Authors Electric

The Art Shop: delightfully situated in an old traditional row! Earlier this week I visited our local Art Shop… Why was this significant enough to post on Facebook (my only regular one of ‘ the socials’ )?  Maybe it’s continuity – continuity, like community, is important to human life. In my post, I also told readers that the Art Shop was a very human place. It is. For artists, crafters, sewing and modelling creatives, the art shop is an essential. Its raw materials – paints, canvases, sketchbooks, embroidery thread, pastels, drawing pens – and that essential art-shop smell… remembered from childhood, the Art Shop, with it brown painted outside, and its inner scent of pencils… Noticeably, this art shop post has attracted the longest list of ‘likes’ I can remember having – friends (‘real life’), friends (FB, only), and relatives crowded to endorse the good vibes of of a shop selling artist’s materials... Evidently, all regarding the Art Shop as a humane and satisfying place! So, why ...

  Empty window reflects the age of change.. People fleeing Twitter in response to Elon Musk’s purchase, and in the same week, though not for the same apparent reason, a number of fellow writers warning their readers that they are quitting blogging.    Change. Not for the same reasons, though possibly change in one area of social media may influence some to think of changes they might make in another where they advertise their books? Mostly, it seems, either in order to develop some other aspect their writing, or because they feel their blog is making less impact on sales.   Meeting each other and joining this conversation in the group’s News Feed, these writers were agreed that ‘it’s time to move on’ from blogging, because, as everyone knows, nobody bothers to read blogs any more.   Whether that is true of ‘everyone’, I’m not totally convinced: but of course a blog post takes time to write, and if the readership is unknown, or if followers are few in number, t...

There is always one thing you can guarantee in life, that being, change will inevitably come. The world is changing at a rapid rate. Technology is changing at a rapid rate. Life moves ever faster and often it feels that the changes are propelling us. The reason I am thinking so deeply about change at the  moment is because I own apple everything. iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac - there's an apple on the back of every piece of technology I own.  This forced me into a lot of change recently due to the fact apple has updated all its operating systems - IOS, the new iPad OS and OSX Cantana. If this sounds like double dutch to you and you're an apple owner, you'll soon find out what it means. How, I hear you ask, does this affect me as a writer. The first impact of this universal upgrade is the time it takes. I had a small window of opportunity, whilst I had a cup of tea, to upgrade my iMac. Or so I thought. I duly clicked download and, before my very eyes, a message poppe...

2015 or thereabouts, and I was four years into this self-publishing lark. Four years seemed like forever at the time; it was in early 2011, after my dad bought me a kindle for a birthday present, that my life as a writer changed forever. From a collection of short stories which had already earned their word count, through a young adult fantasy which had only narrowly missed acceptance by a couple of big trad publishers and into a six-book dark crime series – and I thought I was there. Summer 2015 and I’m making a respectable second income … … and suddenly everything changed. I can't even pinpoint when it was when sales tailed off, when the Facebook posts became less frantic, when twitter stopped dominating out lives. Was it the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Lending Library, KDP Select or just changes in algorithms? Or maybe the bubble just burst, but things seem very different now in early 2019. From the authors I knew a few years ago – the group of independent writers...

From Skin Wars - Life imitating art imitating life. Oscar Wilde, famously quoted as saying 'life imitates art far more than art imitates life', must be spinning in his grave about now. Certainly, one hundred and thirty years ago his statement was probably true. In fact, it was probably true twenty years ago. Now, however, life has once again taken the reins and is moving and changing at a pace too fast for even the most trendy hipsters to keep up with. Social landscapes are constantly changing. Now sex and gender mean different things and it's becoming more commonly accepted that there are dozens of the latter. Technology that seemed decades or even centuries away now looks plausible in the next few years. Fake news is so common, even from previously trusted sources, that the real trick is finding true news. The political landscape pushes the boundaries of even the most on-trend Tom Clancy or Bill Patterson novel (in fact, the latter has even joined forces with a ...

The future is here and it's everything, and nothing, like what we expected. It's taken a while longer to get here than I thought it would back while watching the Jetsons as a kid, but the future I dreamed of is finally arriving. And now that it is, it's much more exciting and more frightening than I ever considered it might be. The ever-present connectedness and constant surveillance combined with rapid scientific and technological progress means this is both a thrilling and a frustrating time to be a science fiction writer (but it's a great time to be alive!). Fifteen years ago, back before I began writing seriously, I started a far future story. Set one thousand years in the future, it featured technology such as cerebral-embedded computers, technology-based cyberpathic control, automated waste reclamation drones, clothing that could change colours based on the user's desires, tattoos with patterns linked to the owner's mood, and genetically engineere...

Man wielding his mighty plunger You know, we all get bunged up now and again. No, I’m not talking about constipation, I leave that to cringe-making TV ads. However I might be using plumbing metaphors, partly, ok, largely so I can write about men with enormous tools (yes I know there are female plumbers, and small tools, but those are for other blogs, other times). Man with enormous tool. Just because I like writing that.  There have been many discussions of Writers’ Block online, and responses are reminiscent of those about sea- or morning-sickness, or gluten or dairy intolerance, in that those who’ve never had it (YET), often seem to assume it’s imagined or just other writers being over-precious weedy wets chiz chiz. Just apply bum to chair, fingers to keyboard, and keep going, they bark like Sergeant Majors. Those of us with livings to earn can’t afford to have WB! Well those who lay bricks can’t afford to have bad backs, and yet they do. Others, at all levels of fame...