Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.   Firstly, may I wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. Secondly, may I hope you receive many wonderful books as presents.   One of the joys of the post-Christmas and pre-New Year period is having more chances to curl up on the sofa with a good book. I make the most of this. My Christmas reading consists of books I receive on the big day (these always jump up my To Be Read pile) plus I catch up on writing magazines.    In the run up to Christmas I take in a number of related stories usually via film. To my mind, the best rendering of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is The Muppet Christmas Carol. Sir Michael Caine is superb in that. After that, comes the Patrick Stewart version.  Hogfather by the much missed Sir Terry Pratchett is the Discworld’s answer to Christmas and the story is a cracking thriller. Who is trying to get rid of the Hogfather and why and can Death, assisted by h...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. I don’t write many seasonal stories. One exception is now when I write festive flash fiction. Sometimes I get ideas for festive tales during the summer so will write them up ready to send later. Festive flash is lighthearted and I’ve had some broadcast on an internet radio station. I usually finish my weekly column for an online magazine with a festive flash roundup and share a story. All fun to do (and I hope for others to read).  On the reading side, I ensure I watch and/or read Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, Discworld’s equivalent to Christmas.   Naturally Dickens’ fabulous work, A Christmas Carol , is on the agenda though usually in the form of the best film version ever made - The Muppet Christmas Carol . Yes!   Michael Caine plays it straight as Scrooge and genuinely comes across as sinister. The Muppets are true to the book - they’ve just added some songs (good ones too, I’m fond of the...

Photo by  Jean Balzan  from  Pexels This being the Season To Be Jolly, it seems only fair that I should have upset a number of people on Twitter over Christmas. One person even blocked me, which made me laugh, as he didn’t even give me the chance to deserve it. Rather, having dashed off a biting tweet in my direction, he bravely shut off all replies (as if) from me, like a small child biffing another in the playground before running to teacher to stop his victim biffing him back. So what did I do to inspire such fear and loathing? Er, well, I expressed an opinion. Like, you know, the other 330 million Twitter users. What about? Oh, just a TV programme. A mini-series. Well, a Classical Serialisation in fa – look, it’s not my fault that the A Christmas Carol Question raises its snowy head every year, is it? Competition among theatre, film and TV companies, from the humblest to the loftiest in the land, on who can make the biggest mess of Charles ...