Authors Electric

  The world never tires of telling us that we're not Real Writers now and we never will be.  In the beginning, we all were Too Young...when we dreamed of writing books like the GOATs we loved. Then, when we'd written scores of stories or poems and had finally chiseled our own voice and style, the rejections began coming in. We encountered a chorus of form rejections convincing us we weren't Real Writers. And the charge was echoed by everyone we met: if unpublished, we couldn't be Real. In time, against all odds, we actually sold a book to a traditional publisher or to a small press. Either way, the initial rush and sense of validation crashed: the book had a limited press run, appeared on no bookstore shelves, gathered almost no reviews, and sold seven copies. The next book did not better, leading our publisher and agent to conclude they'd been wrong: we weren't Real after all. We were dumped. But even if our books enjoyed limited genre success, strangers lost i...

I was looking through my Amazon orders the other day. One of my orders fell over – payment failed, apparently. Thanks so much, Amazon, for refusing to accept my VISA credit card after many years of loyal service! Although it wasn’t VISA that was declined – I had a few more weeks to go for that, so in anticipation I’d added a Mastercard to Amazon for future payments and made a test purchase (any excuse for another book). Except that the Halifax had cancelled the Mastercard without actually bothering to ask or inform me!  So I go into my local Halifax – only to be told that the card no longer existed on their system. At all. They cancelled it because I hadn’t replied to a message I never received. Of course, I could apply for a brand new card which would take around 30 minutes … 30 minutes? I went home and decided to get an American Express card instead which took me all of 5 minutes online.  Anyway, having made several test-purchases of books – these things just have to be don...