Authors Electric

‘Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.’ This quote was recently posted on Facebook and attributed to Albert Einstein, but such attributions tend to be random. I don’t know where it comes from, but I like it – especially now I’m so old in years I can hardly believe it. It chimes with a poem I’ve known for years but now can’t find, which, after a catalogue of sorrowful things, contains the lines ‘still let me live as love and life were one. Still let me turn on Earth a childlike gaze and trust the whispered charities that bring tidings of human comfort. Still let me raise on wintry wrecks an altar to the spring.’ I’m not even sure I’ve got it right, but I think the sentiment is clear, and like the Einstein(?) quote, it invites us to seek joy and trust and wonder. If that’s childlike, I’ll take it. It is much needed in these times. Being childlike rather than childish informed much o...

The picture prompt for 'January'. Earlier this year, in May, I wrote a blog about collaborative writing , recommending it as an exercise for writers of all sorts. At the time, I was looking at the topic only from the point of view of the writer. The blog drew only one (anonymous) response from a writer who claimed she/he would be incapable of such collaboration and made the very valid point (which I’d omitted) that ‘it must come down to being in sympathy with your fellow writer and having trust in them’. I think both my collaborator, Eden Baylee , and I had taken for granted that that was the case and it was only the anonymous comment that made me recognise its truth and how necessary such trust is. (So thank you, Anon.) More recently, though, thanks to an email from a writer friend here in Scotland, I’ve been reflecting again on the process and how a different aspect of it might affect not the writer, but the reader. The collaboration was for a monthly podcast ...

Last month, Ann Evans wrote  an interesting and knowledgeable blog  about her experiences of collaborative writing. By chance, its timing coincided with the appearance of a short story which I co-wrote with Eden Baylee, a Canadian writer with whom I’ve already co-written 3 other stories. Our combined efforts were written to be read by us on R B Wood’s Word Count Podcast .  The picture prompt for our story I’m choosing this as the subject of this month’s blog because each time we’ve written together, the results have been very satisfying to both of us and I think it’s an exercise that’s well worth trying. I’ve written before about how fictional characters seem to act autonomously and how those in my books often surprise me by seeming to take directions which have nothing to do with me. In our collaborations, they behave in the same way, but with the added twist that, even though I may have created  one, given him/her a specific identity, and sent him/...

Hello everyone, sorry to follow on from Reb yesterday, it's purely coincidence that Reb and I are both hanging up our AE blogging pens, but I think this will be my final blog for Authors Electric. I’ve loved reading everyone’s blogs over the years, but my writing is leading me further away from Indie writing, so it’s difficult for me to write on topics that our blog’s readers will be interested in. Happy to say I’m busy writing for reluctant readers, with about a dozen books published now with educational publisher Badger Learning. These are for teenagers with a lower reading age than their actual age. I’m also writing crime novels for Bloodhound Books; and as always magazine articles on all kinds of topics.   However, something I can write about for this blog, which ties in with Indie publishing and mainstream publishing is that the latest book accepted by Bloodhound is actually a collaboration between me and a good friend. So, two authors and one title. Coll...

No more monkey business. You’ve only to spend a little time in the real or virtual company of writers to hear some version of accepted wisdom. We all need editors, kill your darlings, less is more. I used to agree. And there’s a part of me that still does. I’m all for editing as a process, although there’s a difference between proof reading for typos and punctuation – which is generally better done by somebody else – and editing in the sense of somebody telling you that you need to rewrite your manuscript and how you ought to do it, occasionally going so far as to try to do it for you. I’m a compulsive reviser. Just about everything I write, but especially fiction, goes through many drafts, sometimes more than a dozen, sometimes more than two dozen. I revise on paper as well as on screen. Partly it’s because I fall in love with my characters and can’t bear to leave them. Mostly it’s because I love the process of honing and refining. I began my writing life as a poet and paring d...

          There have been some great partnerships over the years - Laurel and Hardy, Morcambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the list goes on. Great entertainers who paired up to produce some wonderful entertainment.            However not quite so many double acts spring to mind when it comes to collaborating over writing  a book.            Thanks to the wonders of Google, I've just picked out a few of the successful writing partnerships. For instance Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchettt wrote Good Omens together in 1990 which was nominated in the World Fantasy Awards.           Stephen King teamed up with Peter Straub to write The Talisman in the early eighties which also was nom...