Authors Electric

Last Thursday, while Britain was busy voting on its EU divorce, I managed to indulge two of my passions - writing and martial arts - with a fundraising launch of the Zombies v. Ninjas series in Stonehouse Books, Kilkenny, Ireland. Coach Gary (left) and author Ruby (right) at the launch of Zombies v. Ninjas It was a great event, well-attended and raising a good few euros for the club, Evolution Martial Arts Academy . The whole thing turned into a signing fest when we came up with the idea of club members wearing their outfits. Readers were encouraged to ask anyone in karate regalia to sign their newly purchased books as the trilogy features all the club members. It was a unique experience for everyone. Members of EMAA as featured in Zombies v. Ninjas The launch had been greatly anticipated. My ZvN trilogy was a rapid project, first chapters being penned in February 2015 and the final edit of the third book completed in May 2016 (they're only 40k words each). This proj...

This month I'm sharing the info on my upcoming book launch. All are welcome! Here's the blurb from the Facebook event : Official launch of the Zombies v. Ninjas book series by R.A. Barnes, published by Kilkenny company Marble City Publishing and printed in Ireland. MC for the evening will be local author and Francis MacManus prize winner Patrick Griffith. This trilogy of paperbacks features characters that are surprisingly similar to the members of Evolution Martial Arts Academy as they battle to save Kilkenny, Ireland and the World from the Undead. Suitable for all ages from 10 to 110. Ruby Barnes and the Evolution Team members will be signing books on the night. All Marble City profits from the launch will go to Fundraising for Evolution Martial Arts Academy for the team to compete in America in 2017. More about the books here at rubybarnesbooks.com and I'll be writing a series of blog posts on that site about the background to the rise of the Undead i...

In half an hour you and your family will have to leave your home, probably forever. What are you going to take with you? The good news is you have your car, truck or whatever you normally drive. One vehicle containing your family and the essentials of your life. If you only ride a bike then hitch a lift Oh, I forgot to mention that this is not a holiday. You are fleeing certain death, or worse, at the hands of an evil horde of hungry undead and venomous mutants. The good news is that you and your pals stopped off at the shops on the way home and essential food and drink items are already taken care of. So, I packed all my DIY tools, including the brand new ones I have never used but keep because they will come in handy some day. As Mrs R was busy being a mad scientist out at the laboratory, I was free to load all our clothes into the pickup without having to check what would be suitable for which occasion. My son, being a boy scout, had the forethought to grab our sleeping bags and...

Please tell me you all have the same problems as I do in this internet-based world that we live in. It's all driven by usernames, passwords, URLs, cookies and crumbs or something. An infinite number of web places with wondrous free things awaiting if you just register, sign up, log in, tune in and trip out. Maybe there's a log in with facebook option, or twitter or something? It all just seems to work. Until it doesn't. This person is saying terrible things about you ... A friend has tagged you in a photo ... I can't believe this is you in this video … got big boobs and a big butt and know how to use them ( that last one always has me wondering about alternative bb & bb usages) . You click the message and, hey presto, someone has hacked your twitter, your facebook and who knows what else. You might not even know you've been compromised, unless a kind friend who has received spam from your hijacked account decides to let you know. Do you use the same ...

So, tell me what you want, what you really, really want. As a reader of electric books and the like, what do you really, really want? Why am I asking? Because me and my little publishing house, we give things away. Why would Marble City Publishing do that? To maximise readership for our authors and to reward readers for staying with us. This is nothing new, of course. Mail lists have been a mainstay of marketing ever since Baldrick started pushing Mrs Miggins' pies through letterboxes (ref. Blackadder for non-cognoscenti). Staying in touch with people is essential for a new book release. The virtual cafés of the writing world are abuzz with methods to successfully build a mail list. Independent authors with prodigious output are presenting subscribers with such offerings as starter libraries of free novels. Phrases such as Reader Magnets abound. Online courses are being sold for hundreds of bucks to share the secret sauce of building an author's list. In this mod...

