Authors Electric

                                                          My Life in Libraries Moving from the junior to the senior library at the age of 13 was for me a rite of passage. I can remember the first book I borrowed from there,  Nancy Wake  by Russell Braddon, pictured. It didn’t have that vivid book jacket illustration, just a black and dusty cover with the title and author at the top of the spine. I had already read Russell Braddon’s  The Naked Island , a memoir about the author's trials in a Japanese POW camp, so I was keen to read more.   Nancy Wake, however, was somewhat different to my usual fare, causing my mother to raise a quizzical eyebrow when she asked to see what I had borrowed - a rite of passage indeed. Garston Library in Liverpool, near my then home from where I borrowed the book, was a place I frequently visited...

A week ago, I woke in pitch dark from of a whirl of troubled dreams, spawned no doubt by my dread of 2024, a year swaddled in doomsday prognostications . Freezing rain pelted my bedroom window. The glowing deco clock on my night-stand blinked 5:30. I'm accustomed to wee-hour awakenings. Might as well forget about going back to sleep.  An hour later, after my ablutions, when I switched on the TV over coffee, it dawned on me, quite literally, that it was evening not dawn. I had overslept from an afternoon nap. No wonder all the wrong newscasters were on and it wasn't getting light outside. T'was a scifi-moment, not a senior one, I reassured myself. I've been wrestling with time paradoxes in a story I'm writing. I had jumped to the next morning for a few hours. Ho ho ho. That, I'd wandered into the fog of winter solstice blues. Time travel speculation is an exercise in what-ifs. So is New Years Eve when we celebrate change knowing that the coming year probably will...

As you read this, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it is fondly called, will be just over half way through. Writers all over the world will collectively have written millions of words and will be storming towards their final goal of 50,000. Some writers will already have completed this number of words and may have stopped at that point or may be carrying on to write an entire novel. Some writers may be struggling to move their word count forward and that magical 50,000 seems to be far in the distance. I speak to everyone today but mainly to those who are struggling.  To those of you who are storming ahead, congratulations, I applaud you. This is a fabulous achievement and you should give yourself a pat on the back and some extra chocolate (other treats are available). At the end of November you can download that winners certificate and claim your winner goodies. You might even buy yourself a NaNoWriMo Winner T-Shirt. Why not, you deserve it after all your hard work. To...

Mythic and Magical by Katherine Roberts 'On my one-hundredth birthday my father made me a present of a mortal man…’   So we’re told by Kryssa, the heroine of ‘ Rubies’ , one of the stories collected in Katherine Roberts' Mythic and Magical. ‘Rubies ’ reminded me of Bradbury’s tales of supernatural families, not only in its subject, but in its sensuality: ‘Her hair, black as mine, glittered with diamonds that outshone the early stars…’   And later, as Kryssa, her hair threaded with rubies, looks at her reflection in a lake: ‘Yes, I could see myself. Or…I could see moon-pale flesh shimmering with gold, and the pinpricks of red stars surrounding me: Grandpa’s rubies blurred with the millions of worlds above…’             ‘Rubies’ is romantic, lush, Gothic, and its theme, like the other stories, is that of rebelling against the rules your society insists you live by. And, in these stories, at least, the rebels most...

Sometimes Ridiculous , a new collection of my short fiction in softcover, has hit the stands (as we used to say in the newspaper biz). I won't feign humility. I'm pretty proud of it, and hope that I will be in years to come. The title reflects the squirrelyness of the stories, which flit among the branches of the improbable. It also describes how I feel when I read my own writing, and even when at the task of writing itself. My wry friend and colleague John Blades, the fiction editor of Chicago Quarterly Review and editor emeritus of the Sunday Chicago Tribune 's Book World, and author of the surreal, darkly comic, Small Game , did me the honor of writing a foreword. "Reading Tosi, ' El Mago '," he wrote, "is like a vertiginous trip on a combination magic carpet and time machine, the passengers generously fuelled with complimentary loco weed." I blushed under my beard at reading his amusing and generous observations. I've never gone f...

I love short stories - bite-size confections, entire books distilled down into tiny, perfectly formed delicious delights ... looking along my shelves I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised to see just how many collections of short stories I have acquired over the years. Plenty of them are anthologies with multiple authors. I first came across this sort of collection while at school, where excerpts and short stories were gathered into text books which were read aloud during a lesson and then discussed. I couldn't bear listening to the stumbling, monotone reading of my classmates so used to stuff my fingers in my ears and race through several more stories while the current one was being murdered. They were good stories too, and I took note of the writers, and looked them up afterwards in the library - and in this way I was introduced to Jack London, Ray Bradbury, Saki and many other authors whose work I love, but might never otherwise have stumbled acros...

          Well it's nearly that time of year - yes, Valentine's day is almost upon us once again. Mostly it makes me cringe, but although part of me wants to exclaim "Pfffftttt!" and throw up my hands in disgust, I'm not totally without a heart. You may find it hard to believe but beneath this gruff exterior hides a true romantic: just not the slushy sort.              For this post I was going to pose the question "If you were a book, which one would it be?" but with Valentine's Day looming, it sounded too much like the sort of thing Cilla would ask contestants on Blind Date. Once that image was in my mind it was too horrible to pursue and I could feel my teeth beginning to grind.            Then I thought a bit more about it. One of the Valentine's Day rituals is of course the Special Meal, with the table cosily set for tw...

           It's Octobrrrrrr and the season of witches and spooks is here. It's time to draw the curtains, edge closer to the fire and get your nose stuck into a ghost story or two. For my money, those which are short stories work best and there are some great ones out there - tales which get it just right, scaring the pants off you and haunting you for years after, jumping out at you from dark corners of your memory at unexpected moments, and without ever needing to overstep the matter and descend into horror and grim and grisly goriness to achieve their effect.           If you need some classic examples, there's our own Sue Price's Overheard in a Graveyard for starters: it's right up there with that master of Halloween eeeek Ray Bradbury's story The Emissary from his collection The October Country .           And there are of course other m...