Authors Electric

Enginesoptional, Redbubble, 'We Fall Only To Rise.' Long-sleeved t-shirt   Earlier this month, my AE colleague Debbie Bennett posted an amusing (but saddening) blog about the threat posed to writers by the many people, in Debbie's words, 'upload[ing] thousands of low content bits of tat a day' . Much of the tat clumsily ripped off from others. Ripped off from us . As Amazon's bots and human staff check everything uploaded for copyright infringement and other crimes, the rise in low-content tat means that it takes longer for all books published through them to be approved: so the shameless intellectual theft of a few makes indie publishing harder for us all, even when our material is legit. I was reminded of another threat to all us hard-working, and mostly under-paid, writers and artists: the much vaunted AI or Artificial Intelligence. One of my brothers told me about a Polish fantasy artist named Greg Rutkowski who, it seems, is being persecuted and ripped ...

It still amazes me that many adults don’t read fiction. I used to take it for granted that everyone did, until a chance comment from a friend, an artist, shocked me to the core.  ‘No, I don’t read stories’, she said, ‘in fact I don't read much at all. I don't have time'. She might as well have said ‘I don’t breathe.’ Sadly,  I’ve since discovered that ‘not reading stories’ is quite common, even among teachers. Perhaps it’s all that paperwork. No time to read anything other than the latest advice about improving their performance and meeting the agreed ‘learning outcomes'. Pah. Fiction didn’t feature much on the curriculum in my own school days, during the 50s and 60s, and there was certainly no discussion about what we read in our spare time. We were allowed to read a book, carefully censored, at playtime, as aimless running about was frowned on. In class we read the Greek Myths, Arthur Grimble’s ‘A Pattern of Islands’ (non-fiction) and CS Forester’s ‘The ...