Authors Electric

Brahe's lost star tracker Happy new year! Time to reckon, to reflect and to resolve, or so they say. Not my strong points. My mind roils with riptides. I have to swim criss-cross if I'm to make it ashore. Don't expect any consistency here. Besides, as Emerson pointed out, it's overrated. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," he wrote, "adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Now we march into the third decade of the twenty-first century, too many out there goosestepping to the deadly drums of tyrannies past. You can't call this mess millennial anymore. No more excuses. With a precious few notable exceptions, this brave new century has been a big disappointment. Those of us who came of age in the last century expected so much more.  We see no magic-bullet cures for major diseases, only Big Pharma raking in obscene profits for incremental palliatives with terrifying side effects that announcers list i...

... the more we know we don't know. You can be just lying in your bed, watching a mindless video and an epiphany finds you. You don't have to go climb mountains or anything. You don't even have to want one, or anything. For example, whilst recuperating from a nasty bug over Christmas - no way to spend the holidays - I was was half watching a You Tube video of what was supposed to be a romantic mountain train journey around Switzerland. I had the sound turned off. Watching trains lulls me to sleep somehow. It takes me back to being a little kid curled up in the swaying, top bunk of my parents' compartment on our annual winter cross-country rail journey from Los Angeles to Boston, Massachusetts back in the 1940s. The top bunks on the old Pullman cars used to have these little oval windows up where the carriage wall curved into the ceiling. I could slide a little plastic shade open and peek out onto a moonlit winter landscape with myriad stars above. It was like the t...

Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja poses for Matthew Bremner's recent Guardian profile. An article in the Guardian  knocked me on my backside the other day. The feature, How to Be Human  by Matthew Bremner, examined the life of Marcos  Rodríguez  Pantoja, an elderly Spaniard had been abandoned as a child and had survived fifteen years in the Andalusian mountains with wolves as his only companions. L ike a real-life  Romulus and Remus , he owes his life to a she-wolf, who accepted the small boy as part of her litter, sharing food, after he crawled into their den seeking shelter from the cold on the first night or second night of his long ordeal. Deja vu:   My Dog's Name , the novella I've been revising for inclusion in Sometimes Ridiculous , my forthcoming softcover story collection, has a similar, archetypal plot. A boy,  presumed buried by a mudslide, roams  the Hollywood Hills with a family of coyotes.  I wrote it back  2013, havin...

Freebie alert! Anyone who comments on this post from August 22nd - 24th 2016 will be entered into a draw for a free copy of Everything Love Is, the new novel   by Claire King published by Bloomsbury, July 2016 I ran into author Claire King a few years ago on Twitter when her novel Night Rainbow (which I really enjoyed) was accepted by an agent and then a publisher. Since then Claire has not only had her second novel published but also moved from France to Gloucestershire, and so on a  sunny Saturday in July, I met her at her book signing in Stroud (complete with luscious macarons ) and came home to bury myself in Everything Love Is. As expected the writing was gorgeous and the opening had a hint of intrigue in the narrative voice.  Fifty pages in I wasn’t so sure. The main character, Baptiste, a therapist who lives on a canal, was lovely and I wanted to know what was happening to him. But what was happening? The second voice (or was it more than ...