Authors Electric

One thing I’ve discovered, over the past couple of years since I first planned to self-publish my books, is just what a fantastic bunch of people authors generally are. Supportive, nurturing, helpful – and just downright friendly. Over recent months, I’ve widened the circle of authors I ‘know’ (‘know’, in quotes, because most I’ve ‘met’ online via social media rather than in person) and the variety of genres in which they write too, ranging across historical fiction, thrillers, children’s picture books, queer fiction, YA, romance, fantasy and all points betwixt and between. But the original core of authors I first encountered online are firmly rooted in my own current ‘genre’, if such it is: Ricardian fiction. That is, writing inspired by King Richard III. I’m not sure there is any other English monarch who has his or her own particular brand of fiction, which in fact spans many more regular ‘genres’ – from the more obvious – historical fiction and romance – to the per...

I would be very surprised if anybody who writes or reads these blogs would consider that what children under eleven are in future expected to know about language is anything but a disastrous misunderstanding of the true nature of both language and learning. Let's take at random one of the fantastic assertions the onlie begetters of the futile new tests peddle as stone tablets. What are the situations in which you can use the the humble exclamation mark? It would appear that children need to know that one of the very few places in which it can be used without fuelling the experts' anger is when the sentence begins with 'How' or 'What' . Actually, as the last sentence but one above begins with 'What', there's a good case to make that I should have used one instead of a question mark. On reading the paragraph over, it occurs to me that I've said something serially stupid.  'What? Can he be serious about that?'   I hear you cry? S...