Authors Electric

This past month has been quite introspective for me. I’ve been looking back through some of the short stories I’ve written over the past thirty-odd years with a view to seeing if there’s anything in there that still engages me. I will say, I don’t write anywhere near as many shorts as I used to – the books have kind of taken over, there, meaning the time to write something small and self-contained has shrunk – so the majority of them are earlier works. I’m also, for obvious reasons, not revisiting those stories that have been published. I think they can stand on their own merits. This started four or five weeks back, after a conversation with a work colleague who was asking me about writing (surprisingly, not the usual questions about ‘Where do you get your ideas’ and so on). We were discussing how it’s possible to see a writer’s style and voice develop over the years with each book they put out – we started looking at the development of the Harry Potter books, funnily enough, and ...

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love reading books of letters and diaries. I was a fan of Adrian Mole and the letters of P.G. Wodehouse are an interesting and often humorous read (as you’d expect). One of my favourite quotes comes from a Wodehouse letter.   “God may have forgiven Herbert Jenkins Limited for the jacket of Meet Mr Mulliner but I never shall!” Dodgy book covers are nothing new then! I also have a fascinating collection of letters between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Reading this is like peeping in on a private world, which is a great reason to read books of letters and diaries! Have you written in letter and/or diary format? I’ve done both though for flash fiction I have needed to use close to the upper limit of 1000 words for these. They are an interesting challenge and I find they make a nice change from “straight prose”.  Having said that, I wouldn’t want to always use these formats. It can look gimmicky. Besides the...

This summer, I've been thinking about different kinds of prisons and the various ways people find to escape them. Of course, first you have to recognise you are actually in a prison, since many are gilded cages in disguise. Apparently, we will all soon be living in a virtual Panopticon, whether we love gold or not... and how did THAT happen without anyone noticing? But I'm not attempting a dissertation on social engineering in this post; I merely write fiction to entertain the inmates. So before you all rush off to Google 'panopticon', here is a (very) short tale of mine from the 1990s, first published in an alternative women's fiction magazine called QWF. This story was inspired by ancient Greek/Turkish legend and, although I never name the characters, you should have little trouble guessing who the famous husband is. * The bars at the window were gold. The bed was gold. The single chair was gold. A golden blanket flowed stiffly to a golden floor. T...

For a recent story acceptance I was asked to provide a short insight into the inspiration behind my fiction. And as always that question gave me pause for deep thought. Where do those ideas begin? Most of us will recall being given a word of phrase as inspiration to write a story for homework. It was good practice for spotting a headline or story in a newspaper, or maybe an incident at work or with friends, which sparked that train of thought. Writing fantasy and horror it is the folklore and local legends that have always been a passion that figure large in my back catalogue. I readily admit to plundering those sources, but the resources are vast and forgiving. That said, a seed of inspiration is needed to even begin to know where to start in such a sea of riches. Mermaid's Pool - between Leek and Buxton The market for this story had the wide open guideline of Folk Horror, which is a vast area that means different things to different people. Think Algernon Blackwood...

Createspace is dead... long live KDP paperbacks! I've previously used Createspace to publish indie paperback editions of my titles, but CS has now been retired by Amazon so this month I tackled my first ever KDP paperbacks with two short story collections  Mythic & Magical and Weird & Wonderful , which up to now have only been available as ebooks. Each collection contains seven of my short stories, so they both come in at around 125 pages, plenty long enough for a paperback edition. Being the same length also meant I could use the same KDP cover template for both titles, which made the design a bit easier. I'm calling this series 'Ampersand Tales' because the collections are additional to my novels, as well as being for older readers who might have enjoyed my children's books as young readers when they were first published. Some of these short stories helped inspire my novels, and each carries an introduction setting it in the context of my writin...

Recently I was lucky enough to have a short story chosen for the twice yearly Stroud Short Stories event which took place last Sunday and before this I'd already done two other reading 'gigs'  at Writers Unchained and Talking Tales , both in Bristol.  Reading at Talking Tales For all of these evenings I spent some time rehearsing my piece, especially for Stroud which has the biggest audience and called for a  story I hadn't read aloud before. As usual I found myself making small changes to my typescript - as I often do - to get the right emphasis or to smooth the flow of words.  Just to be clear, I had submitted these pieces in advance to a judge or judges as a document, but I justified these changes to myself on the grounds that spoken word and written word have slightly different requirements and none of these changes were substantial.  Or were they? After SSS organiser John Holland, reminding me that all SSS stories would go into a futu...

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...

Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja poses for Matthew Bremner's recent Guardian profile. An article in the Guardian  knocked me on my backside the other day. The feature, How to Be Human  by Matthew Bremner, examined the life of Marcos  Rodríguez  Pantoja, an elderly Spaniard had been abandoned as a child and had survived fifteen years in the Andalusian mountains with wolves as his only companions. L ike a real-life  Romulus and Remus , he owes his life to a she-wolf, who accepted the small boy as part of her litter, sharing food, after he crawled into their den seeking shelter from the cold on the first night or second night of his long ordeal. Deja vu:   My Dog's Name , the novella I've been revising for inclusion in Sometimes Ridiculous , my forthcoming softcover story collection, has a similar, archetypal plot. A boy,  presumed buried by a mudslide, roams  the Hollywood Hills with a family of coyotes.  I wrote it back  2013, havin...