Authors Electric

  It’s been a busy few days. Last week we visited a couple of castles, Linlithgow Palace first, most famous for its connection to Mary, Queen of Scots. My wife has had a fascination with Mary for as long as I’ve known her and the castle has been closed for the past few years for renovation work, so it was good to finally get there and soak up the atmosphere. As an aside, we also popped into the church that sits alongside, both for the stunning architecture and stained glass windows, and, for myself, to have a close look at the pipe organ they have – I’ve heard it in recordings of Bach and Widor, so it was good to see it in the flesh. Thursday was another train ride, over the Forth Rail Bride, to Aberdour, and have a look around the castle and gardens. This one will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Outlander, as it features as the Benedictine Monastery in the first series. One of the parts that really got me was the room with the painted ceiling. Yes, it’s faint, and...

  It’s been a bit of a grumpy month for me. I’ve had the dubious pleasures of AI foisted on me at work, and spent far too long looking for an off switch for it. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never really bought into the hype about AI. I’ve always thought it’s a bit like 3D TV – quite niche, and ultimately not that useful. Because, fundamentally, it’s not really intelligence – it’s just a cleverly programmed algorithm with a vast trove of data to fall back on for pattern matching. I tried to be fair when evaluating it, but gave up after a day when it confidently informed me that the word ‘strawberry’ contained the letter ‘R’ four times, and showed me a picture of a raspberry. It also insisted there were twenty-five years in half a century. Sigh. Despite this, I’ve had a stream of people gushing over it. The most ironic comment was that it would ‘write my emails for me’ – all I had to do was proof read them and correct them… Suggesting it would be as quick to just writ...

  I’m not long back from a few days’ break. Nothing too exciting, just a wee trip from Scotland to Yorkshire to spend a few days with my parents. The original idea was to take one of the kids with me and use up some of my annual leave before the end of the leave year. Due to various factors beyond my control, I ended up going on my own, and for five days did very little apart from eat, drink, and generally relax. No laptop, or anything like that – the plan was not to write for a few days and spend quality time with my folks. But a couple of things happened whilst I was down there – firstly, I met their cleaner, and it turns out she’s a writer, too. We had a very engaging chat about writing, and the wider process of publishing including book design, illustrations – she writes for small children – and so on. What occurred to me was, despite the fact we write in completely opposite genres, a lot of the considerations we had were the same, albeit sometimes arriving there ...

  People who’ve read previous posts of mine will know I have a deep love of music, primarily classical but other genres as well. It forms a permanent soundtrack to my life, and provides a palette of colours as a background. See, I have synaesthesia. I ‘see’ colours when I hear music (well, all sound, really, but music is much more overt). It’s not something I’ve spent much about – I was in my twenties before I realised it wasn’t the normal state of being for people, and that it had a specific name. All I knew up to then was it was easy to tell when my guitar was in tune as each open string was a specific colour. I say I ‘see’ the colours, but that’s probably a simplification. It’s not the same as seeing something visually, as closing my eyes makes no difference – I still get the same images as I do with eyes open. It was earlier this year, when the BBC Proms were on, when my wife discovered that when I talked about the different colours of the music, I was being lite...

Dear Aunty Debbie. I’m so happy!  (utterly deadpan) Why’s that then, Happy Writer?  HW: Because I’ve had an email from a company that’s going to make my book into a film!  AD: That’s amazing news. Which book is that?  HW: The one I put on Amazon last week. The one you told me needed editing and I couldn’t afford an editor, so I published it anyway.  AD: Okaaay. So what will this company do?  HW: Well, they found my book and they must have loved it so much, they told a producer friend who wants to make it into a film.  A D: They just came across it on Amazon?  H W: Yes – isn’t it incredible?  AD: (Totally incredible. As in not remotely credible …)  HW: And they won’t charge me anything.  AD: I’m sure they won’t. Yet. But this is what will happen:  The company’s representative – let’s call him John – will email you a few times, telling you how much they love your book (but oddly never mention anything specific to your story ...

It’s been a funny few weeks for me. After my week off last month, I managed to catch a rather unpleasant bug and ended up in bed for a week. On the plus side, this gave me a lot of time to read (as I couldn’t do much more than that). It kept me sane (I get rather grumpy when unwell, as I don’t like to be inactive, and I knew I had a fair few jobs planned for the garden), and at least allowed me to make inroads into the huge TBR pile we have – last count had over 500 books still to be read… I also jumped about genres and styles, from horror, to crime fiction, with drama and science fiction in the mix somewhere. But one of the books I most enjoyed was a work of non-fiction, by John Nichol (the navigator from the Tornado shot down during the first Gulf War), called Eject! Eject! . Pauline, my wife, picked this up for my birthday, thinking it would interest me as I used to work on ejection seats. It’s a fascinating read, charting the development of egress systems from the ...

