Authors Electric

Standard advice for newbie writers seems to always be never pay to play . Generally speaking, that’s true – twenty years ago or so, you could confidently say that you should never, ever pay anyone to publish your books, that money always flows to the author and never in the other direction.  These days, it’s still good advice – although there are occasions when it’s ok for an author to put his hand in his pocket. I’m not here to discuss vanity or even ‘hybrid’ publishing, and for the new writer just getting to grips with it all, I’ll only say to do your homework. Google. Look at reviews. Check out ALLI  and Writers Beware before you part with a penny. And yes, it always has been perfectly ok to buy in editing and design skills if you don’t have them yourself. I’m a writer, not a designer, and while I can look at a bad cover and have an idea what doesn’t work and why, I couldn’t tell you what to do to fix it. My cover designer, on the other hand, can take my vague suggestions...

  I've been thinking recently about trying something new from a writing perspective. I mainly write novels, with some short stories thrown in. I enjoy writing the shorts (although I seem to have less and less time to do them nowadays) as it allows me to approach writing in a different way, kind of like a mental version of cross-training. Anyway, back in 2018 I wrote short story (by hand, as I was on holiday) which I quite liked at the time. It started in the usual way for me – sitting in the coffee shop enjoying the view over the firth to the Isle of Bute, I spied an older gentleman, sitting on his own, nursing a drink. The waitress seemed quite attentive of him, and it piqued my curiosity – why was he there? What was his story? Over the rest of the week, I drafted the story, setting it mainly in the fifties and using the old man telling his story to the waitress as a framing device to tie it all together. After a couple of rewrites to tighten it up, it was done. I was please...