Authors Electric

Because social media and the trials and tribulations associated with using the various options loom large in the novel I'm currently writing, I thought I would share what's been happening with my own social media accounts. They haven't caused me quite as much trouble as my characters are having in the novel, but I must admit to finding aspects of them a little baffling/annoying/anxiety-inducing just lately. I've been using Twitter (X) and Facebook for some time. Although Twitter has been horrible lately in many ways, there are still some nice things about it. For instance at the time of writing I've just taken part in a hectic and very friendly discussion there with other writers and readers about cosy mysteries, using a hashtag to group all the relevant posts together. And then there are the cat and dog accounts, of course! I see that recently many of these have also appeared on other platforms, so I'm fairly confident that if/when I give up on Twitter I will s...

The new year is steadily marching on and I am sure you may have had your fill of New Year posts. So, you may be wondering what on earth I am doing writing another post and where I might be going with this. Let me start by saying, December should have been my last post with Authors Electric and I was planning on handing over my weekly post to a new author. However, during my planning for this coming year I found myself planning posts for my monthly Authors Electric post. I may have thought I was finished with AE but it turns out I was not, which I am actually frightfully excited about. This started with planning and it is planning I want to talk about today.  Usually, when we plan and set out our goals for the year ahead we decide what we want to achieve and what steps need to be taken in order to achieve those goals. Often this means giving up other aspects of our writing and publishing life. I have learnt a valuable lesson during this process, that being I should think carefully a...

Image Credits:- Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Photos of The Hayes, Swanwick were taken by me, Allison Symes.   I will still be at the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School when this goes live. This event is my big writing event of the year. It is a joy to get together with other writers, enjoy a range of workshops, and convivial company. I come back inspired, refreshed, and tired! All that creative energy takes it out of me  but in a good way.  That made me wonder about holiday reading and writing. Do you read and/or write more or less during the summer? That answer may depend I suspect on whether you have school age children or other commitments. For me, the writing dips as I take much needed time off but the blessings of being a flash fiction writer is if I only write a couple of hundred words a day, I’ve probably completed a story in that word count. I also prepare and schedule blogs in advance including this one. I love scheduling! It means I can take ...

 Herb Caen This marks seven years that I've been throwing blogs against the wall here at Authors Electric, the pioneering collective of distinguished independent writers that welcomed me as a member in May, 2015. A lot has happened since then - more than I could ever cover, but I've done my best to vary the menu. I was a mere 78 years old and Obama still was President. Beyond personal and public events, I've written about my books here, about writing, the peeves and bigger questions that bedevil independent writers like ourselves in the new era of digital publishing and its contradictions. Mainly, our issues remain the same as always: deciphering the creative process, and figuring why it seems to stall out sometimes. Most of all, however, its not been a one-way street., I've learned a lot from what our 28 other members have been writing here every day along with our guest bloggers - a lot more than I could on my own. I wish I could be like my self-disciplined colleague...

I've been a blogger for a dozen years now--I started blogging in 2008, as a daily writing practice. Daily (w)rite has grown since then--from the initial days of crickets to the more than thirty thousand followers today. That sounds like a half-decent number, but engagement is always much lower than the number of followers. It took years of blogging to build the small community I have today-- of all my followers, I possibly have about 200 bloggers who I regularly/ semi-regularly interact with on the blog and over social media. Others drop by less often, and my interactions with them is sporadic at best. The best thing about blogging was the amount of information exchange. The guidance on book marketing and the writing life has also been invaluable. I follow blogs by other writers and publishing professionals, and the generosity of their sharing has made it possible for me to carve out a path for myself as best as I could, learning from others' mistakes, and hopefully, ...

Monkeys blogging Juliofranco [Public domain] Wikimedia Commons I started blogging because my publisher told me to. All authors have to blog these days, she said, just as all authors need a social media presence. Readers want to feel a personal connection to an author. But I know plenty of authors who refuse to blog. They warned me. It’s too much work. It will distract you from your real writing. You’ll run out of topics. You’ll get bored. As it turned out, I didn’t. I’ve been blogging once a week now for almost two years. Blog post #100 is coming up soon. Sure, I’ve taken breaks for holidays and travel but so far I’ve never considered stopping. So what’s in it for me? blogging is writing, too I write every day, 7 days a week. Usually, I start with my journal. It’s my morning workout. Some days, all I can manage is a list of the things I need to do that day or what I ate the night before. But more often than not, I’ll get a brainwave. A new plot twist or scene th...

If you want to get ahead, get a hat - I mean, a blog We're all so used to reading and writing blogs now that it's easy to forget that they are a relatively recent phenomenon.  Jane Perrone, writing on The Guardian's blog just 14 years ago , felt the need to explain what they were for the sake of the uninitiated: A weblog is, literally, a "log" of the web - a diary-style site, in which the author (a "blogger") links to other web pages he or she finds interesting using entries posted in reverse chronological order. We Sing, We Dance, We Blog... I'd almost forgotten that blogs used to be called weblogs . When I see that word now, my instinct is to read it as "we blog" rather than "web log", as if it's part of the declension of the verb "to blog". (Iblog, youblog, heblogs, weblog ...) Interesting, too, that Perrone defines the main purpose of a weblog as being to link to other web pages rather than...

Have you ever considered joining a blog team like Author's Electric but thought you couldn't because of the learning curve it would involve. Well, don't let that put you off. To help you here's my quick tour for getting up and running.  Note:  For this post I've assume you've taken the leap and joined a team, so you can at least sign in to your account. Top tip: But before we start my top tip is that although blogger auto saves, I'm a belt and braces type of blogger. So, I press save (top right) on a regular basis, just in case.  When you sign in hopefully you’ll get this page – obviously with you at the top and not me. Starting: Click on the ‘new post’ rectangle at the top of the screen near your photo. This page should appear: I begin by giving the post a title which is followed by my name. I tend to place a dot between title and my name (I’m a Mac user so this is ...