I’ve been out and about the last couple of days, and with more to come. The reason? Twofold, really. One is to spend some time with my family – my wife and I have next week off, and it’s the school holidays here in Scotland so what better opportunity. The other reason is more selfish – I’m looking around for inspiration and ideas of locations that may fit into current or future stories. Although I generally write contemporary crime for adults, I try to place it in a setting I’m familiar with, which usually means Edinburgh and its surroundings. As I usually have a few ideas of certain key scenes when working out the details of a book or story, I find it helpful if I can ground them in real places. My most recent book for adults, The Missing, had certain elements of the plot altered when I wrote the first draft as I worked in real places. (Of course, I usually change the names of places, although a person familiar with the area will almost certainly know what I’m really referring to.) ...

This past month has been quite introspective for me. I’ve been looking back through some of the short stories I’ve written over the past thirty-odd years with a view to seeing if there’s anything in there that still engages me. I will say, I don’t write anywhere near as many shorts as I used to – the books have kind of taken over, there, meaning the time to write something small and self-contained has shrunk – so the majority of them are earlier works. I’m also, for obvious reasons, not revisiting those stories that have been published. I think they can stand on their own merits. This started four or five weeks back, after a conversation with a work colleague who was asking me about writing (surprisingly, not the usual questions about ‘Where do you get your ideas’ and so on). We were discussing how it’s possible to see a writer’s style and voice develop over the years with each book they put out – we started looking at the development of the Harry Potter books, funnily enough, and ...

I’ve been following the news this month with interest. As a writer in Scotland, I’ve been watching the introduction of the new Hate Crime bill and the (predictable) results. If you’ve not seen the detail, basically, if you say or write something that someone perceives to be hateful, then they can report it (and you), with the maximum penalty being 7 years imprisonment. As you can imagine, writers across Scotland have been viewing this with some consternation. I myself write quite dark, gritty psychological crime, and as such, I’ve written characters that run the gamut of the seedier side of life – violent, racist misogynists tend to feature quite a lot in crime fiction. In fact, I’d argue that part of the purpose of crime fiction is to explore the more unsavoury elements of society, and see what makes them tick – is it nature, or nurture, or a combination of both? But writing characters like these doesn’t mean I agree with their views. I’ve written characters before ...

The main topic of discussion in my house these past few weeks (at, least, in terms of book-related) has been trigger warnings, and whether they’re a good thing. I’ve never paid much attention to them, viewing them (rather cynically) as a marketing strategy – I’m reminded of when I was a teenager and a sure-fire way to guarantee a record would sell was to plaster it with stickers spouting text such as ‘Warning: contains explicit lyrics’ and similar. Of course, this all-but-guaranteed people would buy the records, because, well, forbidden… I’m aware there’s been a growing discourse on whether books should contain them, although I’ve not been following it as such – my social media presence is minimal to say the least, so most of what I hear is second-hand information. In my day job, I teach IT systems to healthcare professionals, and part of my remit is to look after mental health nurses. We often chat with them outside of training (and they’re a wonderful resource for a writer, but I ...

It’s that time of year when one usually makes their New Year’s resolutions. I’ve done so in the past (and usually, to be fair, have managed to keep to them; however, I put this down to them being reasonably small steps to take). This year, however, my resolution was not to make any resolutions. Instead of planning for the year, I’m going to try and ‘pants’ it. Pretty much like I do with most of my writing, although I have been dabbling with plotting for a while with reasonable success. That’s not to say I don’t have some ideas in mind for goals I’d like to reach – There’s a couple of pieces of Bach’s music for which I have guitar transcriptions and I’d like to learn them; there’s also a couple of pieces I’d like to master on the piano as well, for example – but I don’t want to set dates on them. I’d rather enjoy the journey of discovery as I come to learn the pieces. It’s a similar story with writing. I have a few projects that I aim to finish this year. I have a new YA...

I was looking for something to repost this month - way too much real-life going on at the moment with both parents incapacitated in various ways and a big birthday (and party) coming up in the next couple of weeks. I first posted this blog below in December 2016 and it struck me how little really has changed. Plus  ça  change and all that, but 2026 is scarily close now in early 2024 ... 2016. A year of change. I wonder when they look back on 2016 in the years and decades to come, whether they will say that 2016 was the turning point, the pivotal moment when the world reached some kind of critical mass? I say they because I’ll be 53 in January and while I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon, this isn’t my world anymore – this world belongs to my daughter and her generation, to make the best of as they see fit with whatever legacy we’ve left them. Brexit and the US elections. Neither gave the result that was expected and both, I think, made people sit up and realise ...

I’ve finally managed to obtain something I’ve wanted for a while – an antique writing slope, almost identical to the one below: It’s probably taken a couple of years of looking to find the one I want, at the right price, and in the right condition. I must’ve become a bit of an expert on them since I started looking. I didn’t want to buy new – part of the appeal, for me, as the history attached to it. I also didn’t want a restored version, for similar reasons. But I did want something that was more than just a pile of broken bits – surprising how hard it was to find something to match the image in my head. I want to put my own stamp on it, give it my own twist to make it mine. I was also looking for a chance to flex my woodworking skills, and challenge myself with something different from the usual DIY or garden furniture. My most complex woodworking project so far has been a guitar, which I built many years ago; starting a family and changing jobs has meant less time ...

