Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Book cover image from Chapeltown Books. AI images avoided. One of the lovely things about having a new flash fiction collection out is it will give me plenty of new stories to read at Open Prose Mic Nights.   I usually take part in the Open Prose Mic Night The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick  hold every August. It’s a great opportunity to discover how stories go down with the audience. In 2025 I read out one or two tales from my then forthcoming Seeing The Other Side precisely for that reason. Am glad to say the tales concerned did get laughs the way they were meant to. When I take part in these events, I look for a balance of old and new stories to share. I like to mix up the moods of the tales too to show what flash fiction can do and be. It is a wonderful format for humorous writing but it can also pull you up sharp and make you think, make you react. I still feel a chill at Hemingway’s classic For sa...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One positive thing to come from the pandemic was the increasing use of Zoom to enable people to still “meet”.   I use Zoom regularly to meet with distant family members and for workshops. One welcome thing I hadn’t expected was being able to run flash fiction workshops for writing groups all over the country. No travel fees and I’m paid. I like this - a lot! I now run a monthly flash fiction workshop, on different aspects of the craft, for a Christian writing organisation. The members could never meet in person - we live hundreds of miles apart - but Zoom comes to the rescue and it has made it possible for the organisation concerned to offer genre specific writing groups. I think it is a wonderful development. Zoom has also led to my rediscovering PowerPoint . I used it a lot in the 1990s, moved away, and then returned to it for Zoom workshops as these presentations are great (and easy) to share on s...

  That’s it! I’m done with Zoom. A murrain on it! Bad cess to it! I’ve always had an edgy relationship with it, beginning in lockdown when our choir went online. We had to mute everybody because the time-lag turned the singing into an unpleasing sound-swill, so each of us could only sing at our machines alone. Not a choir by any measure. I gave up on it after one or two sessions because it made me so sad – all those dear faces in some other place I couldn’t reach. It felt like a bereavement.   Worse was to come, with workshops about poetry. Group chats in which I was largely ignored. Looking hard at the image of myself on camera, I began to see why anyone who didn’t know me might have been expecting Nurse, hovering just out of sight, ready to wheel me off to the third bathchair on the right. I know from the mad-looking picture on my City smartcard, taken by a woman sitting down while I was standing up, that the up-the-nose shot really wouldn’t fill anyone with confidence...

 Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love writing workshops. I’ve learned so much from them and now I’m running my own (flash fiction, the ups and downs of being a writer etc). I like workshops which give me plenty to think about and  exercises I can polish up at home. I want to be “doing” as well as listening. Knowing what I like has helped me tailor my workshops. I think good old-fashioned pen and paper still has a valuable role to play. This shows up best at a writing workshop. No worries about whether your PC battery will die halfway through the workshop. No worries about whether there will be enough charging points for said PC to avoid that. You just pick up a pen and jot down points of interest. Okay, there is a dilemma to be faced with pen and paper. Just which notebook will I use? Which pen to go with it? Is there any writer who doesn’t have a surfeit of notebooks and pens? When I worked in Winchester many moons ago, I avoided going...

  Sometimes when the writing is going very slowly, or the marketing has ground to a halt meeting up with a fellow writer can be a necessary spur to action. Before the pandemic Jan and I used to go out for a coffee every week where we would discuss our work in progress, or bemoan our lack of progress and share hint on how to extricate ourselves out of the mire of procrastination or self-doubt. We also considered setting up a regular writing slot, perhaps once a month,   where we got together with other writers,   to write and then to give each other feedback. Although in principal it sounded like a good idea there must have been some reluctance on both our parts because it never happened. Then came the pandemic and everything changed. Locked down, Jan and I discovered Facebook video calls. The writing group I go to went on line and I began to Zoom or FaceTime regularly with friends. So when I found that Kris Johnson runs a lunchtime write in in the Mslexia Salon each M...

                                                   ‘I had not thought that it would be like this’   This is the last line of a poem by Charles Causley called  Eden Rock . The poet is looking back at his parents as they were when they were younger and sees them gone ahead from him now beckoning him forward:                                                     ‘See where the stream path is Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’   Charles Causley is a poet that I have good cause to remember. When I began teaching at a tough comprehensive school in Tilbury in the 70s one of my first lessons wa...