The last couple of Fridays have been very eventful. Two weeks ago we had a book launch in Stone House Books, Kilkenny, of Marble City Publishing’s latest collection By the Light of the Moon . It was the culmination of a lot of work by fourteen Kilkenny writers who had continued to meet up since completing the NUI Creative Writing for Publication course, and the follow-up Two Roads course, a good few moons ago. There was wine, there were readings, smiley faces and happy memories. Our book was dedicated to one of us who had left this Earth for the great creative writing workshop in the sky – Jane Avril de Montmorency-Wright 1936 – 2014. Jane was a power to behold, loved by all (and coincidentally had been Barack Obama’s oldest living Irish relative although she kept that light under a bushel and simply said, ‘He’s more than welcome to come here for some tea.’) The following Friday, when the dust had settled, I returned to Stone House Books to hoover up the spondoolicks from t...

I am nothing if not modest. In fact, modesty is the greatest amongst my many talents. I lay claim to an average level of proficiency in most physical pursuits, with the exception of gymnastics, ice-skating and throwing a ball, all of which I'm pretty crap at. But I can twirl several martial arts weapons with a worrying degree of almost efficiency. When it comes to tastes in music, I like a bit of everything – the latest tunes on the pop transistor radio station, classical pieces by people in suits, bluegrass by folks with no teeth, heavy rock by hairy ones. Stick a label on it and I've probably got examples in my music collection. I myself can play fairly averagely well on several musical instruments – guitar, piano, trumpet, anything that plucks or blows. Regarding TV, films – I'll watch Downton Abbey , Dr Who , Lillehammer , The Middle , almost anything. Reading – contemporary fiction, classics, crime, thrillers, science fiction, misery lit, I lap it all up. Not a big f...

Letters coming through my letterbox here in Kilkenny are a rare thing. Bank statements - electronic these days. Payslips - electronic. I did recently have a cheque for €53.70 arrive from my previous broadband supplier, which was quite exciting. Unfortunately Alfie the Dog has become unused to snail mail and thrusts his fangs through everything that postie shoves in the door, including hands. So the cheque had two teeth marks in it, and my bank wasn't happy with me. Their processing machines don't appreciate bent, spindled, twisted or chewed financial documents. I ordered a paperback book (remember those things?) for Mrs R recently, after her traumatic run-in with a herd of cows and a bull while collecting river water samples for analysis; Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan , naturally. Zombie cows, a very good read. Alfie the Dog appreciated the beefy taste, biting right through the packaging. Two tooth dents in back and front covers. Well, one set of mail that my hound can...

My twitterprofile claims I am the oldest ninja in town. There’s an element of truth to this. I’m currently three years into my fourth attempt this half-century to master karate. I’m not getting any faster, I’m not getting any more flexible, but I am getting stronger and more determined. After a year of practise with the katana (a two-handed sword beastie of the samurai variety) I did a solo performance at the club’s recent fundraising show in front of an audience of 300+. A lot of attacking imaginary opponents with three feet of polished nastiness, all to the tune of Prokofiev’s Montagues and Capulets (go to 1:39 and it’s from there) . It was a two hour programme and my mad frenzied attack was scheduled just before the interval. So how did it go? Almost immediately I was inexplicably out of my expected timing sequence with the music and the ponderous thump of that Montagues and Capulets section required me to strike, thrust, push imaginary dead bodies off the bla...

Social media fads come and go. Step back in time ... remember MySpace? There are kids now who never heard of MySpace. Google+ was going to be the next big thing and the predicted demise of Facebook had people scrabbling for footholds on Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon and goodness knows where else. Now everything is becoming a bit blurred in a whirl of social networks, blogs, photo collections, discussion forums, online chat and update feeds. Isn't this all too much? So, why bother with Twitter? What is the point of a 140 character message which might not get read by anyone before it sinks into the 500 million daily tweets? On the face of it, unless you are looking for personal interaction or are a microblogging wizard and manage to get your tweet to go viral through retweeting or on TV shows, Twitter doesn't seem to offer much. Unless you are a blogger. Content is the key to good blogging. Some folk blog about their daily life, others   about ...

Warning: this blog post contains diabolical and excruciating similes - like a man who grows long black moustaches and greases them into twirls to make himself look more evil, whereas they just make him look like a lion tamer.           Ah, anthologies. The Frankenstein of the book world. Someone’s torso, a leg, an arm, all stitched together and with a bolt through the neck from the editor. Oh, don’t forget the head, and other parts.           My first anthology foray was a piece in our writing college collection Original Sins . That title was original in the way a fat man in a bright orange shirt is individual at a party attended by lots of other people in bright orange shirts, except the other people are all slim.           I’m not a short story writer, I’m a novelist, and my contribution was a cheat in that it was the first chapter from my (at ...