Authors Electric

Last month, I wrote a piece on my favourite god, Hermes, the god of thieves, liars, athletes, scholars, merchants, the home, dreamers and travellers– even those travelling to the next world. Oh, and all those of us who earn our living by words. I also discovered that the worship of the Olympian Gods is no longer a thing of the past. Like Druidism, it’s been revived, as ‘Hellenism’ or ‘Hellenic Worship.’ While skipping about on the internet, I happened on a forum where present-day worshippers swop tales of how Hermes has helped them, and exchange photos of their home shrines. There are useful tips. For instance, suppose you are an American teen, part of an orthodox Christian household, but secretly worship Zeus and Aphrodite. You want to set up a shrine to Them, but can’t face dealing with the uproar that would cause. What can you do? Well, make yourself a ‘traveller’s shrine.’ This is a lidded tin that will fit in a pocket or bag. Inside the lid, put your image of the pagan...

Writers all: Bow your heads and have your offering of wheat cakes and olive oil ready. Here, I introduce you to your patron God.  Herald and Messenger Back in the day, Our Hermes— or Mercury, if you prefer— was a busy lad. He was the Gods’ Messenger, or Herald, divine representative of all those mortal heralds with the fraught job of carrying messages along dangerous roads, to equally dangerous people who might be extremely pissed off by what they had to say. As the Gods’ Messenger, Hermes had to give the hard word to characters even worse than the average human king: to giants, witches, monsters and other Gods (who could be so difficult). Hermes was a diplomat, a fast, smooth talker, a charmer, a deft bender of the truth. As no doubt human heralds were. Each herald carried a version of the God’s snake-wrapped staff, as a sign of the God's protection and a reminder that you really did not want to mess with the Olympian Gods. (You could end up as a shrubbery, or an interesting ...

Book 1,  'The Raven Boys' by Maggie Stiefvater   I've never had a book recommended to me by Pinterest before. I don't know why Pinterest started sending me regular emails. I didn't, to my knowledge, ask for them. Maybe I accidentally toggled some toggle or another. Whatever the reason, for some months now, Pinterest has been sending me emails every few days, featuring 'fan art.' I'm fine with it. I didn't ask for them, but I rather enjoy looking at the cartoons, fan-art 'book covers', portraits of favourite characters and illustrations of favourite scenes, while trying to pick out the real art-work from the AI. I've never read, or even heard of, most of the books mentioned but that's okay. There are an awful lot of books in the world. As the emails came in, it was soon obvious that a great number of them featured a series of books called 'The Raven Boys Cycle' by Maggie Stiefvater. Judging by the number of fans doing art for ...

The Scattered Authors Society is a fine, upstanding body of writers scribbling away all over Britain. I'm a member -- one of the founder members, in fact, along with Authors Electric's own Katherine Roberts. But I'm also a member of a smaller group (and very exclusive group, I'm telling you) within the SAS.  This very exclusive writing group of ours had a problem. None of us were doing much writing. Which, I understand, is not all that unusual with writing groups. Personally, I was bereft of all ideas. Just flat out. But the problem most of the others had was that they had deadlines and  ought to be writing, and wanted to write-- but somehow, the writing just wasn't getting done. We meet up reguarly on Zoom, it being a bit difficult to meet up in person, scattered as we are from the West Country to Scotland. The meetings were full of complaints about the failure to actually get any writing done, beset as we were by distractions. Now there are a few tricks to con you...

James Allingham at his desk He worked out the cost of the printing, the office and the distribution and soon became fascinated. He saw the venture in its clearest and most material light. To him it appeared as a method of selling low-grade bulk paper at forty times its value with the added advantage that the more of it one sold, the higher the profit became. He saw too that it was the ink on the paper that did the selling, so, the only real problem was which words to print with the ink. (Dance of the Years 1943) Margery &Herbert Margery Allingham was looking back, fictionally, to her grandfather’s decision to found a penny paper, The Christian Globe, 150 years ago. James Allingham had been apprenticed as a compositor. When his father died, he seized his opportunity to invest his legacy share in a slim weekly newspaper. Literacy was beginning to boom in the 1870s as the educational initiatives following the 1867 Electoral Reform Act began leavening the number of readers within the...