Authors Electric

  Imagine you’re a you ng journalist from  The Times , reporting on the Hay literary festival. Nice job if you love books and writing – which journalists do, or they’d be doing something else – and you should enjoy it while you can, as literary festivals are sadly in their   Götterdämmerung   p eriod, what with no corporate sponsor being pure enough to be allowed to fund them, and grants from such lofty organisations as the Arts Council being extremely unlikely, owing to books being lamentably highbrow and middle class (not!). Anthony Horowitz By Edwardx - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126308848 So there you are, listening to Anthony Horowitz speak on a panel on the subject of rewriting classics by dead authors in order to remove ‘offensive’ language ( as Puffin did last year with a new edition of Roald Dahl’s works ), and you hear him say he doesn’t approve of burglarising books.  Yup, that’s what he said. Well, h...

There are plenty of theories about what makes things funny, lots of them stressing the cruel nature of laughter. They suggest it’s an expression of superiority over the person we’re laughing at, but that’s too crude. Laughter’s a shared reaction – and it doesn’t have to be at someone else’s expense. BMK / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) The theory I like best is the one which says that laughter’s actually about thinking. If you like, it’s intellectual, critical. It’s your mind seeing something happening, assuming it’ll pan out in a particular way then having those assumptions undermined when something unexpected happens. At its crudest, it’s the banana skin scenario. e.g. A person (preferably one of rank and substance – a queen, a president, a supermodel, say) is walking along and suddenly becomes a disarticulated mechanism. If the result is a serious injury, the laughter dies at once, which kind of discredits the ‘laughter is cruel’ theory...

I’m a member of Juno, a women’s theatre group based around Salisbury, with a brief to work at correcting the gender imbalance in theatre.           Juno’s reach is mostly in Wiltshire and Dorset and I’m in Hampshire, but I just sneak in under the ‘within 30 miles of Salisbury’ rule. We are mostly writers, but several members have performance and directing backgrounds too. We make a lively contribution to Salisbury Fringe Festival – somehow not quite part of the ‘official’ Fringe, but there all the same, putting on our own shows alongside it. ‘Little Red Ella and the FGM’ was one such production. Several of us are also working on projects celebrating women in WW1 at present. We run workshops on writing for the theatre: site-specific, non-natural, political, comedy, for example. I’ve learned a lot.           Our most recent venture has just been on at the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis – a love...

Hope it's a good one! It falls to me once more (and it comes round scarily quickly) to wish you all a very happy new year, and a good year to come. To celebrate, Authors Electric are not charging you to read this blog… but then we never do. Nor do all the other bloggers I know of. In fact, our online lives, lucky us, are crammed with Free Stuff. Woohoo! Spoiled rotten, we are. Facebook? Free. Wikipedia? Wonga-less. Google? Gratis. Amazon? Amazingly free to publish with and awash with free Kindle books. Youtube? Yes, buckshee as well. And yet, and yet… Something odd happens when people get things for nowt. On the one hand, they start to resent paying for stuff. On the other hand, they have less respect for the free stuff. They take it for granted. An example. When you are holding a poetry reading or a book event, if you sell tickets in advance even if they are just £3, people are more likely to turn up on the night. Give away the tickets, and if it rains, they’ll stay away in dr...

Cracking crime! A while back, in this very blog, I came out as suffering from, or perhaps reveling in, Multiple Publishing Disorder. After making my name first of all as a poet, reducing, ditching and deleting to enrich my work, I then became a novelist. How to make a story that long, without padding! Ulp. Poetry, crime fiction, comedy fiction, stage and radio plays (of all lengths, and some including original songs), scientific articles, prose polemic/non-fiction, and a nice line in science-themed textual kinetic art installations became my lines of work: in other words, it was a shorter story to say that I wrote everything but short stories. Ooh missus!  As a reader, I love short stories (brilliant, intense, funny, scary, eg Char March's ' Something Vital Fell Through ' or Saki 's) and hate them (interminable inner monologues with long descriptions of cigarettes lit, coffee made and drunk, eg far too many I’ve been subjected to at spoken word events and ha...

Back in the 80s, when Madonna was like a virgin, Michael Jackson thrilled, Milli Vanilli lip-synced and Ronald Reagan practiced plausible deniablity, I tested the murky bottom of clinical  depression. Everything seemed blacker than black. The view from my San Francisco apartment only cued me to its exorbitant rent and guilt about feeling sorry for myself in such splendid surroundings.  My shrink advised me do at least one positive thing each day, even if it were only to write one sentence. Frequently I couldn't even manage that. Oddly enough, however, I kept dragging myself to improv workshops twice a week, sometimes three. Madonna, 1987 I had signed up, paid my money. The classes, usually with eight or ten attendees – non-actors like myself – and a coach, took place at Fort Mason – a cluster of San Francisco Bay-side, concrete-block, World War II loading docks converted to a cultural center, with classrooms, small theaters and galleries. I would arrive at 7 pm., num...

Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits - oops no, hares hares hares as it's 1st March. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been driven as mad as two March hares, beginning the process of putting my Kindle ebooks on all the non-Amazon platforms I can find. Encouraged by other AE luminaries, I’ve gone with Draft 2 Digital for most of this, and I can announce that my Kindle comedy novel LYDIA BENNET'S BLOG is now on Nook, Kobo, PageFoundry's Inktera, Scribd and Tolino (links below). However the process hasn’t been totally straightforward even with D2D who have a simple to follow method, and Apple/iTunes is a whole other vale of tears not yet put behind me. My AE colleagues have had to put up with my howls of anguish on Facebook and I don’t see why any of you should be spared so here is the tale of occasional woe. Lydia Bennet, shameless as ever, now more widely available. So I scrubbed and polished a nice clean version of LLB in Word. D2D supply front and back matter, but I adde...