Authors Electric

 The third monthly installment of  our hero's adventures as he dances through the minefields of life and politics. “Mixed bag of responses,” Puppy said as he scrolled through the pollsters’ findings on his phone the day after the program was broadcast. “Almost exactly fifty-fifty.” “Fifty-fifty what?” Teddy dragged his tired eyes up from the blank diary page he had been working on, or at least thinking about. “Well, fifty per cent of the people who watched you on Bake-off thought you were hilarious, and believe you should be allowed to bring your own peculiar brand of gaiety back to Number Ten.” “And the other fifty?” “The other fifty can’t believe the British public ever allowed such a clown to get into Number Ten in the first place.” “Bloody photographers!” Teddy grumbled. “I’m sure they airbrushed that photo to make me look like Coco the Clown.” “Not sure they had to, Mate,” Puppy sighed. “You pretty much did your own flour-based make-up in there. The one thing ...

The opening chapter of "The Ex-Prime Minister" appeared in this space a month ago. Our hero's adventures continue. Chapter Two.   “Quite a surprising reaction really,” Ding reported by phone the next day. “It seems the producers think there is still an appetite amongst the great unwashed to see more of Ted’s antics. They actually seem to want to know what he will do next. He’s a one-man comedy soap opera.” “Really?” Puppy felt a glimmer of optimism light up somewhere deep inside his chest. Maybe his glittering career as a political advisor hanging onto Teddy’s flapping coat tails wasn’t an entirely dead duck after all. He looked across at Teddy, who seemed oblivious to anything else in the room, hunched over the dining room table, chewing noisily on his tongue and drooling gently as he concentrated on filling in his diary, which he hoped was soon going to elicit a decent sized advance from one of the many publishers who had already expressed an interest. “Are any ...

When writers get to the stage of writing fiction about the problems of writers, it is generally a sign that the time has come for them to get out more.   Dan Rhodes, however, is so monumentally pissed off with everything to do with publishing, and so good at writing comedy, that his new novel, “Sour Grapes”, published by Eye Books, is fantastic. Every gripe that writers vent to one another about publishers, publishing, literary festivals, money (or lack of it), and the pretentions or inadequacies of other writers, is given the full comic treatment.   Publishing’s greatest renaissance man, Scott Pack, acquired the book for Eye Books, claiming that it is his swan song as a publisher, partly because he is as tired of the whole game as Rhodes himself. What a book to go out on. Some of it is outright farce, like the very best of Wodehouse or Waugh, while beneath the surface the author’s boiling fury has been honed into ice picks of satire, the targets of which anyone who has la...