Authors Electric

I’ve got my grumpy head on this month as I lament the lost art of communicating. Or rather the fact that with so many different methods of communication available it is so often impossible to speak to a real person and resolve a simple issue. great image from an article about bad communication! https://wiselancer.net/lack-of-communication-and-improvement/   Let’s rewind, my story started last week when I made an offer to drive a friend to a seaside town, over an hour away so she could visit her son. The car park we found uses an app to make payments, no coins or simple tap of a card here, that would be far too easy. I downloaded the app successfully but we figured out we would take a proper look on our way out when we knew how long in hours and minutes we had actually stayed. After all there was no indication when the transaction had to happen. In fact, the signage was extremely vague with no step by step guide. Before we left I entered all the details of our stay and tr...

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about writing of late, more thinking than writing, especially late at night. This makes me want to beat myself up mentally sometimes, makes me wonder why I can't sleep.  In the past, when want-to-be writers wanted to chat about writing, I obliged but with some trepidation. I don’t do small talk, and to wax poetic on the craft of writing seemed meaningless unless there was real life application. Were we writing a book together? If not, then what I had to contribute would probably be of little help. I’m not an academic, and theorizing about writing can never take the place of the act of writing itself. It’s a discipline that's learned while putting it in practice.  Writing is also a solitary endeavour, not a group effort. I say this even though I write with a partner every month. Bill Kirton (who also contributes to this site) and I compose stories together , but our individual pieces are written without prior discussion, so the act of writing ...

  An event occurred recently which caused me to reflect upon intention. A story of mine that’s been up on the Black Country Arts Foundry website for two years suddenly attracted attention – and not of the sort I initially welcomed. (The link to the story follows below this article).   My story is loosely based on real life events and is told partly in the voice of a child. In the story I use the word ‘gypsy’. When I wrote the piece I was well aware that the word is now considered to be offensive. Happily it is not now in common parlance and we use the word ‘traveller’ instead. But when my brother and I were children, the word was widely used, including by my own mother, although I do not recall any particular prejudice on her part. However, my brother and I did hear from those around us, of the ‘bad’ things ‘gypsies’ did. My brother and I attended a local village school in the 1960’s. A small traveller community then lived in the village. I cannot remember exactly when it disa...

Now we’re home from holiday, I’ve stopped worrying about my lack of Spanish , but the niceties of how we use our own language are sometimes just as mysterious as a foreign tongue.  Maybe it’s a preoccupation of the elderly, but I’m always aware of the register we use depending on our audience. At the extreme ends of the scale, an application for a job or a pitch to a publisher is always more formal than a thank you note or reply to an invitation, unless we are making a conscious effort to be matey. Informality, after all, is a characteristic of speech rather than writing, or should that be ‘was’?  Still nice to get some things in writing The universal use of email (and all communication via keyboard)   has gradually blurred the lines. It was once the case that a stranger contacting me at work would start with ‘Good morning’ or ‘Dear’. These days I might use ‘Dear’ for a first cautious approach but anything after that would be ‘hello’, gradually giving way to ‘hi’...

The  lovely port of Santander, so much better than a bank Last week on a trip to Cantabria, we visited the museum of Altamira  where a startling range of Neolithic cave paintings were discovered in the nineteenth century, dating from somewhere around 20,000 to 14,000 BCE. Yes – they are roughly 16,000 years old.   In the ‘new’ (replica) cave, visitors can watch reconstructions of daily life  and observe the tools and skills these people are thought to have used in the stone age. But the projected display had no sound-track, and the same thought occurred to myself and a fellow tourist – how did they speak? What language did they have? Language and communication were in fact pressing concerns on this trip. I used to consider myself a bit of a linguist but it appears I came to Spain and Spanish too late in life to ever feel comfortable with it and have to fall back on a dumb tourist act to get through any holiday, something that grieves me for the duration ...