Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Images of the north-east coast of Scotland were taken by me, Allison Symes.   By the time this goes out on Authors Electric , I would have just returned from a wonderful week away on the beautiful north-east coast of Scotland, which is somewhere I am always pleased to head. Going here makes me feel as if I have got right away from it all.   But how would our characters have the change of scene which does them the world of good and can be a pivotal story point? Would they have to literally get away from where they are based or would the right conversation with a mentor like character be enough to give them a change of scene in terms of seeing what they now have to do when before they could not? A change of scene doesn’t need to be for something as dramatic as for a quest story, though it is the obvious route to go. A minor change can often be enough to get the character through something.  For example, ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. No kidding, Sherlock, I know but I suspect there have been a few love stories doing the rounds this month. Wonder why…  That said the thought of Valentine’s Day and associated tales led me to wonder about popular themes and whether anything new can be said to still make the best of them. Naturally some themes will turn up time and again for competitions and markets because they will always appeal to us. The world isn’t going to run out of love stories. It doesn’t mean authors should stop writing them, far from it. Themes reflect the human condition, which is why we always identify with popular themes.   The ideal then is to bring something new to the mix. My way into that is via the character(s). There has to be something about them which would make them stand out to me first, then potential readers. If the character doesn’t grab my attention, I can hardly expect them to grab the attention of anyone else....

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love author interviews whether I conduct them (for an online magazine) or if I’m reading or listening to them. I always learn something of interest. I  find how writers go about producing their work: an endlessly fascinating topic as we all approach writing in different ways. I’m not averse to picking up good tips either! What is always encouraging is in finding out other writers also go through the rejection business. It is good to know you’re not alone on this. When I conduct interviews, I want to find out what has led to the book which is being launched or how the author is making progress since I last spoke to them.  I also like to ask for someone’s three top marketing tips because there is so much here, I don’t think any one writer can (a) know them all and (b) there is often common ground as to what works best for more than one author I’ve talked to. I see that as being good ground to follow myself!...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. There are few books which have flopped for me. There are some I won’t read due to personal taste, my faith etc., but everyone has likes and dislikes. What I dislike is finding a book that looks promising, I read, and it falls flat. Life is too short for wasted reads! In these thankfully rare cases, I realise fairly early this will be a dud and I stop reading it.  The books and stories which work take me to other worlds, show me things about this one I hadn’t considered before, inform me, entertain me, and remind me of why I love reading. I adore books and stories like that. My tastes include non-fiction, historical, crime, as well as flash fiction and short story collections, novels, novellas etc.  Those which don’t work turn an interesting subject matter, such as history, into a dull list and too much academic jargon for non-fiction. For fiction, characters which fail to engage me means I’m unlikely to rea...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Do you write anything connected to holidays, whether they’re ones you’ve taken, or ones where you've sent your characters away? I don’t though I can see the appeal. You’ve got the chance to put your characters out of their normal environment. How would that change their behaviour and attitudes? What would be the consequences? I’m thinking about Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie here. What was supposed to be a honeymoon trip became something different. How could you make use of holidays you’ve taken to enhance your stories? One idea is to use the landscape of where you’ve visited as a model for the setting for your story.  I was in lovely Northumberland last autumn and was staying near a lovely town with a gorgeous river running through it. So I could take that idea and fictionalise it for my story or I could take certain elements only and put those in my tale. Holiday photos can also inspire ideas later. Lan...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One of the ways I fire up my imagination is to use random generators.   I’ve used the following to good effect. Random Noun/Adjective/Verb generators. Random Question generators (good for giving ideas for themes, sometimes titles). Random Number generators (I’ve used a number as a countdown in a story. I’ve also used it as part of an address where the action happened). Random Name generators (where you can generate a first name, surname, or both). Random Picture generator. If I select a landscape I come up with who might live there and what happens to them in this landscape. If I select a picture of a person, I prefer those where they are doing something, such as walking away from the camera at the time the shot was taken. I can rough out a story around that. Who is this person? What or whom are they walking away from? Could they be walking towards something instead? A successful generator makes me ask que...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. In the character -v- plot debate, I’m on the side of the characters. Characters trigger plots. If I’m writing a pompous character, I’m almost always going to put them in a humorous tale and set them up for a well-deserved fall. Laughing is the best thing to do with pomposity.   A great plot can be let down if it is served by “weak” characters. Conversely, a strong character can “lift” a weak plot. (Naturally you aim for a great character and a terrific plot but I’ve found knowing my characters well enough to write their stories is the logical starting point for me).   An intriguing character keeps me reading. I struggled with Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. Fanny Price is easily her worst heroine - far too insipid. Had this been by any other author, I wouldn’t have finished reading it.    I must care about the characters to want to read their stories. Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice is t...

