Authors Electric

Sometimes you come across a great book by chance, in this instance I found it when scrolling on the Borrowbox library app. Sometimes you read a book and you have to share it with everyone because it is so well written and the theme of the novel is so topical. The book in question is The Great Divide by Cristina Henriquez. I listened to it and the narration is excellent, with distinctive accents for each character. Although as with “listening” to any book I did struggle to work out who was who at the beginning, without the benefit of flicking back a few pages to clarify, but it was well worth persevering. According to Wikipedia “the most common meaning [of The Great Divide] is the Continental Divide of the Americas, which separates the watersheds of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans”. The novel is set in Panama in 1907 at the time when the Panama Canal was built, a construction which crosses the Great Divide and divides a country in the process. Panama has often been in the news...

Civics assignment It's not easy being an American metropolis these days - besieged by neofascist nativist, hassled by hatemongers, lied about, loathed, baited while its people struggle to live up to challenging dreams of opportunity, freedom, enterprise, and cosmopolitanism. We urbanites visualize of our hometowns as centers of art, technology, education, science, architecture, and enterprise. Meanwhile, the Trump 2.0 demagogues recently returned to Washington DC have made us their convenient targets again, just as they did in 2016. Last time, they separated immigrant families and jailed children in detention camps. The cruelty was not accidental. It was the goal. This time Trump's goons are apparently taking special aim as U.S. schoolchildren. As if it's not enough that American kids and their teachers have been exposed to mass shootings for decades thanks to the political clout of right-wing gun fanatics and gun makers. Now, less than a month into Trump 2.0 our kids worry...

ChatGPT in action. Photo by Matheus Bertelli: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/laptop-office-working-internet-16094045/ Katherine Roberts’s  experiment with ChatGPT  got me thinking. As yet this AI writing tool can in seconds produce reams of prose, matching the prompts given, in a way that no one, adult or child, will ever want to read. So far, so good. (Or satisfyingly bad.) But any complacency on the part of genuine flesh and blood authors is misplaced. As Katherine and others have pointed out, this bot learns quickly. We can’t rule out that, sooner or later, given enough original material from an inventive editor, say, it will be able to create a gripping, heart-warming tale with all the right kind of characters, and dialogue that doesn’t make your ears bleed. Something actually readable. Publishing houses will save heaps of dosh by eliminating authors altogether from the equation and we writers will, er, be written out of history.  An alarming prospect, and not just fo...

  There's been a ton of hype about Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang, a novel about today's publishing world, and every ounce of it is well deserved.  I can't imagine that anyone who has any connection to writing or publishing wouldn't love every moment of it - even the uncomfortable ones. It portrays exactly what it is like to be a struggling writer, exactly what it is like when you do find a publisher and end up disappointed with the results, and exactly what it is like when you finally hit the jackpot and become a bestseller, and a media sensation.  It is paced like a thriller, with the characters chasing one another through the moral maze of cancel culture, social media hate campaigns, and the thorny diversity issues of who has the right to write about what? There are moments when the reader wonders if it is ever right to write about anything, but Rebecca F. Kuang forges fearlessly ahead, kicking every sensitivity and taboo into touch. This is a fantastic, thoughtful, ...

  As part of my day job, I was recently on a panel about improving diversity and during a break I was chatting with one of the delegates who mentioned writing. Of course, my ears pricked up at this, and we ended up having a chat about books in general. She asked if I’d seen the latest spat on Twitter about diversity on books. Now, I’m not really a follower of any social media – I have a FaceBook page that I suspect needs the cobwebs blowing off, and a Twitter account that I might glance at once or twice a month – as I’ve never really understand it. I know I should engage with it more, especially from a marketing perspective, but I always manage to find something better to do. (The garden won’t weed itself.) Still, this piqued my interest enough to go have a look, so that evening I logged into Twitter and did a wee search. Sure enough, there was a series of tweets along a similar theme. Almost all of them started with a photograph of a Waterstones store window, captioned with some v...

Fresh, deliciously green copies of The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel This time last year I was just a few weeks away from publishing my third children’s novel, The Fall of a Sparrow . No book launch, alas, because of lockdown, but that didn’t spoil the excitement of all those lovely fresh, deliciously green books arriving from the printers and appearing online and in bookshops. So what does a writer do at that moment, apart from buzz around doing book signings (where possible) and school visits (where invited), plus the odd radio/magazine interview?  Well, she starts on her next book of course. If she’s not well into it already. Certainly a whole year later, there should be at least a first draft in the can, if not a second/third/fourth. Writers burst with ideas, don’t they, characters running around in their heads, banging on their temples, me me me they cry, what about ME, it’s my story now, get ON with it…. Erm. Yes. Or, in my case, not so much.  People often ask:...

Brahe's lost star tracker Happy new year! Time to reckon, to reflect and to resolve, or so they say. Not my strong points. My mind roils with riptides. I have to swim criss-cross if I'm to make it ashore. Don't expect any consistency here. Besides, as Emerson pointed out, it's overrated. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," he wrote, "adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Now we march into the third decade of the twenty-first century, too many out there goosestepping to the deadly drums of tyrannies past. You can't call this mess millennial anymore. No more excuses. With a precious few notable exceptions, this brave new century has been a big disappointment. Those of us who came of age in the last century expected so much more.  We see no magic-bullet cures for major diseases, only Big Pharma raking in obscene profits for incremental palliatives with terrifying side effects that announcers list i...