Authors Electric

I've  never been absolutely certain, as a writer, if I'm doing something useful or wasting mine and everybody else's time. Two big questions of our age, Donald Trump and Billy Brexit, have brought it into diamantine focus. I suppose I could boil it down, personally, to comedy or assassination. The best thing Bertolt Brecht could come up with about one piece of appalling behaviour by the government of East Germany he was pledged to support, was to remark dryly that it might be a good idea if they dissolved the people and elected another one. He recognised that assassination is not easy, whereas elections, rigged or otherwise are maybe not so hard. We've seen the future. It's orange Like most people reading this blog, I imagine, it was beyond my wildest nightmares that Trump would win. I’d half guessed the Brexit vote might happen, because the level of ‘debate’ was horrifying, and the level of downright dishonesty was worse. But Trump? Oh no, no no, no n...

Hello! I’m guest posting today. My name is Kristin D. Van Risseghem and I’m an author. Don’t be afraid to say it. Writing isn’t my day job, but I do write, so therefore I am a writer. Sometimes you may have to say this a few times. Try it out, then say it again. I didn’t start out thinking I would be a published author. When I was little, I wanted to be a lawyer. Even went to school to be a paralegal and was supposed to go onto to law school, but for some reason I didn’t. I stayed as a paralegal for 19 years. I know some of you may have always wanted to be a writer … so, be one. I hadn’t written anything since high school. Sure I wrote memos or depos for college, but nothing like a story. Now later in life, I tried my hand at a YA Urban Fantasy story. Don’t be afraid to push the boundaries. By this I mean if you want to write about something, do it. If it’s not something you’ve ever tried, do it anyway. Try it. Maybe the topic isn’t what’s hot right now. So what? Or maybe it...

          Every year the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction Awards ‘draw attention to the crude and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.’           This year’s award went to Nancy Huston, an undeserved winner, I fear, although I note with a certain satisfaction (albeit of the purely cerebral kind) that Guardian readers voted resoundingly for the ‘big generative jockey’, while I myself also favoured the ‘elfin grot’ reference, but there you go. These things are very personal. Earlier this year, John Grisham endeared himself to me no end by describing how he had written an explicit sex scene and given it to his wife to read. She had collapsed into so much helpless laughter that he had decided it wasn’t his forte. Would that a few writers of literary fiction had so much insight, but perhaps their spouses are so overawed by their genius that ...

On a recent Guardian blog the literary commentator, Robert McCrum, analysed some of the "genres" in the book publishing market. One of the genres he identified was "Ghost Lit". "A surprising number of successful books," he wrote, "(bestselling memoirs especially) are written by ghost writers. But there are also ghosted novels, too. By definition these wraith-like creatures have no names and are known only to their fellow spooks – and the publishers who depend on them." It then occurred to me that “wraith-like creatures”, pretty well sums up the whole experience of being an author. Sitting in a Soho editing suite a couple of weeks ago, watching the rushes from the filming of my novel “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”, (freely available on   http://www.wattpad.com  and soon to be Kindled by its original publisher), I was struck first by the changes which the scriptwriters had made to the original story in order to make it work as an episodi...

     Within the world of blogging, we’re mature about self-publishing. We know to look beyond the term 'self-pub' or 'indie' and to judge a book by its quality.      But elsewhere, all is not so enlightened. When self-publishing is discussed on, say, the books blog of the Guardian newspaper, readers leave comments like this :      ‘Self-publishers are the literary equivalent of those mad people on the auditions episodes of TV talent shows. Every self-publisher I've ever come across has been operating at this delusional standard. These onanists are the enemies of literature, and a centuries-old heritage of the published written word, people who, ultimately, have an utter self-obsessed contempt for the reader, whether they realise as much or not...'      Onanists? Oh no you don’t. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated rant. It’s what happens whenever a national newspaper runs a piece that (pardon me) touc...