Authors Electric

Chocolate cake and cat teacosy When I’m not writing, or reading, or walking, or being with friends and family, I like to bake. Recently I was trying out new recipes for muffins and scones. At the same time, I was finishing a final, final edit of my new novel “The Shadows on the Grass,” and it has occurred to me that there are definite similarities between baking and writing.  To write a novel you need a story and just, as a novel is targeted for a specific group, so is cake. Will it be for a children’s party, brunch, an intimate tea for two? Must it be vegan, dairy, or wheat free? Can it sit for hours in the oven, or must it be whisked up quickly for unexpected guests? Will it entail elaborate icing, or be packed into a lunch box? A novel will not only have a narrative, there will also be a theme. Just as cake might be chocolate, or lemon drizzle, a rich Dundee, or a light as air sponge, the book might be about grief, or love, or what happens when society, as we k...

Me after everyone else in the world has left. You know that thing where you walk out to pat the coalman’s horse, and a speeding Lexus mows you down? That’s called future shock. Technology and culture race by so fast that you’re left stupefied, feeling obsolete. And sometimes the cause of this trauma is already considered old-hat by some. What I’m going to rave about here is apparently ‘sew last decade’. Indeed, it’s considered a classic, so fast do these things move now. I’m sorry, cool young person who just stumbled on this blog by accident, I’d never heard of it before. Okay? Consider me woken up. My tale I wol bigynne. It started when I found a page of pithy quotes from a fictional character, a villain, a truly nightmarish specimen. This character, GLaDOS, is a sentient computer, inspired by HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but taking the psychoses up to eleven. She could be HAL’s bloodthirstier, more cake-obsessed little sister, venting sarcasm and passive agg...