Authors Electric

This post was inspired by the discovery that there’s an apparently endless supply of videos on YouTube which focus on a number of players fighting each other and various enemies on Minecraft (don’t ask me how I know this). Before I watched some of the Minecraft videos, I was tempted to write about the great Kit-Kat heist,  with the illustration below.  Glad to have my Kit Kat stash at the moment I had a difficult history with computer games even before Minecraft. That history, I’ve just worked out, goes back around fifty years, which was when some of my work colleagues discovered they could access a game I think was called ‘Space Wars’ on the mainframe computer at our place of work. Once the senior staff found out about it, they ruled that it wasn’t to be played during working hours but playing after hours was all right. This was a workplace that had very few other rules even compared with others of the time. I never quite understood the attraction of Space Wars, if that was r...

What do you do when the novel you are writing goes wrong? Your plot isn’t working? Your characters aren’t talking to you? Or perhaps you’re suffering from writer’s block. I’m sure some, or all of this, strikes many writers from time to time. And if you are a writer who has never been affected by any of this, then you are lucky. This is where avoidance comes in. The reluctance to put pen to paper, or fingers on keyboard. And in order to avoid having to do this a writer may engage in some sort of displacement activity. I have heard tell that some women writers find mounds of ironing to do, scones to bake, or house cleaning to be done. I’m afraid none of these activities appeal to me as I’m a non-domesticated animal. One of my displacement activities is building computers. I’ve built two desktops over the years, but I refuse to build any more. The reason for this refusal is simple. Space. I would need a bigger house. But there’s nothing stopping me from upgrading the c...