Authors Electric

The brain is an amazing organ - it literally works twenty-four hours a day, whether we are asleep or awake, making sure our bodies continue to work to their optimum capacity. As writers we use our brains continually, taking in stimulus from all our senses and storing them as ideas we can use in books. Even when we are asleep we often dream of plots that can be used in a book. I don't know about you but I find ideas zinging into my brain almost every second of the day and bouncing around in there like an acrobatic troop on steroids. Yet, I am sure you will agree, these ideas don't stay there for long as they are usually booted out by the next brilliant idea that claims squatter's rights. This constant stimulation can be draining and exhausting but we creative types struggle to switch it off. So, what can we do to organise things better? Quite a bit it turns out.  1. We all know this one but write things down. I'm putting it here as it is possibly the number one way we ca...

My partner keeps his brain alive - his expression - by playing Scrabble.      He's only been playing the game for about a year, but he took to it ferociously and now plays every chance he gets. He even plays against himself.       He joined his local U3A and their unsuspecting Scrabble-arm made him welcome - since then he's beaten them all, even their best player, monotonously, like gongs. And by 'beaten', I mean by over 300 points.      In self-defense, they brought in rules such as: No cheating by using the official Scrabble dictionary instead of an old Concise Collins without a cover, published in the 1940s. And then: No looking things up in dictionaries.      It did them no good. He's simply memorised all the allowable two and three letter words, and all the allowable words containing 'U', such as: usufruct : the right to enjoy the use of another's property, so long as it's not damaged or destroyed, and ...