Authors Electric

Katherine Roberts’s blog post a few days ago about the tyranny of social media struck a chord. Social media have changed our lives.  First Facebook, whose friend connections at least made sense. I mean, it’s just another way of connecting with friends you have in real life, isn’t it? (IRL if you will… see what I did there? Oh heavens, two deeply irritating social media cliches in one go. Sorry.) Oh, and their relations, who you may have met. And their in-laws, who you definitely haven’t. And then… crikey who are these totally strange friends from round the world I’ve never come across before? Photo by Leila Larochelle: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ white-and-brown-deer-standing-on-snow-10709569/ Then Twitter, which revolutionised everything. I remember when I first, tentatively, tweeted and followed other accounts. How amazing it was to connect with people I had absolutely nothing to do with and would never come across otherwise, not just in different parts of the UK but on d...

Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Many thanks to Gill James for taking the image of me reading from From Light to Dark and Back Again at the Bridge House Publishing Celebration event in December 2023. All good fun! What are you hoping for in this new writing/reading year? Writing wise, I would like more things in print. Reading wise, I would like to discover authors new to me. The big eye opener for me in recent years has been discovering the wonderful world of non-fiction, especially history. The start of a year is when I miss most favourite authors no longer with us. I always looked forward to the new Terry Pratchett book for example. Nearly always ended up having that as a Christmas present.  Having said that I was given A Life In Footnotes which is his biography (written by Rob Wilkins) and am loving that. (Wouldn’t surprise me now if I go on to discover more on the wonderful world of biographies!).     I look forward to book ...

Picture the scene. A middle aged woman sits in her brand new garden studio gazing at a blank laptop screen. It’s 1 st January 2022 and she has just become a full time writer. No more safety nets of extra income, no boss, no pension, no certainties. She is working on her third novel and is in the grip of writer’s block. One of her largest freelance clients has had an internal restructure and has stopped sending her work.   Gentle reader, that woman was me. I am still in said garden studio but I am now surrounded with the trappings of a travelling wordsmith. A new trolley sits under the window with two boxes atop it. I am the proud owner of two large glass bowls full of sweeties, three boxes of assorted merch, a light box, a pile of business cards, an illuminated sign giving potential purchasers payment options, three miniature Christmas trees, several strings of fairy lights and some book stands.   I hadn’t been a full time writer for very long before the chill wind of reali...

  So, confession time; I'm rather fond of Twitter. On the whole I only follow people I like or am interested in, so I have seldom been troubled by trolls or hate speech, and whenever it has managed to infiltrate, I can mentally filter it out, in the same way I do with the horrors that pop up on the television news or the front pages of newspapers, concentrating my thoughts on things that I can do something about myself – of which there are shockingly few. I enjoy the distraction of the gossip on the Twittersphere, and the feel-good videos that go viral, and I learn more about what is happening in the publishing and writing worlds than from any other source. The last few books that I have read have come to my attention from tweeted recommendations. I can see that social media has handed a megaphone to people with some pretty nasty opinions, but these people have always been there, sounding off in the pub, or berating their partners and families with their unsavory  views ...

  Empty window reflects the age of change.. People fleeing Twitter in response to Elon Musk’s purchase, and in the same week, though not for the same apparent reason, a number of fellow writers warning their readers that they are quitting blogging.    Change. Not for the same reasons, though possibly change in one area of social media may influence some to think of changes they might make in another where they advertise their books? Mostly, it seems, either in order to develop some other aspect their writing, or because they feel their blog is making less impact on sales.   Meeting each other and joining this conversation in the group’s News Feed, these writers were agreed that ‘it’s time to move on’ from blogging, because, as everyone knows, nobody bothers to read blogs any more.   Whether that is true of ‘everyone’, I’m not totally convinced: but of course a blog post takes time to write, and if the readership is unknown, or if followers are few in number, t...

                                   Finding “The Alexandria Quartet" One thing leads to another as they say. Today I was thinking about how we choose our reading books and as is often the case with me a story came to mind, so here goes. When my wife and I used to visit her aunt Joan in the lovely town of Sherborne in Dorset I was always intrigued by the Faber editions of Lawrence Durrell’s  Alexandria Quartet  residing in a corner of one of the many bookshelves in her large four-bedroom house. I always meant to ask if I could borrow them, but I never got round to it. However, after her death - she had had a long innings as the expression goes - and her funeral at Sherborne Abbey in October 2020, attended by just 30 mourners, the family was asked if they wanted anything from her house? Most people wanted one of the pictures that she had hanging on the walls, but I thought about it and decid...

'People lashing out need to take a step back and think about what they would actually say in person rather than when hiding behind a screen.’ It's OK with the barbs, tweeps. We're the good guys . Photo by  Anastasia Zhenina  from  Pexels So wrote a fellow Tweep a few days ago, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s not a groundbreaking idea; we know that social media – Twitter in particular – have reshaped the whole way subjects are discussed and how people relate to each other. But we don’t seem able to curb our behaviour, to stop pouring hatred down the throats of those who express a different view, or – heaven forbid – use the wrong words by accident. Before this global free for all, irritation and outrage could be vented harmlessly by yelling at the television screen; now the temptation to fire barbs publicly at the writer/politician/newscaster/actor/singer/academic/football manager/poor clumsy twit who’s ventured an opinion they might not even realise is controversial – is ...

Yesterday I launched the second book in the series “The Adventures of Letty Parker.” It’s a MG book, aimed at the 8-12 market, though as one reviewer, Kerry Parsons from www.chataboutbooks said “ it will be enjoyed by children and adults alike. I think it would sound great read aloud and enjoyed by the whole family.” There were more reviews, loads of comments on FB and Twitter and I felt much supported by friends, fellow writers and book-bloggers. All in all a very positive experience, but one which left me totally exhausted. Switching off the computer, pouring a glass of wine I wondered why I was so tired. What I’d been doing was enjoyable. I love interacting with people on social media and it was great to be able to thanking friends for their comments and likes. After all, I hadn’t done any hard physical work. I’d sat at my desk most of day, fuelled by cups of coffee and glasses of water –I’d made sure I wasn’t dehydrated, so I should have been fine. Talking to othe...

Eva Noemi Cienfuegos Sometimes we don't see the trees in a forest. We've been preoccupied - justifiably - about the flagrant abuses of privacy and exploitation of social media by deadpanned corporate owners in puerile tee-shirts, along with their platforms being weaponized in the interests of oligarchs and fascists in Moscow, London and Washington. A lot of us - including some of my good friends - have quit Facebook and other forums in disgust. I myself have stopped buying social media promo-services in protest - a gesture, I know, but I did let them know.  But I don't want to quit hanging out with my friends on Facebook, Twitter, et al, however, given their too-often discounted, fine company. Why cut off my nose that way? We've all been using the Internet to commingle long before there was a Facebook anyway (beginning with forums and bulletin boards back in the day). Before that we had (and still have) coffee houses, taverns, graffiti, and letters, poetry and or...