Authors Electric

What do you do with books you no longer need? I’m not talking about more recent paperback novels which can be taken to a charity shop. I’m an avid fan of searching the bookshelves for a bargain. I’m talking about non-fiction books that are no longer relevant. Or multiple copies of “best sellers” that have fallen out of fashion. And what about self-published books that have been printed but then you find too many typos, or formatting errors and releasing them into the wild could potentially damage your overall brand? This is what happened to a friend recently – despite all the checks and balances before printing when his novel was republished, he still found issues that needed to be addressed, so rather than selling the stock that had already been printed he made the bold decision to throw them away. “But I still have seventeen copies to sell and an event this weekend?” “Just put them in the recycling.” He said. With a heavy heart I did just that. In they went with the emp...

Bury St Edmunds has just held the very first fringe literary festival - the Foreword Festival   - which took place on 7th and 8th October. Do click on the link to find out more, it was a marvellous weekend. As part of the inaugural event they held a flash fiction competition, winning stories would be read out at various locations in the town by professional actors. Never one to pass up an opportunity, especially when it is local, I decided I really MUST enter. But what do you do when a deadline is looming? You are running out of time and can't get the creative juices flowing. With the sound of a ticking clock getting louder and louder in my ear I decided to recycle a previous idea and scrolled through my old blogs searching for a suitable story I could tweak. I used to follow a lot of sites that regularly posted writing prompts, the trouble was most of my stories were under 150 words and this one had to be 500, certainly no less than 450. Eventually I found one that was 3...

Research... books ‘De-cluttering’ - as throwing out once-loved possessions is now called - is not really, as they say, my bag . That is, our home is set about with all kinds of delightful objects, all   much loved: books (in bookcases, more than ten, now I stop to count), and ornaments, cushions (great fun to throw around if you’re a visiting grandchild), paintings, pot plants, and of course, not forgetting, The Cat. None of these is ‘clutter’ except, perhaps,The Cat when he insists on sharing the screen and ‘helping’ with   a Zoom call. However, the delight when something precious suddenly moves from one category - necessary research - to another - old information never again needed! Having just spent an hour or so browsing through super-stuffed lever-arch files, casting a last look over wonderfully informative scientific articles and sociological comment pieces on lifestyle today, it’s possible to say of nearly all these that they’ll not be needed again!   Once much lov...

  Recycling is on everyone’s tongue these days. The need to mend, recycle and use less of the earth’s resources. It got me thinking about how this links to our writing.             I am sure we all have drawers full of notes, or old notebooks, or stuff on the computer, or who knows where. Writing we have discarded. Writing that started out with a promise and ended up on the rubbish dump. But even rubbish dumps contain hidden gems – if you know where to look, if you are lucky, if you spend enough time there.             I’m not suggesting you should spend too much time rooting around the rubbish dump. It’s easy enough to get distracted these days by social media, let alone one’s own scribblings. However, when stuck for an idea or a character, you may find one lurking in an old notebook or computer file. Those scribbled notes and ideas can come in useful when you ar...

How green are you? How much do you recycle? How many bins sit at your back door? In this age of recycling so that we don’t all finish up living on rubbish tips, I bet you’ve become adept at separating your waste paper from your bottles and tins. And of course there’s that wee bin for your food waste. But what else do you recycle? Have you thought about those blog posts you write, and the articles you submit to various online and offline publications. How many of those do you recycle by changing a bit here and a bit there? And what about all that research you’ve painstakingly done for your latest article or blockbuster? Once the book is written where does all that information go? Does it nestle cosily in your hard drive for evermore, or maybe it winds up in the salvage you are commendably recycling in order to save the planet? Or do you use it to write articles and blog posts? And then there is the plot we squeeze out of our brains – more painful than giving bir...