Authors Electric

  Reading to Write   When the green book containing my INSTED article “The Companionship of Books”, dropped onto the doormat, I was over the moon as the expression goes. I wanted to play my favourite records at full volume; I wanted to take my wife out for a slap-up dinner. I felt so inordinately pleased with myself that I gave our cat Monty some extra Dreamies. Recognition is such a wonderful thing for us writers.   As most writers do I love reading as well as writing, and recently, before we went on our wedding anniversary trip to Corfu, I bought two of the books that have featured on Authors Electric and which had intrigued me as a reader. These were,  Life in Art and Practice  by Mari Howard and  Sex Pro!  by Reb McGrath. The following comments are not   reviews but my thoughts on the books, how I read them and what they made me think about, answering for myself the important question of, 'Why we read?' - something I had looked at in the artic...

Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There  was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts...