Authors Electric

  I talk to myself in the shower in the mornings – in my head, you understand, out loud would be weird. It’s usually fairly mindless chatter, reminding myself what day it is, etc. but it will be coloured by whatever I’ve been reading during the EMC (early morning cuppa) before I get up. This morning it was in the voice of the Russian narrator of Life's Music, yesterday, suave Italian   Marco from The Hummingbird. If it was poetry, the internal monologue might be in iambic pentameters. It’s not a skill – I just can’t help it. It tends to wear off by the time I'm talking, which is probably just as well, but the mood invoked can last. A couple of blogs ago, I had a brief online conversation with Peter Leyland via the comments section. He mentioned his interest in bibliotherapy and kindly included a link to a paper he had written about it in the magazine   Aeon/Psyche. It contains a fascinating account of his exploration of the impact of reading on mood and wellbeing, wit...

Perhaps you’d like to guess which novel this is? ‘Great premise, appallingly written. The plot is replete with unexplained co-incidences and impossibilities…. Tedious, lacking any credible plot-line, immature and over-written in the extreme.’ Mary Shelley, eat your (or some random corpse’s) heart out! Yes, this is an extract from a one-star review of Frankenstein. 'appallingly written...tedious' I’ve blogged before about the brilliant and hilarious reviews people are leaving, such that creative Amazon reviews are becoming a genre of their own. Check out the Mr Men books,  Bic’s pens ‘for her’ ,  banana slicers , etc for some all-star gems, if you've not already enjoyed them. Now, to make us all feel better, let us enjoy the one-star review – in all its nasty glory – always more enjoyable when dumped on some other writer’s self-esteem. It was some enjoyable facebook posts by renowned actor, director and author Fidelis Morgan (check her website out  here ) which set...

          Well it's nearly that time of year - yes, Valentine's day is almost upon us once again. Mostly it makes me cringe, but although part of me wants to exclaim "Pfffftttt!" and throw up my hands in disgust, I'm not totally without a heart. You may find it hard to believe but beneath this gruff exterior hides a true romantic: just not the slushy sort.              For this post I was going to pose the question "If you were a book, which one would it be?" but with Valentine's Day looming, it sounded too much like the sort of thing Cilla would ask contestants on Blind Date. Once that image was in my mind it was too horrible to pursue and I could feel my teeth beginning to grind.            Then I thought a bit more about it. One of the Valentine's Day rituals is of course the Special Meal, with the table cosily set for tw...

          Every year the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction Awards ‘draw attention to the crude and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.’           This year’s award went to Nancy Huston, an undeserved winner, I fear, although I note with a certain satisfaction (albeit of the purely cerebral kind) that Guardian readers voted resoundingly for the ‘big generative jockey’, while I myself also favoured the ‘elfin grot’ reference, but there you go. These things are very personal. Earlier this year, John Grisham endeared himself to me no end by describing how he had written an explicit sex scene and given it to his wife to read. She had collapsed into so much helpless laughter that he had decided it wasn’t his forte. Would that a few writers of literary fiction had so much insight, but perhaps their spouses are so overawed by their genius that ...

                   Actually, I really do want to shrivel your blood,                                      by Dennis Hamley I ended my last blog by saying that if you were good I'd tell you a ghost story.  Well, you have been so I will.  And it is true.  It is, it is. First, the backstory.  The year was 1964, the month was October.  For the previous four years I had been teaching at Stockport Grammar School even though I'm a soft southerner.  I thought it was time for a change so I crossed the Pennines to Wakefield and Queen Elizabeth Grammar School.  And in October I was teaching Wuthering Heights for A level to a crowd of Yorkshire sixth-formers. Now while I was living in Stockport I met a nurse who worked at the Christie Cancer Hospital in Manchester and before I left for Yorkshire we had agreed to ...

 Picture by Matt Zanetti All novelists know about the mid-list but a straw poll among non-writer friends revealed that almost nobody else does. Yesterday, an artist friend asked ‘what’s the mid-list?’ and when I tried to explain, replied, ‘Oh, you mean the kind of books people actually want to read.’ Which begs the interesting question: what books do people want to read? Possibly as many kinds as there are readers. You probably won’t find celebrity or sporting memoirs in the mid-list. A mid-list novel isn’t a blockbuster or a bestseller although many bestsellers used to come from the fertile ground of the mid-list. These were called breakthrough novels. After publishing several interesting and well written books, an author who had built up a modest following among the reading public would suddenly write a book which ‘took off’ and made him or her (and the publisher) quite a lot of money. You’ll sometimes find prize-winning novels on the mid-list, but although prizes help to boos...