Apart from scribbling stories and stuff as a kid (to which I probably subjected my poor siblings), and then doing essays at school and university, writing wasn't ever really part of my grand scheme of who I intended to be or how I'd spend my time. (To tell the truth, I had no scheme.) I graduated, got a job, started a family and was already in my thirties before I started 'writing' and, even then, there was no burning ambition or seeming purpose about it. It certainly didn't earn me a living. I suppose most of it I did just for myself, to try to understand things. Putting stuff into words, filling foolscap pages with spidery ink marks made stuff manageable, creating characters made them accessible, understandable, perhaps helped me to understand why 'real' people said and did the things they did. I’m not certain about that; it's just speculation. In retrospect, though, that's what happened. (Not that I pretend to 'understand' people now, ...

 I've probably posted here before about trains, a topic close to my heart as well as yet another reason to be annoyed with 2020, as this must be the first year I can remember when I haven't travelled by train at least once. To make up for the train shortfall in real life, I've watched more or less every railway documentary I can find on television during the year. My absolute favourite is actually not about real trains at all. It's the Great Model Railway Challenge, which sadly doesn't seem to have taken place recently, probably because it's a team event and more or less impossible to do while you're applying social distancing rules. But who could resist railway layouts that included the Glenfinnan Viaduct, or a multi-level structure in which trains had to drive into various futuristic elevators in order to access the next level? However, as I realised while watching grown men panicking because their model freight train had derailed again, not entirely unexp...

A writing friend was bemoaning the fact that, being a fairly prolific writer of short fiction, she often loses track of the markets where she has submitted work, and the fact that many of those short fiction markets fail to notify unsuccessful writers does not help – and I feel her pain. With editor’s hats on at Alchemy Press we make a point of always notifying both successful and unsuccessful writers when we have made our selection as a matter of common courtesy; which can be quite a task when those submissions have numbered anything up to four hundred per anthology. However, I can see how larger markets who have thousands of stories sent in would draw a line at individual emails and many have a line in their guidelines giving a time limit after which writers can assume they have been unsuccessful.   Elsewhere technology has reached a point where most of those use automated replies. That may seem impersonal when you have slogged over a story and sent it out with high hopes...

I had two conversations not long ago that made me wonder whether I should have put a map at the front of my mystery series books. One was an electronic conversation with one of my small band of keen readers in which she (apparently casually) asked me if I had ever drawn a map of the fictitious town where most of my action takes place. Trying to conceal a guilty start, which is easier in electronic form than in real life, I told her I hadn't. I also resisted the temptation to say something like, 'If I'd wanted to spend my time drawing maps I would have been a fantasy writer'.  Actually, I had often thought a map would have been a good idea, if only I had realised at the start of the series that it would go on for such a long time and that there was so much scope for me to create so many geographical misconceptions. The second conversation took place in real life, just before Christmas in the café of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. It was with a friend ...

We had a new addition to the family the other day, and something happened that made me consider the topic of people's names and what we expect from them. When I heard the name given to the new arrival, for some reason I immediately pictured him in 40 or so years' time as a professor, probably of archaeology. His mother, on the other hand, told me she saw him more as a sportsman. Apart from the fact that she was probably joking because she knows how much many other members of the family excel at sports, i.e. not very much, this started a train of thought that led to various different destinations. My grandmother (top left) and her birth family As a family history researcher I find people's names very interesting, especially their first names. In many Scottish families there was quite a structured naming pattern in place, perhaps for centuries. I think I was one of the first children in our family not to be named after some ancestor or other. But it used to be le...