Authors Electric

Never have we been in more need of fiction writers telling the truth. I'm not going to engage in a philosophical argument about the nature of truth. My truth might not be yours, that sort of thing. It is the bread and butter of fiction - creating characters who have different views of the world and develop a narrative in which those differences collide and are resolved. Maybe not a 'happy every after' but at least an understanding that allows the people to rub along together well enough (and the baddies to get their comeuppance). I mean objective truth. The 'grass is green' sort of truth. Having written that I can see that even grass can be brown. But surely we can all agree on the basic nature of grass: it grows in soil, regrows if it's cut, provides essential nutrients for countless creatures etc. These are truths the fiction writer takes for granted. When my daughters were young one loved the story of a witch who tired of everything being green and rep...

My eldest grandson is twelve today. I'm sure those of us with grandchildren all remember where we were when we heard they had been born. Those nail-biting days beforehand. That overwhelming joy to know that mother and baby were fine ... or more serious nail-biting if all is not as we'd hoped. But this grandson's arrival was a bit different for me. I was over half way through my Grown-up Gap Year. My daughter had told me she was pregnant three weeks before I set off - and a week before she returned to her job in Caracas. The original plan was for her to have the baby in Venezuela and I would go out to help when she went back to work - my travels would be completed by then. But Chavez was already in power and threatening to refuse exit visas to any child born in the country until he or she reached 18. (It was an attempt to stop the trade in beautiful brown babies to childless couples in America). And so she decided to return to the UK for the birth. (As things have turn...

I love big skies - I now live in a top floor flat with a view across rooftops to the distant hills. And above - magnificent skies. And I love words. I love the way they come out to play and surprise me. I love the way they creep up on me when I'm not looking. I'm a wordsmith - teasing away at a sentence until it does exactly what I need it to do gives me great pleasure. But I run out of words when it comes to my skies. Which troubles me - I'd like to be able to use the stories in skies as metaphors. I'd like to use more adventurous words than lowering, or shimmering, or azure. And so I'm going to do something I rarely do on this blog - give you pictures. Pictures without words. These are all taken from exactly the same place on my balcony. Please - can you find original ways to describe them? Believe it or not, I do, occasionally, stop looking at my skies and do some writing. You can find out more at jomcarroll.co.uk