Authors Electric

At the end of last year, a birthday gift – the DVD of “Roman Polanski’s Film of MACBETH”, as the cover has it. There, too, on the cover, a robed, crowned, bearded and enthroned Martin Shaw, holding what could be a shield, or a mirror, or a scrying glass, turned outwards and away from  himself. Of course, in the film, Martin Shaw plays Banquo, not Macbeth. I assumed that Shaw was on the cover because his fame nowadays is greater than that of the late Jon Finch, who did play Macbeth in this film, and that this was an attempt to shift DVD copies to Shaw fans. Google suggests otherwise, though, with the consensus seeming to be that the company which produced the DVD had mistaken Shaw for Finch/Macbeth, and put him on the cover by accident, lifting the first still image they found on a scan, of an actor wearing a crown in the film. I watched the DVD just after Christmas, with the friend who had bought me it. We watched it in Inverness where it seems the real h...

The idea of this is that a writer puts up a post on his or her own blog answering ten questions about his/her work in progress, and then “tags” three – or five, depending on which version you see – other writers to do the same. Then, the writer posts a link to his/her “tagger” and to the people he/she is “tagging” so that readers who are interested can visit those pages and perhaps discover some new authors whose work they’d like to read. I was tagged by Dan Holloway: http://danholloway.wordpress.com/ I had the pleasure to meet Dan a year ago, when we appeared on an author panel together at London Book Fair, for the launch of the Alliance of Independent Authors. (He even gave me his own coffee when he saw I didn’t have any!) He has recently released “Evie and Guy: A novel with no words”, which is available for download at Dan’s site there. I’ve enjoyed exchanging notes with Dan now and then over the last year, regarding some lesser-known gems of European literature...

2012 was my first year of epublishing. I began it by sending an email to Linda Gillard, whose example had inspired me. She kindly replied, offering me welcome advice, which included the suggestion that I might feel at home in a group called Authors Electric. I’d seen the website in 2011, another example which had inspired, so I sent off an email to AE, giving the same account I had given to Linda Gillard, about my writing history and experiences with literary agents and publishers over a number of years. I was invited to join AE and, at first, throughout February, I was convinced that this had happened by accident or misunderstanding. Yes, I’d been published by Picador and Vintage, but only single short stories at a time, never a book. Yes, I’d been represented by more than one literary agent over the years, but they had never succeeded in selling my work! I was convinced throughout February, as I waited for my first March 11 th blog slot, that Authors Electric only a...

Having recently watched Roman Polanski’s 1976 psychological thriller,  The Tenant , for the first time, I was struck once again by the degree to which films have influenced me when it comes to narrative structure. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t been influenced far more by the past 400-years’ worth of novels we’ve been gifted to read…but somehow, as Tanita Tikaram put it back in the 80s, cinema has been the Twist in My Sobriety where narrative is concerned. I’d loved The Fearless Vampire Killers  and Rosemary’s Baby , re-watched them many times since initial encounters with them during childhood(!)... And it seems my response to Polanski duplicates my response to Tarkofsky, or to Knut Hamsun, or to Mikhail Bulgakov, where I seem to fall in love early with one piece of work (Tarkofsky’s Solaris , Hamsun’s Hunger , Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita )…this one piece of work then mesmerises me as I watch and re-watch, or read and re-read, through decades, attemptin...