Authors Electric

--At last, I'd exhausted all my excuses! And I'd had some great ones for not returning to the WIP I'd orphaned after a knee replacement last June. Check these out: --The post-surgical pain was extreme and I was stoned on meds for most of the first month. --PT offered worse pain with discouraging results.: my  lack of flexion seemed hopeless. At home, when I wasn't force-flexing or icing the knee, I brooded on the strong chance that I'd end up a cripple after FIVE procedures on the same right knee. since 2021. --I could neither stand or sit long enough to write. --Worse, I lost track of the two plot lines meant to fuse in this new book--one rooted in a novel I'd abandoned years ago. And along with losing track I found myself losing my creative  nerve as three months, four months, five months passed. But wait. As I wrote in last month's post, I decided the first thing I needed to do was regain my confidence in every way I could. With luck, I could transfer unr...

In some ways, we should be celebrating the rising pension age here in the UK. After all, it's official recognition that people over 65, including women, are still active and healthy enough to be working and earning a living. True, I can't quite imagine myself in my late sixties doing my old job of getting up at 6am, mucking out five stables and riding three racehorses each morning in all weathers, occasionally falling off them, cycling home for lunch and then back again to groom, feed and settle 'my' horses for the night, 13 days every fortnight, with maybe the 14th day spent travelling to some distant racecourse for overnight racing. I was in my thirties when I did that job, and already older than most of the other stable staff at the time. But writing books, managing various online activities from the comfort of my own sofa/bed/kitchen table, and the occasional excitement of a book signing tour with not too much danger of getting dumped in a hedge on a foggy winter...

IDEAL MOTHER'S DAY GIFT!!!  She gave birth to you, so show her you care with this thing for removing the dead skin off her poor peeling old feet. Yes, it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday in the UK, so there’s been an outbreak of ‘suitable gift’ ads, this one was on TV. I have seen in shop windows such things as kitchen waste bins, washing up bowls, and aprons displayed with ‘FOR MOTHERS DAY!’ signs, as if we’ve not suffered enough. On the other hand, when not scrubbing or throwing out rubbish, Mums are delicate creatures who can’t use anything unless it’s covered in pink flowers, even tools. Flowery secateurs from M&S for when someone's about to be 'all thumbs'  Like these secateurs: very useful, because when torturing one of your henchmen who’s been caught skimming off the top, it’s nice to have something dainty-looking to do it with. Of course there are masses of flower (though the prices are hiked up to their armpits for that weekend) and chocolate ads. Wimmi...

Dorothy L Sayers Fabulous and dead "Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.” Dorothy L Sayers.   When ill health forced me to give up teaching some years ago, I used my convalescence to catch up on reading. This was 2000 and bookshops were awash with chick-lit. (Jane Austen and vampires hadn’t yet been discovered by the marketing men.) As I was forty-seven, with only a limited interest in shopping, shoes and handbags, I struggled to find commercial fiction that reflected my taste or even my life. Few novels featured women of my age centre stage. Romantic heroines over forty simply didn’t exist. Mature women appeared only as somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife and they never had sex (unless it was for comic effect.)   LINDA GILLARD Fabulous and 50-something So I gave up looking and decided to write a book for myself, the sort of thing I wanted to read, but couldn’t find: a thinki...