Authors Electric

 Alicia Sammons I worked as an editor for the better part of my too long professional career. Editing can be demanding, but I never thought of it as a particularly glamourous or creative calling. Over the years I climbed my way up from proofreader to senior editorial positions on magazine, major metropolitan newspapers, and editing for independent publisher.  I always felt in awe of writers and aspired to their magic with words, an assessment shared in popular culture. We see a lot of juicy movies about authors like The Hours and Midnight in Paris. On the other hand, editors can't get much respect even from their writers, including a few authors with whom I've worked.  Vladimir Nabokov  sneered at them as ‘pompous avuncular brutes.’  Robert Gottlieb edited books of  Joseph Heller ,  John Le Carré ,  John Cheever , and  Toni Morrison . The legendary Maxwell Perkins  edited and famously mentored Lost Generation icons F. Scott Fitzgerald ...

I turn 86 in a couple of week, older even than our President. I feel like I've lived several contiguous lives instead of one long one. I was married four times and have four daughters whom I count foremost among my blessings. I've worn many hats. My byline has appeared in scores of extant and disappeared papers, magazines, on covers and posts, each as ephemeral as summer dandelions - as are most of us.  I live in by the Great Lake Michigan, born in Boston, Massachusetts, but grew up and made my bones in California. I've worked many jobs, travelling and sedentary, wearing a hard hat, standing or seated. But I've spent the greatest portion of my working hours as I am now - in front of a keyboard.   I'm a seasoned veteran and a newbie. I've been a writer all of my adult life, but I've only been writing fiction for the past dozen years - barely long enough to hit my stride and develop what passes for a literary style. It's been a long winding journey through...

  Eden’s recent discussion of all the different Points Of View a writer can choose when telling a story came at just the right moment for me, having just finished reading a book which pushes this rule to the utmost. And got away with it. Brilliantly, as it happens. When I started writing children’s books, I saw no reason not to change points of view between characters. How else to follow their different paths if they get split up on their journey, as happens in Ante’s Inferno ? I needed an editor to point out that this was Ante’s story from the start, and that abandoning her half way through to get into the heads of the other characters wrecked all narrative tension. Restructuring the story was difficult but of course the editor was right. I learnt my lesson. One day I may be ready to bring off what many writers – Tolkien and C S Lewis among others – do, but not yet. And obviously, changing points of view between characters can only work if you’re writing in the third person; ...

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...