Authors Electric

It's lovely now and again to have a completely new experience. At my age, such occasions are fewer and fewer and when they do arrive there's less of the 'this could change my whole life' feeling and more  the 'everyone else was doing this years ago. Why am I always catching up?' resignation. I'd often heard of speech-to-text programs. I remember, several years ago, Jan Needle singing their praises on this blogspot and how they had significantly changed his writing life. I read it with some awe but, IT trainwreck that I am, thought, 'that's not for the likes of me.' Yet it was closer and easier than I thought. Back in 2012 I bought my first laptop, mainly for when we went to New Zealand. It was a smart HP Pavilion and it was ideal for its immediate purpose because it was preloaded with Word Office. So I was set up for life when  travelling. Or so I thought.  I got through some work while away, assessing entries to the annual writing  com...

The Chernobyl disaster of 26 April 1986 is imprinted on the memory of everyone who lived through that time and continues to be known as one of the World's worst nuclear accidents. The Cold War had long threatened the planet with a nuclear cataclysm but Chernobyl surprised and appalled the population of Earth. An author with a knack for prophesy had written a novel based around a nuclear power accident in Russia several months before the Chernobyl disaster occurred. Farewell to Russia by Richard Hugo (a.k.a. Jim Williams) described a technically very different scenario to Chernobyl, with an even more disastrous potential outcome. But the point Williams made was poignant:   "...there remains a fundamental similarity in that both disasters have their origins in the way that the communist system operated. The Soviet Union was a rickety slovenly place behind its sinister façade and the circumstances of the imaginary disaster at Sokolskoye and the real disaster at Chernobyl s...