Authors Electric

I sporadically keep a log of what I read.  I always start off with good intentions, write them all down for a few weeks and then get caught up in other things, leaving the pages blank.  Only a few out of the thousands of books I’ve read since I left school have been recorded. But, when my mother died a few years ago I discovered among her things a series of little notebooks that were a record of her reading from 1948 until the week before she died, with very few gaps.  She was a voracious reader and had a book in her hand when she slipped into her last coma. In her notebooks she wrote the month, title and author and gave each book a star rating that reflected how much she had enjoyed it.  I’ve found it fascinating to go back and discover who were the most fashionable authors of each decade.  She also read the classics widely - particularly Dickens and Doestoevsky, but not much Hardy or Jane Austen.  Trollope and Walpole were among her favourite...

I decided a while ago that I’d like to try out the Kindle Singles market. It seemed a wonderful idea to be able to publish short stories, flash fiction and novellas for people to sample like a newspaper or magazine. So I put together a small collection of short stories. The title story Three is an unpublished story about three characters in three parts - too long for most short fiction outlets - and I included two others which had either been published in anthologies or broadcast on Radio 4. Three stories. My partner and I put them all together in one file as required and, with all the experience gathered from e-publishing our previous non-fiction book, A Passionate Sisterhood,  we uploaded the file onto Kindle. And that’s where our problems started. Somehow between the computer and Kindle site, the file became corrupted and two (rather crucial) lines were missing from one of the stories. The culprit turned out to be a long (double hyphen) dash inserted by Word in plac...