Authors Electric

As the new Bridget Jones film is currently showing in cinemas I thought I'd share an old blog post I wrote when the book first came out. Amazingly it has taken 11 years for this book to make it to the screen, but this is a much more grown up Bridget dealing with something a young woman shouldn't have to deal with - the death of a spouse when you have young children to raise. This is something I know much about and to my mind both the book and film are very good and have a lot to say about relationships and grieving. Diary15th January 2014 v. late night finishing off Bridget Jones’ latest diary. I laughed loud and cried buckets, even had to put on reading glasses for last few pages to make blurry words big and bold enough to read properly - v.g. book! I remember reading the first two books and watching the films but I’ve always had mixed views about Miss Jones. I’m not sure if we’d ever have been friends back then although I love her easy to read chatty style her shenanigans oft...

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love reading books of letters and diaries. I was a fan of Adrian Mole and the letters of P.G. Wodehouse are an interesting and often humorous read (as you’d expect). One of my favourite quotes comes from a Wodehouse letter.   “God may have forgiven Herbert Jenkins Limited for the jacket of Meet Mr Mulliner but I never shall!” Dodgy book covers are nothing new then! I also have a fascinating collection of letters between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Reading this is like peeping in on a private world, which is a great reason to read books of letters and diaries! Have you written in letter and/or diary format? I’ve done both though for flash fiction I have needed to use close to the upper limit of 1000 words for these. They are an interesting challenge and I find they make a nice change from “straight prose”.  Having said that, I wouldn’t want to always use these formats. It can look gimmicky. Besides the...

If you want to get ahead, get a hat - I mean, a blog We're all so used to reading and writing blogs now that it's easy to forget that they are a relatively recent phenomenon.  Jane Perrone, writing on The Guardian's blog just 14 years ago , felt the need to explain what they were for the sake of the uninitiated: A weblog is, literally, a "log" of the web - a diary-style site, in which the author (a "blogger") links to other web pages he or she finds interesting using entries posted in reverse chronological order. We Sing, We Dance, We Blog... I'd almost forgotten that blogs used to be called weblogs . When I see that word now, my instinct is to read it as "we blog" rather than "web log", as if it's part of the declension of the verb "to blog". (Iblog, youblog, heblogs, weblog ...) Interesting, too, that Perrone defines the main purpose of a weblog as being to link to other web pages rather than...

As far as I know, I only have one Pony Club Diary in my possession, so I apologise for the slightly misleading title of the post, and also to anyone who thought this would be written in the style of Jilly Cooper. I haven't ever belonged to the Pony Club, although I grew up in a village where I'm sure some people did, and I don't know how I came to own one of their diaries, complete with horse care hints and tips. I can only surmise that someone in the family gave me this one as a joke, because of my long-standing aspiration to go pony-trekking during family holidays instead of playing golf or at least following my parents round golf courses morning, noon and night. I had forgotten about the diary until I inadvertently unearthed it the other day while moving some board game boxes about in a vain attempt to make room for my new printer. This storehouse of memories was in a bag of odds and ends that I vaguely remember collecting when we were clearing out my mother's...

Sometimes only pen and ink will do ... Boswell, Johnson, Pepys, Anne Frank, Captain Scott, Nella Last - not to mention the fictional Adrian Mole, Charles Pooter and Bridget Jones ... Yes, the link between them all as you've probably guessed, is diaries, which seems rather appropriate considering the time of year. A new diary used to be a regular gift item each Christmas, with all the promise of the year ahead waiting to be filled in on those inviting blank pages.  Diary entries are of course a wonderful device for novelists, allowing you to skip over the boring bits and get straight into the action on every page, as well as into the mind of the protagonist; and if you aren't great at description, it neatly lets you off that particular hook too.  Where real people are concerned though, they provide an insight into the lives not just of both ordinary and extraordinary people caught up in the events of their age, but a glimpse of the mundane, every day existence which w...

I have a box. An old boot box I think it is, squirreled away in the back of a cupboard in my study. Every few years, I find it again, pull it out and spend an hour or so reliving parts of my past. Newspaper clippings, cards from my 18 th and 21 st birthdays, medals from chess competitions (bet you didn’t know I was the under 18 Wirral girl’s chess champion on more than one occasion), concert tickets, old photographs – they’re all there. A chronology of my teenage years; things that were important to me back then. I even have a small red plastic cat – the kind you’d get out of a cracker – that I distinctly remember playing with aged about ten with my Pippa doll I bought from the local toy shop (it was 65p and it took me weeks to save up my pocket money). And I have diaries. Seven or eight year’s worth, starting from just before I was thirteen years old and about to venture out to our local youth club. It’s all in there – the boys I liked, the moments of such exquisite embarras...