Authors Electric

  I have a habit of seeing stages of my life in terms of books or films that seemed to reflect everything I was experiencing or feeling at the time. Is this, I wonder, how we make sense of our lives, attempting to give the chaos and serendipities of reality a narrative arc where none really exists? My early years were pure Christopher Robin, an only child in the countryside, whose best friends were pets and toys, entirely unaware that I had arrived at the end of a long line of privilege; white, male, middle class and British. The idylls of “Hundred Acre Wood”, (and “Never-Never Land” for that matter), were then replaced with a mixture of “Jennings Goes to School” and “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” – culminating in the cathartic anarchy of Lindsay Anderson’s film, “If”, which was released just as I was reaching the end of my patience with educational institutions. “Down and Out in Paris and London”, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” and “Of Human Bondage” reflected the struggle to surviv...

I had been mulling over what to blog this month and my mullings were tending towards telling you about a new man in my life called Max Bear. Then, yesterday's post about Winnie the Pooh confirmed my intention. Bears, your star is in the ascendent - this week. Aliida, age 4 I have a lovely goddaughter called Aliida. Yes, two i-s, it's an Estonian name. Her maternal grandmother is Estonian, her mother Scottish and her father Ghanaian. A year ago, her mother, one of my best friends for many years, sadly died quite suddenly. Since then, I have been ramping up the godmother efforts. A few weeks ago, I picked her up from school and we hit the nearest shopping mall, it being wintry, dark and cold in the late afternoon. A very cool bear is Max I had promised her a special treat for winning a poetry competition (she is only six). So it was I found myself, for the first time, in a Build a Bear shop. Quite an experience! Half an hour later and £40 lighter, we were the owners/...

Right, people, a quiz question to get those sluggish winter brains going: which of these quotations is the odd one out? “Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?” ... and this is what he wrote:     HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY. “If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together... there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart... I'll always be with you.”   When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it. A Wedged Bear in Great Tightness Yes, I’m talking Winnie-the-Pooh here.  The most wonderful books for children ever written, no...

Well here we are. We have finally reached the end of my countdown of metafictional comics, and it only took nine months to do it. Yes, there are children being born this month who were conceived on the day I began this outting. Hi kids! Y'all got some catching up to do. There have been some  sidetracks ,  meanderings , and just plain  random   laziness , admittedly, but we have at last gotten here. If you are like these kids, you may want to check out the previous list first: You could start with the honorable mentions , then move on to 5. Cerebus by Simms and Gerhard 4. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Moore and O'Neal 3. Sandman by Gaiman and various artists 2. Fables by Willingham and various artists And now.... 1. The Unwritten - Mike Carey (author) and Peter Gross (artist) On the surface,  The Unwritten seems like a conscious rip-off of both Harry Potter  and Neil Gaiman's comic  The Books of Magic . ...

Since 2007 I've been lucky enough to be a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.    It sounds very grand, but is really just one of the most wonderful safety-nets any writer can have. The RLF has been around for nearly three hundred years, helping writers in need, including many of the most famous - like Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Dylan Thomas.  It has also supported the bereaved families of authors such as Robert Burns. It relied on charitable donations, but things changed when one of its former recipients, A.A. Milne, left the RLF the copyright of his Winnie the Pooh books. The sale of some of these rights to Disney in 2001 allowed the Fund to support writers in a much more imaginative way. Fellowships were created in a number of universities which then provided a two way benefit;  the university got a professional author to advise its students on the art of writing and the author received financial support for a set period of time. It w...