Authors Electric

  Funny old business, this writing lark. I never know when and how it’s going to take me. If only I could be one of those admirable people who have their writing days organised and keep office hours. I expect their workplaces are tidy too. Sigh. I saw a slogan on a t-shirt once – something about how necessary chaos is if one is to be the dancing star. Great-sounding rubbish. I sometimes wonder how productive I might have been if I’d had the capacity for organisation, or even tidiness. Idle speculation. Lost cause. The writing I’ve been most pleased with has come, not from study but chance. A place, an event, a passing thought, a memory, and something drops into my brain from somewhere and a story or poem or play begins. As for writing to order – a brief, a theme for a submission, sometimes it sets off a spark and sometimes it’s a dead loss even when the topic seems appealing. I do struggle with it, I try, but can only produce dross which no amount of effort will make better. I’...

This would have been my November blog had I not had an attack of brainfog. Apologies. Here it is recast for December: We’ve just had our last Writers’ meeting for 2019. It was festive, with exchanges of small gifts and cards and a splendid apple cake baked by Lisa. However, the focus was, as it always is, on The Work. This was known in our deeply-missed *Vera Forster’s day as 'Vurk'. She was Hungarian and 50+ years here had not changed her self-taught English very much. She allowed us a few minutes to chat at the start, and then clapped her hands and cried ‘Vurk! Vurk!’ So we did.  In my last blog I reflected on our long and happy times together as writers. This was stimulated by coming across Henrietta Branford's signed copy of her book Royal Blunder , dated May 1990. The group had been going a couple of years by then. At this our latest meeting, Lisa brought the prologue to her second book set in the time of Raffles in Singapore – the second of a planned tr...

My latest book, ‘Incident on the Line’ is now published in paperback and as an eBook / iBook on Amazon, so what comes next? Incident on the Line by Valerie Bird Starting again, a new novel, and, as before, all the questions and worries crop up. It began with a scene, an image so clear in my head that it transposed into words with relative ease. What has happened and how it will reverberate into a story is clear. I know the reason who did what to whom and why. I have an outline of a plot.       The characters are coming alive, they’re doing what they want, taking me to places, with thoughts and conversations I hadn't originally envisaged. Apart from the old problem of lacking confidence, fear that I cannot do this, and how do I stay focused and calm to keep writing, I am excited.       This is a love story which should not have happened. It will not be a romance though; happy endings seldom convince me. Even in Ja...