Authors Electric

Some cities are expensive to start with: New York, San Francisco, L.A...Others have  high-rentness  thrust upon them: in Atlanta, for example, after the 1996 Olympics rents simply went through the roof overnight. I've lived in both classes of city and found myself priced out again and again. And I've moseyed along with my head down.   Now, at a certain age, I  face more wrecking balls that build while they destroy dreams like Shiva. Three years ago, when I moved from Charlotte to Seattle, this was a happening city.. And it still is, in a different way.. With a booming economy driven by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, Seattle has risen to fifth rank in the nation's least affordable cities. An estimated 68 buildings are under construction or waiting to begin in midtown. Seattle has three times as many cranes as New York City, though a mere fraction of its size. And most of these buildings are either for apartments or offices for the Big Three. One bedroom...

I had something else lined up for this month, written and ready to go, but some inner compulsion told me to post up this instead, and as I’ve based much of my writing life around inner compulsions, here goes. I’ll begin with a story - something that happened a few weeks ago. I was writing at my desk one day when a fight broke out outside my window [my office overlooks a public passageway].  I hoped it would go away, but it doubled in ferocity so I did what's known in my family as my mum-in-old-bat-mode thing and charged out brandishing my phone, threatening to call the police – only to find myself staring into the lens of a camera. One of my neighbours was making a film. Not in Hollywood or London, but in downtown Shrewsbury. It involved zombies, steampunk and intergalactic Nazis. I swapped a few friendly words with the actors, whose take I’d ruined, and retreated indoors.   A few nights ago, one of that film crew came knocking on my doo...