Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I plan an outline of any story or blog I write and find doing this reveals shapes I use. For a blog, my writing usually has a linear shape. I want to make certain points. I start at A and finish at Z. Stories have more variety. I have used circular tales where I start with an opening line and close the story with it. All the action happens in the “middle”. I like the use of repetition for the opening and closing lines here. It gives good “echoes”. I use linear for stories a lot but vary the format. For example, I’ve written A to B stories as “normal” prose, as diaries, as letters, as monologues etc.  Even when I use twist endings and know how a tale will finish first, it is still a linear shape. The line is working “backwards” when I do this. Do I decide the shape of the story in advance? Generally, no. A character occurs to me. A situation occurs to me. Sometimes just from that I can tell this situation would w...

  I have now been an author for eight years and my journey has been full of surprises most of them of the delightful kind. Occasionally, one comes along which isn't quite so pleasant, and I have learnt to roll with the punches. I was taken by surprise today that it was actually the 16th of the month, the day I was due to put this blog up. As I'm knee deep in an editing project I couldn't muster up a single original thought to help my fellow authors. It was then I realised that this could make a great topic in itself. What do we, as authors, do when life takes us completely by surprise?  If the surprise is a joyful one, the first thing we do is celebrate and party our little socks off. Well, maybe not party like it's 1999 as we are still in the middle of a covid pandemic. However, marking it in some way seems appropriate. I've had a couple of lovely surprises over the past few months. Firstly, I was given a grant by The Society of Authors for a research trip to Antig...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. How easy do you find coming up with ideas? I’m always on the lookout for new ones. I write flash fiction and blog for online magazines, so I always need a stock of ideas.    As well as writing on topics of interest to me (and I hope other writers), I use random generators to trigger ideas. These work especially well for fiction but I have used things like a random question generator to give me a blog theme.   I also use prompt books and have contributed to a couple. I like the challenge of rising to a theme set by someone else and bringing my take to it. With the random generators, I can do this via variety of means.  I have used the following:- Random word/object generators. Random noun/adjective/verb generators. Random name generators (a recent story of mine was accepted for an online magazine and the idea for it came from the generated name). Random question generators. (Great for use as...

I'm going to be honest here and say I was fresh out of ideas for this month's blog. The more I searched my brain, the more it said, "Get lost, I'm having time off." No amount of cajoling would make it change its mind. So here I was with blank page syndrome on steroids. I thought I would turn to previous posts from my own blog - Bookaholic. This one from 2016 immediately leapt out at me and I just knew I had to riff off that. It's perfect as the world is just opening up to travel again. Original Blog Post - The Joy of Constant Travel I've been flying around the world recently as well as chasing around the UK. Life as a writer is so busy and often I think that I don't have time for any of this. It's getting in the way of me actually doing any writing. But on a number of occasions I have discovered that travelling can also broaden and enrich my abilities as a writer. This morning I was on my way to The British Library. To get from where I was staying ...

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...

An adventure in real time... September 5, 2016: 7:30 a.m. Welcome! Welcome to the MacRath Institute's Lab for a stunning new experiment on writing a post with no subject in mind. I submit a post here on the 12th of each month while also maintaining my own blog. This week the two deadlines conflicted. Though I'd finished the AE blog early, I hadn't even started my weekend entry for my own blog. So I had to do something quickly or I was sure to lose face. Solution: I posted the AE blog onto my own, putting myself in a new pickle. Still, I had a week to write a well-crafted piece for AE. My mind turned to the subjects that interest me most: transitions and segues in writing...plain and fancier styles...time and the writer...deadlines...book titles and covers...promotional flair...expensive vs. cheap cigars...pizza dough and Chicken Parmesan...razzmatazz and personality...moondancing...Groucho Marx and Marlon Brando...tiny-waisted women...and, above all, epigr...

One of the worst things about being a self-published author is that you have to do everything. I mean bleedin’ everything , including all those clever, specialised things that normal people can’t even understand. You either have to learn to do them yourself, or pay through the nose to get someone else to do them for you. Nowhere is this problem more sticky than when you’re dealing with pictures, as you frequently are. You may be in the business of arranging words on the page or screen, but we live in a visual world and sooner or later you have to worry about images, too. Book covers, for example: unless you’re a graphic artist as well as a writer, these are probably best left to people who have at least a vague notion of what they’re doing. And what about blogs, websites, Facebook pages, and so on? They must come complete with images! Nice, fancy images that will hold people’s wandering eyes and reel them in! A blank screen is exactly what you don't want. Image credit: P...

