Authors Electric

If you had the choice, would you like to be someone else? Perhaps yourself in different circumstances, perhaps yourself with a few minor changes (improvements?), or perhaps an entirely different person? We probably can’t do a great deal to change our essential ‘inner’ selves, which are, of course, formed from an intractable mixture of genetics, upbringing and life experience. Many of us have at one time believed that a new start of some form (new home, new job, new partner…) would enable us to become someone different and probably better, and then been disappointed a few months or years down the line to realise that we are, essentially, stuck with ourselves for life. I’m not saying we shouldn’t sometimes try to change and look for healing and new starts, and I’m sure these sometimes work, but the changes aren’t always as profound as we might have hoped. I think I eventually accepted about ten years ago that I was permanently stuck with many of the characteristics that, for bet...

Are writers by nature anti-social? Is this why we write?  This month, I was supposed to be blogging Part Two of my Spring Clean-Up post, with the focus of how edited my collection of fiction. We.ell, as so often happens with any type of cleaning in my house, I’ve started, so I’ll not finish. Tra la! My butterfly mind hops on to a different track.  What interrupted my Clean-Up blog?  An interesting piece from the Huffington Post, about Introverts. Now, I’m not a fan of labels for people, in any form.  We can only pin people down for a very short time. In the next moment we’re different. Influenced by something in our environment, we change our minds, we learn and grow, we evolve, as written in stone as blobs in a lava lamp. Yet, this piece on Introverts really spoke to me, because I recognised myself and for the first time acknowledged my weirdness as perfectly normal. There, I've said it! I've come out! I'm an Introvert!  Finally....