind of nice to clear everything away and start with a clean and uncluttered approach to life. So what am I going to do this year? For some reason, I seem to put a new book out roughly every 12 months and usually towards the end of the year. I then spend a month or so in a panic, wondering if the muse will ever return from her Christmas/New Year break, but she generally comes back in the spring, refreshed and ready to perch on my shoulder again. I hope. I’m already starting to twitch, but I have faith in her return, though what she will bring with her in the form of inspiration, I have no idea right now … This year I need to be more creative in other ways. I’m hopeful I’ve got my stalled audio projects up and running again, thanks to talented narrator Chris Barnes , although I don’t think he’s  read the book all the wa...

January 1 st is a day like any other. Many of us like to celebrate the new year in grand style with parties and nights on the town. ‘Seeing in the new year’ has never been a family tradition for me. My father always maintained that ‘it would still be there in the morning what ever you do’ and he was right of course. Yet I still like to see the year out and in, toasting new ideas with those closest to my heart. Today I received a copy of SPARKS 2: A Year in E-Publishin g , the Authors Electric book of blogs for 2015.  I also had a payment for a story about to be published in January and I had a meeting with fellow writer Misha Herwin to map out our plans for 2016 projects. Projects such as 6X6 - a series of quarterly reading cafes to be held at Central Library, Hanley, Stoke on Trent, and also the launch of our respective new titles with Penkhull Press . We have collections and novels already in proof stage and ready to launch in the spring, so 2016 is already busy before i...

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. I hope, as well, that we all have a saner New Year - saner, because our 2015 world seems to have gone completely off the rails (and lovely Hattie, on the right, agrees with me. Her little world consists of cocktails of smells, chasing things, and the occasional treat - like a stick to destroy, or a carrot to munch - no oil, guns or money - MUCH nicer than ours). Since I last blogged on this site, a great deal has happened in the world, and most of it unpleasant. There were the atrocious attacks on people in Paris - most of the victims young, and with their whole lives ahead of them - and now we are, it seems, at war against the people who planned this. I, like most of us, had mixed feelings about bombing Raqqa, the apparent 'Head of the Snake', but on the whole, I simply couldn't see how doing it would resolve anything. The best suggestion I've seen online has been to turn the whole area into a no-fly zone, which would curb...

From 25 th August I began humming ‘The Carnival is Over’ to myself. Okay, it wasn’t a carnival, but an ebook festival, however it’s well and truly over for another year.  As, it seems, is summer. I’d like to thank all at AE who contributed, visited, spread the word and hope that they all enjoyed themselves – virtually at least. Personally, it feels a bit like I’ve had my community service order revoked.  I’m glad it’s only once a year. Attendances were up from 9,000 to nearly 11,500 which is pleasing (especially given it was over 14 not 17 days as in 2012) and over 500 people took the FREE Goody Bag. So I guess it was job well done. But I’m mightily glad it’s over. Time to move on. September for me is always tied up with the idea of ‘going back to school.’ Never mind that in Scotland most schools go back at some stupid point in August (at which point the weather invariably perks up for a bit), for me September is associated with new educational endeavour and buying of...

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. I am an unashamed romantic and make no apologies for loving this time of year, the decorating, even the baking and other preparations - but as always it was over in a flash. Where does the time go?  It seems like only a couple of months since I was in this same position last year - the great thing about posting at the end of the month is that in December it gives me the chance to reflect on the year that's gone, and wish  everyone a Happy New Year. OK, I know there are a few days left in the old year still but it'll be nearer Valentine's Day than New Year the next time my blogging post rolls round! It's been something of a roller coaster year, with ups and a few downs. My dear on-line author friend Sharon Donovan, who was blind and suffered with diabetes was admitted for a second heart surgery. Sadly. there were complications and she passed away in April, a month before I was due  to fly to Pennsylvania to meet her an...