Authors Electric

There’s a lot of agonizing, in a quiet way, involved in being a writer. Although I wasn’t fooled by Julia Jones’s non-claim to be in an ice storm in Antarctica a fair few people were, apparently, and agonized about whether it made them foolish gulls, or Julia a sort of naughty troll (The infantilisation of language in the age of social media is another story) for “kidding” them, even inadvertently. Others of us agonise (note the s this time; who can guess what a computer’s going to do from one sentence to the next?) about completely different things, some serious (real life) some to do with the mysteries of our “trade.” A couple of blogs ago I remember worrying about the ethics of altering new e-editions of already published books just because I thought some of the stuff I’d written was baloney, or maybe rather clumsy or whatever. Good golly, I pondered, in the long watches of the Arctic night while Julia kept herself amused with a frozen hand of virtual Scrabble, do I have an...