Authors Electric

Let me ask you something: who do you think is the most terrifying villain in literature? Mask of Him Who Must Not Be Named Plenty of candidates to choose from. Voldemort in Harry Potter , Sauron in The Lord of the Rings , the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays , Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories; or going back further in the canon, Macbeth, Iago, Edmund, Richard III (as depicted by Shakespeare, I hasten to add, before any Ricardians take me apart), Mephistopheles… These are all splendidly evil figures. But not, to my mind, the most terrifying, for one big reason: we know what they are. The reader is in no doubt, from the word go, that each one of these is a Bad Lot, and how the hero will or won’t overcome them becomes the central drama of the story. (In Macbeth’s case you could say it centres on whether the hero’s better self will overcome his dark side.)   No. Far more frightening, for m...

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...

This will be a broken-backed blog, I fear.  There's a radical change of subject half-way through, but there's a segue which I hope you think works. We had a wonderful day out last week.  Like millions of others, we had tried in vain to buy tickets for something - anything - in the Olympics.  Of course, we failed.  When the Games started and tickets were put on sale every morning, we tried again.  But the tickets cost the proverbial arm and leg and we soon realised that we had to get up at 3am to stand a chance.   Yet we still clung on to the idea that we might somehow see the Olympic Park while it was fulfilling its original purpose and also get into at least one of the venues, preferably the main stadium.  And so we tried for what we thought would be just a consolation prize.  We bought tickets for the Paralympics. And all that mighty heart is lying still Just a consolation.  And then I remembered something very pleasing.  Wh...

Sitting at my keyboard, or terminal as we call it nowadays, I look at my watch (or little panel at the bottom of my screen, as we et cetera et cetera) and realise I’ve done nothing at all in two hours, maybe longer, except twiddle and fiddle and piddle about in the name of being up with the times. I’ve looked at Facebook, I’ve even posted something on my ‘wall,’ I’ve wondered as so often before why it didn’t behave exactly as I expected it to,  and why a link I typed in (inputted?) did not appear as it should have done. I— Oh! New technology strikes again. My mobile phone, lying in front of me before the screen, has just given a couple of sickly buzzes. Why sickly? I set it up only yesterday to be loud and brash and insistent. Apparently it’s changed my mind for me – I deserve only a sickly buzz, and it’s just lucky it was lying in the open and not stashed in a pocket and inaudible. The message is interesting, and requires an answer. Unfortunately, the caller is ‘unnamed,’...