  Computer's switched on. Right, that's the technical bit sorted. Now, who are we going to embarrass this week?  I first started writing a blog in order to learn about the technicalities of doing blog posts - you know, how to insert pictures and make the words stick to the screen in more or less the right order and places. I'd been invited to join a group blog, you see (this one, actually) and didn't want to look too much like a total techno-numpty when it was my turn to produce something. A wippitty blog The practice blog was called A Tale of Two Wippitts and the first post took me ages to write. It was all about wippitty predilections for vole au vents I seem to remember. And then it took ages to work out how to upload pictures and position them ... never mind going on to conquer stuffing in links and stuff like that. Unless you are a newbie at blogging, you are probably rolling your eyes at this point. But it was all new - and quite exciting - ...

If you’re reading these words, there’s a very good chance that you’re a writer. In these days of PoD, digital publishing, and free and instantly-available blogs, there’s also a good chance that you’re published in some form or another. Do you, like most writers, assert your copyright? Or do you distribute your works under the Creative Commons   licence? Image credit: Xander | Wikimedia Commons If you assert your own copyright, do you respect other people’s? It’s a question worth thinking about. You can’t consistently both assert your copyright and flout other people’s, and yet some writers do. (If, on the other hand, you’re on a crusade against the very notion of copyright, then you can at least disregard copyright and do so consistently. For legal reasons, I don’t recommend it.) There seem to be two basic strands of thought concerning copyright issues: 1) copyright must be respected and breach of copyright is theft; and, 2) copyright is an out-of-date and often u...

Writing as a writer (is there any other way?) I sometimes feel an irksome dissatisfaction that I’m just not getting enough. Enough exposure, if you know what I mean. I feel I should be, well, putting it out there a bit more than I do. I made the mistake of reading some statistics online. Apparently, most people in my peer group are managing it around two to three times a week. Some even more. A few energetic, dedicated souls are getting down to it every single day, for far longer and with more satisfying results (you can tell by the number of comments they get). But I’m among the growing number who find that they’re just too tired at the end of the day, or too busy, or just too disillusioned with the working relationship, to bare our souls on the internet very often. No, once a month is about as often as I can manage to write a blog post. There you were talking about sex, I thought you were talking about holidays. WALKS! I mean walks. Blogging can be an uncomfortabl...

One of the great things about having a dog - or in my case dogs - is that they give you a guilt-free excuse for stepping away from the keyboard or catching up on the more tedious things like filling in the tax return or housework ... they keep me regularly exercised, make sure I don't forget mealtimes,and ensure plenty of breaks for essential maintenance such as grooming, training, teeth brushing, nail clipping, tummy tickling, treat feeding and general spoiling and gazing at in adoration.They also ensure that I get up at a sensible hour and don't waste the morning lolling in bed ... But just recently Archie has taken it into his head that five o'clock (we're still talking about the morning here) is the new six o'clock. The day now starts something like a variation on the old 'are we there yet?' scenario. It goes a bit like this: Archie: Quick! Quick! Wake up! Me: (sleepily) What? Why? Archie: WAKE UP!!! Me: What? Is the house on fire? Have burg...

It was a dark and stormy night when I sat down to write this blog post. I hoped that it might help to inspire me, but several hours later I still hadn’t got the foggiest idea and was still racking my brains for something to write about. As we all know, the only good cliché is a dead cliché and I had really hoped to avoid trotting out the same old trite and hackneyed phrases about the same old topics, but to be honest, new and original insights are my Achilles’ heel: what I’m good at is putting a new spin on things, at finding a different angle, rather than generating something genuinely innovative … The thunder outside had finally stopped and it was now raining cats and dogs, but I was still no closer to my goal: for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything and it looked as though I was going to have to pull an all-nighter to get my post written on time. But you live and learn, and in a flash I suddenly realised that the solution to my dilemma had been staring me in the fa...