Authors Electric

2012 was my first year of epublishing. I began it by sending an email to Linda Gillard, whose example had inspired me. She kindly replied, offering me welcome advice, which included the suggestion that I might feel at home in a group called Authors Electric. I’d seen the website in 2011, another example which had inspired, so I sent off an email to AE, giving the same account I had given to Linda Gillard, about my writing history and experiences with literary agents and publishers over a number of years. I was invited to join AE and, at first, throughout February, I was convinced that this had happened by accident or misunderstanding. Yes, I’d been published by Picador and Vintage, but only single short stories at a time, never a book. Yes, I’d been represented by more than one literary agent over the years, but they had never succeeded in selling my work! I was convinced throughout February, as I waited for my first March 11 th blog slot, that Authors Electric only a...

Having recently watched Roman Polanski’s 1976 psychological thriller,  The Tenant , for the first time, I was struck once again by the degree to which films have influenced me when it comes to narrative structure. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t been influenced far more by the past 400-years’ worth of novels we’ve been gifted to read…but somehow, as Tanita Tikaram put it back in the 80s, cinema has been the Twist in My Sobriety where narrative is concerned. I’d loved The Fearless Vampire Killers  and Rosemary’s Baby , re-watched them many times since initial encounters with them during childhood(!)... And it seems my response to Polanski duplicates my response to Tarkofsky, or to Knut Hamsun, or to Mikhail Bulgakov, where I seem to fall in love early with one piece of work (Tarkofsky’s Solaris , Hamsun’s Hunger , Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita )…this one piece of work then mesmerises me as I watch and re-watch, or read and re-read, through decades, attemptin...