Authors Electric

As usual, once Christmas is over, New Zealand calls. Wonderful. And it looks as if Kay's protracted fight with the insurance company over damage in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake may be nearly over, with a result very close to a victory. Even better. Over the last two months, whenever my blogs haven't been in prophetic, apocalyptic or merely nostalgic mode, I've been talking of the projects I have in hand and my deadline to get them all sorted by the time we leave in the New Year for two months.  As I remember, they were (1) finishing  and publishing a short story collection, Yan Tan Tethera: five stories an d a very tiny novel , (2) finishing and publishing the second in the  Bright Sea, Dark Graves trilogy, The Nightmares of Invasion, (3) completing the editing and production of Dora's Story, written by Dora Ganeva, the indomitable nonagenarian who escaped from Communist Bulgaria to New Zealand in 1976 with her family, (4) writing the ongoing advertisin...

It's lovely now and again to have a completely new experience. At my age, such occasions are fewer and fewer and when they do arrive there's less of the 'this could change my whole life' feeling and more  the 'everyone else was doing this years ago. Why am I always catching up?' resignation. I'd often heard of speech-to-text programs. I remember, several years ago, Jan Needle singing their praises on this blogspot and how they had significantly changed his writing life. I read it with some awe but, IT trainwreck that I am, thought, 'that's not for the likes of me.' Yet it was closer and easier than I thought. Back in 2012 I bought my first laptop, mainly for when we went to New Zealand. It was a smart HP Pavilion and it was ideal for its immediate purpose because it was preloaded with Word Office. So I was set up for life when  travelling. Or so I thought.  I got through some work while away, assessing entries to the annual writing  com...

Two things to blog about this month, one run-of-the-mill, the other a bit special, which fully deserves the adjective 'inspiring'. First, the ordinary. While I'm sorting out the final draft of   The Nightmares of Invasion, the second in the Bright Sea Dark Graves trilogy, I'm also putting together another collection of short stories, some already published, others new, for my private JOSLIN BOOKS imprint. This is one of the many, many things I like about independent publishing. It's almost like being a poet making a retrospective New and Selected, something it would be really, really foolish to ask a publisher to do unless you are incredibly famous. And to make Createspace paperbacks out of them as well as ebooks gives the whole project a sort of three-dimensional quality, a mark of permanence. Even if nobody buys them, they are still there to be had and that in itself, is a great comfort. So this time I'm taking two already commercially published storie...