Authors Electric

  A quick tour--even a virtual one--of any bookstore's fiction shelves will be enough to convince you of this: the fight to survive under ironclad rules governing minimum word count has led too many writers to pad for dear life. Check out the opening pages of book after book if you want shocking proof that writers at large are becoming a tribe of Word Accountants. And as you read, you'll hear the clicking of their calculators' keys and picture the poor bastards working it out:  'OMG, I'm 10K words under...so I need to add--let me see...at least 30 (or 40 or 50) words to every page. What if I add 15  adjectives or adverbs per page plus 20 to 30 extra words of dialogue or description? How about 2000 words of research here and, say, 1500 there?" They should be tarred on Live TV.  But you know what they say about horses.   The Padders aren't the worst offenders. They're easily spotted, at least, and they can be ignored. Their counterparts--the Marners--real...

Oh, Asda - what were you thinking? So we’re buying a flat. A bit of speculative property development, plus our house is on the market – and while I don’t think we could squeeze ourselves and all our stuff into the flat long term, it may well serve as storage and as a temporary stopgap to save having to possibly rent somewhere while we find and buy our next house. Anyway, all the paperwork comes through from the solicitors and we spend an evening ploughing through land registry documents. It’s an ex-local authority flat and the freehold is still held by the Housing Trust, which isn’t a problem – except that clearly nobody at the Trust has ever actually looked at the property and figured out where the doors are … The result of which is the vendor not actually being able to sell us the entire flat at all, but only 9/10 of it, since the front door and hallway are not theirs to sell as they are not marked on the leasehold title held by the land registry! Cue the vendor’s solici...