Authors Electric

I love the serendipity of allowing random books to arrive in my life from unexpected sources... this month's offering is a non-fiction title picked up from a stall at our local Apple Pie Fair. I went for a slice of the giant apple pie, and came home with rather more to digest than I'd bargained for! 'Machines That Think' is part of a New Scientist series written by multiple human experts in the field. Subtitled 'Everything you need to know about the coming age of Artificial Intelligence', this book practically jumped into my hands. On checking the copyright page, I was rather disturbed to see that it was published in 2017, which is ancient history where technology and AIs are concerned. However, if you study the dawn of computing, it's clear these clever little programs have been around a lot longer than you'd think. The first chatbot (named Eliza, after Eliza Dolittle in the play 'Pygmalion') was developed in 1966 as an artificial psychoanalyst ...

Once upon a time, before the dawn of the World Wide Web, the internet was in its infancy. Some of us had computers with modems – those little boxes that sat next to your pc with whizzy lights and beeps that kidnapped your telephone line and charged you money for every minute it took to upload/download emails and read a few online text-only forums.  I’m talking late 1980s into the early 1990s, when monitors were green-on-black and gaming involved answering simple questions and hitting <RETURN>.  I had an email account that was linked to a site (not a web site, they hadn’t been invented yet) called CIX. It was American, I think, and had several interesting forums – the most active one for me being Cult TV. Remember, this was way before the age of digital streaming, when TV shows were broadcast once, maybe again if you were lucky and after that you had to see if it was available on VHS video somewhere. Cult TV was a discussion of all things sf and nerdish. From Doctor Who t...

Oh Puffin books. For heaven’s sake.  Is this how it’s going to be, from now on?  Writers date, of course they do. Orphans are no longer sent home from British India to live with reclusive uncles in Yorkshire ( The Secret Garden ), or imprisoned in the workhouse, from which they might escape to join a band of pickpockets ( Oliver Twist ). Yet no one is suggesting – I hope – that the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charles Dickens should be rewritten to suit the sensibilities of present day children (as perceived by adults, of course). So why Roald Dahl?  Dahl’s style has always been irreverent, bordering on the crass, and children love it. If you, as a teacher, don’t think it suitable for children, don’t teach it. Give them Eva Ibbotson and Joan Aiken instead. Or Katherine Rundell, Jacqueline Wilson, Malorie Blackman, Rick Riordan, Jill Murphy, J K Rowling, Robin Stevens. There’s a whole host of wonderful children’s writers out there who will not distress you by using...

If you've been following my monthly ramblings on here (I've been around since the start of Authors Electric, so I'm part of the furniture - probably that creaky old wardrobe in the corner of the attic with the door that doesn't shut properly ...), you'll know that I write the occasional mostly-tongue-in-cheek advice column. It may be written with an irreverent approach, but much of the advice therein is worth looking at, if only to discard or laugh at! So now I want to talk about how advice can do more than get you off to a bad start - it can land you with huge bills and/or get you into serious trouble with the authorities! The trouble is, advice is one of those things that is often asked for but never actually wanted once you've got it. And everybody has an opinion. On everything . I should know - I'm one of those annoying people who happily delivers unasked-for opinions in clothes shop changing-rooms. But telling somebody they look lovely in a dress i...

My exhibition at Newcastle Central Library, Part the First.  Not another double entendre from me, you cry! To which I reply, I insist on getting it out as often as possible with as many different people as possible. Yes, getting our work out there, it's the perennial question to which there are many answers, all of them sadly requiring time away from writing, watching NCIS and messing about online. I’ve just returned from overseeing the installation of one such, ‘Will Power’, a solo exhibition opening today, which I was offered by the central library in my nearest city, of my poems inspired by Shakespeare. Exhibition Part Two: My 'Ophelia's Sista' Hamlet rap, some of my play posters, and Will S. I’m better known for death, sex and pathology poetry lately but occasionally I’ve bashed out a sonnet, sometimes based on one of Will’s but on a modern subject. As I’ve found with my science-poetry art installations, from very untechie (beachballs, sheep, swimming pool...

If you’re reading these words, there’s a very good chance that you’re a writer. In these days of PoD, digital publishing, and free and instantly-available blogs, there’s also a good chance that you’re published in some form or another. Do you, like most writers, assert your copyright? Or do you distribute your works under the Creative Commons   licence? Image credit: Xander | Wikimedia Commons If you assert your own copyright, do you respect other people’s? It’s a question worth thinking about. You can’t consistently both assert your copyright and flout other people’s, and yet some writers do. (If, on the other hand, you’re on a crusade against the very notion of copyright, then you can at least disregard copyright and do so consistently. For legal reasons, I don’t recommend it.) There seem to be two basic strands of thought concerning copyright issues: 1) copyright must be respected and breach of copyright is theft; and, 2) copyright is an out-of-date and often u...

'What's yours is mine, bwahahaha!' I’ve been embroiled in a plagiarism scandal for weeks now and it’s still going on. Someone I’ve known for years, been to their launches, bought their books, has plagiarised friends and colleagues as well as famous writers, and it’s been going on for years under our very noses. At first mainly poetry, now as more and more of it emerges, it includes prose as well and cheating on a PhD thesis, and getting huge amounts of funding from various public bodies on the basis of track record as a writer. I got embroiled when two friends, co-publishees (and as they discovered after a book launch, plag’d poets) and our mutual publisher failed to get any satisfaction over several weeks of private back and forth. I started looking at other poems in the new book and discovered to my dismay that many of them were others’ poems with tweaks and synonyms inserted. We then brought in the ‘poetry sleuth’ Dr Ira Lightman, who’s also a friend, and who has ...

Last month I had a little rant about the Green Party and how they wanted to ‘share’ my copyright with others . Today I’m on my soapbox again, still about copyright but this time with regards to the copyright of my photographs (which I use to bolster my writing income). A friend recently sent me a link to a photography competition being run by a charity I support. I followed the link and clicked on the terms and conditions. It was no surprise that yet another competition wanted full rights of any photograph I submitted, even if I didn’t win. This is not the first time (and I doubt the last) that I’ll read this clause in a competition. The clause was: "By submitting your entry, you agree to grant the XXXXXX a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sub-licensable right and world-wide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display and exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to your e...