Authors Electric

Scary stories read out loud late at night in a big old barn. Yorkshire, middle-of-nowhere, halfway down the valley at the end of a steep lane. It’s late November and the weather forecast is for high winds and snow tonight.  Sounds a bit of a cliché, doesn’t it?  Go to bed after a few glasses of wine. Get woken up by big bangs in the distance somewhere. It’s windy. Get up at 3am for a wee – light switch – nothing. No power. Okaaay…. A few hours later and even the security lighting has failed. Look out of the window and it’s snowing. Even more of a  cliché?  (c) Ariell Cacciola There's no power, no heat, no light. By the morning, I could at least see, so I wander downstairs, wondering which one of the 14 of us will be the first body to be found in this classic set-up for a murder-mystery! Still no power and no gas here either, so can’t even make coffee and we have to wait for somebody who knows about these things to lay and light a wood fire in the sitting room, so we ...

Katherine recently pointed out that Authors Electric has been going for ten years. As I’ve said on Facebook, that means I’ve put out over 120 random witterings over the years and I wonder where I dredge up all this rubbish from? Most of the random musings are 11th-hour-I-need-to-come-up-with-something-right- now posts, with the occasional gem, where I've had an idea or a thought and run with it, letting it take me where it will, with some googling thrown in along the way for luck. But it's been a quick ten years - time really does go faster the older you get. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose and all that ... So what's changed for me and my cohorts? By this, I mean the group of us who started at more-or-less the same time: those people I knew already who jumped on the indie bandwagon with me back in 2011, those I ended up sitting close to as the wagon began bumping its way down the rocky path of publishing, or the writers who joined me months or years into my j...