Authors Electric

  Rod Kamitsuka, back when . To paraphrase Samuel Johnson: The prospect of death (by Coronavirus) can "concentrate the mind wonderfully."  We've been living with that prospect for more than a year now, awaiting the vaccine cavalry while the threat escalated from miniscule to monstrous. It matters not that the odds are in favour of survival except among the elderly and health-impaired. It's still a threat, with nasty side effects. Covid and the solitude of lockdown have made death more present to us all. Our capacity for denial wilts as the toll doubles and redoubles on TV. Death, however, can be a writer's friend. It motivates characters. It propels our narratives, themes, plot points, and symbols. Plus, dying can be a good career move for some writers, boosting book sales, prestige and popularity. No one ever heard of Stieg Larrson until he died, and we all know how The Great Gatsby flopped in 1925 and didn't catch on until after F. Scott Fitzgerald 's ...

It has been more than a decade since the first book in the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins took the dystopian fiction world by storm. Since then, these books have been made into four feature-length films and spawned a raft of fan merchandise, including gold mockingjay pins for budding revolutionaries. They split the third book   into two parts for the screen, which annoyed me at the time because I had to wait a whole year for the final instalment reach my local cinema. (Ah, those were the days... CINEMAS! Remember when you could sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers, hold hands in the back row, and scoff popcorn to your heart's content?) Fortunately in this era of lockdowns, you can now get all four films on DVD (and stream them, too, no doubt) to watch in the comfort of your own home, where I believe you still can hold hands and scoff popcorn without breaking any laws. If you haven't seen them yet, they're perfect lockdown viewing. Collins' Panem is divide...

Sunday lunch — someone I know (in real as well as virtual form) posted a photo of her daughter under this heading (or hashtag) a few weeks back. Reminded me of when our daughter was that age and stage: long hair, beautiful smile… and preteen angst in spades! Yesterday, someone I (hardly and virtually) know, responded to my describing my novels as “contemporary”, and then proposing that maybe, since today’s kids (such as that daughter above, at Sunday lunch) are taught the 1980s and 1990s as “history”, I maybe qualify as writing “historical” fiction. This fellow writer even indicated that I would need to do plenty of research! Time flies (and as my great aunt, born in 1876, used to say with a smile, you can’t, they fly too fast! in true Victorian and Edwardian humour style). Sunday lunch — for an example of 1980s living: first, off to the (organic) butcher’s to buy the joint on Saturday. Then on Sunday morning, prepare the veg and the batter, put joint into hot oven, disappear t...

I know, this title reads like a children's story. If only. Life has got a bit serious for many of us: the tribulations of a travel writer are nothing when compared to so many. I'm fortunate. I don't need the income from my travel writing to put food on the table. For those who do - life must have become impossible. Where can they go? What can they write about? We are used taking our safety into account: we generally give serious social unrest a wide berth and don't put ourselves in the path of animals that might eat us. (Well, I did, once - but not deliberately). Speaking for myself: I am fascinated by the minutiae of people's lives - wherever they are and whatever their circumstances. I will oppose poverty tourism (gawping at mud huts or rows of metal beds in orphanages) till the day I die, but will defend anyone who spends hours round a fire listening to singing, and dancing, and telling stories. For me, those stories are the life-blood of travelling. But what...

Crack A Story by Susan Price Lockdown. It's over now. Isn't it? Is it? What's the R number? You might still be in lockdown or partying on the beach -- I suppose it depends on how susceptible you are to brand new viruses that no one has any immunity to. Or how many susceptible people you love. Or how much you believe we're 'all in this together.' At the very end of January, to celebrate his birthday, my lodger went on an outing to Cosford Air Museum. Exactly one week later, in early February, he became quite ill: fever, headache, joint aches, tiredness and a terrible dry cough that went on and on for weeks. He doesn't remember his senses of taste and smell being affected, but he certainly lost his appetite and says that he can't remember being so ill for, well, decades. At the time, we'd barely heard of Covid-19. Even if we had, there was no effective way he could have isolated himself from me. Many members of this Tory government wi...

Not long ago, I did a writing course looking at plot - and one of the things we were told was the importance of events and feelings linking together in some sort of logical sequence. So even if you play around with time or point of view, the narrative must hold together so that the reader - at the end - feels a sense of satisfaction. It all made sense; it held together. Characters responded to events because they believed this, or felt that, or understood the other; they behaved coherently. But we live in strange times. What we are told one day, in the newspapers or on television, is contradicted the next. Taking just one example: here in the UK we were told, at the beginning of this pandemic, that wearing face masks made no difference to the risk of catching the disease, nor of passing it on. They were pointless, and might even increase the risk of us being infected if we failed to put them on or take them off correctly. Now - face masks are essential on public transport, but the...

We live in apocalyptic times. I've not read much dystopian fiction - The Day of the Triffids was enough for me - so I'd be interested to know if the current runaway virus and the panic it has engendered is accurately reflected in fiction. For one thing that has struck me in recent days (distracted me, if I'm honest) is how words that have such momentous consequences for us all are thrown around now without a second thought. For instance: Social distancing : this, we are told, means we have to stay about two metres away from anyone else. Unpicked, it means no hug for the friends you bump into in the street. No sharing a cake. No sharing books unless you both do the ritual handwashing thing first. But - does it mean we shouldn't hug our children? Can we cuddle up to our partners on the sofa? (In theory, I've heard - no. We must all sit in separate chairs; couples should sleep in separate beds. As if every house has enough chairs and a spare bed lying around...

The covid19 scare is affecting even normally socially-isolated authors like me. Activities essential for our mental health and wellbeing, such as meeting other socially-isolated authors for coffee in a halfway cafe (often tens of miles away) are now almost impossible... either the cafe itself has closed, or the other authors are too afraid to venture out. Both of my local National Trust properties, which provide valuable respite from all the wireless radiation in town, as well as being a source of creative inspiration, have also closed for an indefinite period - possibly all summer - and further flung NT places that are kindly keeping their parks open for free during the crisis (but not their cafes, sadly!) are too far for me to reach on my bicycle without planning an overnight stay, which is now difficult because most hotels and B&Bs are shut. Pretty much all of my summer activities have been cancelled, including an authors' conference in rural Oxfordshire I always look forwar...