Authors Electric

                                                       Reading for Peace during a War           In Goya's greatest  scenes  we seem to see                                                                               the people of the world                   exactly  at the moment when                            they first attained the title of                                               ...

The other night I found myself in a crush of shoppers at a big-top market. Its cavernous space cheerfully illuminated: Murmurs blended into the ambient up-music amid a kaleidoscope of kiosks, redolent with e xotic victuals. I was bringing an order of barbecued prawns to my inamorata and a couple of friends who sat at a food court table chatting merrily. As I approached, someone informed me that I had dropped something. Shrimp were falling from the soggy bottom of my bag, one-by-one, leaving a trail behind me. Then the bag gave way and the rest plopped to the tiled floor in a slippery mess at my feet. There was a hush. People tried not to stare. No use attempting to salvage anything. I could just hear, “Clean-up on aisle 4,” over the loudspeakers. “ Tooozi again! Get that Toozi off the court!” I remembered my red-faced high school basketball coach blowing his whistle and yanking me out of practice games for passing the ball to opposing players. I grinned fe...

Author Lewis Perdue A long-time friend from my San Francisco magazine days, author Lewis Perdue, recently began serializing his latest novel, The Nassau Directives, online, as a work-in-progress. The premise, typical of Perdue's techno-Machiavellian plots, involves a rogue drug-war agency cabal to poison millions of addicts as the “final solution” to narco-crime. The tag line reads: “A serial thriller from NY Times bestselling author Lewis Perdue. Even Lew doesn't yet know how it ends.” I perked up at the news – a high-wire digital writing act to be sure, just the kind of creative enterprise that my colleagues here at Authors Electric might relish, if not already practice (or think of practicing) in some form or another, myself included. Lew comes the closest to being a contemporary Renaissance man that I know. Quick, loquacious, energetic, a gourmet who is always down-to-earth, he never makes a big deal of being accomplished in technology, science, history, oenology...

Coming out in March is another of my little books written for Franklin Watts' Early Readers. This one, in response to their brief for stories about animals practising Olympic-type sports, features Lizzie Lizard who's being wooed and pursued by a number of beasties whose intentions are far from honourable! As with a couple of my other books, the illustrator is Inna Chernyak from the Ukraine - a country I'd prefer to associate with artists, poets, writers, dancers, music and songs - all the really important things in life - than with any kind of armed conflict. Speaking of the important things in life, do pay a visit to Little Owl Press - an Iranian publishing house based in London which specialises in the re-telling of Persian fairytales. Predictably, the illustrations are gorgeous. At the other end of the writing spectrum is an adult novel, COUNTERPOINT, which I'm currently editing and re-structuring. It's a novel I wrote twenty-five years ago, on a typewriter...

In the book section of June 6's  Guardian , there is  an article  in which bestselling author John Green, speaking to the Association of American Booksellers, explains in no uncertain terms why he has no desire to self publish. I am not offended by his not wanting to self publish; he managed to find a good agent and a good publisher and is riding that train as far and as fast as he can, and good on him! I have no problem with traditional publishing and wish him and any other traditionally published writer all the success in the world. Who knows? If God/fate/ka wills, maybe one day, I'll even have the opportunity to publish traditionally. Honestly, I cannot completely argue with his reasons for preferring traditional publishing, i.e. the input one receives from an agent and publishing house editors that help make a possibly "self-indulgent" novel far more readable and universal in appeal. I will say, however, that agents and professional editors do not have a monopol...