Ah, December. Christmas approacheth, and what does that mean?  Television ads, of course. And, oh my, do we in the UK have a bizarre selection this year.  Stupendous New York Christmas tree. How did this happen, this escalation of The Christmas Advert? So that all the big hitters – John Lewis, Marks and Spencers, Aldi, Tesco etc – feel they have to go all out every year to outdo themselves in lavishness and sentimentality… And do they actually boost sales, the point of advertising in the first place (though you'd never guess it from these intensely concocted minidramas)?  Well, funny you should ask that (oh all right, that was me). Because, judging by the reaction to this year’s John Lewis creation, they do. Though not quite (tee hee) as the Great Retailer intended (see below).  But first to the one there’s been all the fuss about. Yup, the M & S offering , which, because of popular outcry, had the scene showing red and green paper hats burning in a fireplace rem...

It’s been a busy few weeks for me. We’ve bought a house (and a car, as the old one was getting rather past it) and had all the attendant fun that goes with that. Still, at least I’m settled now. It’s had an impact on my writing, for obvious reasons – from not having the time or energy after a full day at work and then messing around for a couple of hours with boxes (and sheesh, I didn’t realise just how many books we actually own), to practicalities such as not having internet set up or secured,. As a wee reward, I treated myself to a trip to the opera (Rossini, the Barber of Seville) on World Opera Day. Wonderful staging, and the cast was stellar. A thoroughly good time was had. But it got me thinking on the way home, just how many parallels could be drawn between writing and opera (or, I suppose, other sorts of show or TV programmes). There was a wonderful phrase I heard (or read – it was a long time ago) that said good writing made it easy to suspend your disbelief and fill in ...

A long-time colleague of mine recently left our team, taking up a new post. He’d been in the team for sixteen years, so a decent send-off was required. I usually get asked to write something when people leave (a short, humorous poem or sketch) – it’s become a bit of a tradition, in fact, and over the years I must have written seven or eight of these little comic vignettes, but this time was a little different – as I’m currently in charge of the department, it fell to me to do the ‘official’ leaving speech as well. I got there in the end – it was just a couple of hundred words, but took a surprising amount of time to write. It went down well, in the end – clean enough not to upset anyone, with some gentle ribbing recalling a few comic moments, and I managed to deliver it (after a few rehearsals behind a locked door) with perfect timing. So, a success. This was last Thursday morning. We’d also arranged to have a few drinks after work the next night, and during the afternoon, I began t...

The last few weeks have been a hectic mess. I’ve not been writing as much as I’ve been too busy dealing with the vagaries of real life, but did manage to revisit an idea I’d sketched out some years ago. The seeds of this story hark back around seven or eight years, and were planted when I heard Professor Stephen Hawking talking about the dangers of artificial intelligence. (Having seen the output of most of the machine learning models so far, I think there’s quite a way to go yet; I usually refer to it as ‘artificial idiocy’ – yes, I’m a curmudgeonly old technology sceptic – as most of the time it seems too easy to find faults either in the system itself, or the training data used ; you don’t have to look far to find stories illustrating how biased facial recognition systems can be, for example.) Over the next few days, there was a raft of stories across various media, either proclaiming AI as the salvation of humanity, or the beginning of the end. But one thing struck ...

  It’s been a funny month. I’ve been a bit of a party animal (by my standards, anyway) which on the surface should mean less time to write. I’ve also been spending more time on the garden this year, as since moving last year I now have a huge amount of space for flowers and vegetables, as well as a large expanse of lawn to keep tidy. Yet it hasn’t worked out like that. The physical time to write has shrunk, that’s for sure. But I’ve found I’ve been using what time I do have much more productively. All those hours in the garden weeding and mowing and watering and nurturing the plants (and the rhubarb, started from seed last year, is now almost four feet tall and there’s some ready to harvest already) gives one time to think, and sub-consciously, that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s the only way I can explain it – every night when I sit down to write, the words have flowed, minimum of 500 but often edging close to (or even over) the 1k mark. In a maximum of two hours. And ...

I’ve been enjoying myself with short stories recently. It’s how I (and I suspect a lot of other writers) first started. I’ve not really written much in the short form over the last few years, though, preferring to concentrate on the books. However, I was in the pub few weeks back and was discussing writing-related matters with a couple of friends. One of them casually tossed out a suggestion to write about the current raft of AI and smart gadgets. (Slight aside here – why is it always non-writers who come out with such lofty suggestions but no comprehension of the technicalities? The words were something along the lines of, ‘You should write a short story about it, bet it’d sell dead easy and wouldn’t take long. Easy money for you.’) So, I politely made noises of ‘possibly’ whilst thinking, ‘Not on your nelly.’ I considered pointing out the time involved in first outlining a story, then researching things, followed by a revised outline to fix all the impossibilities in...