Authors Electric

You know how it is – somebody mentions a particular subject on Facebook or Twitter, which sparks that domino effect of comments, which often stray off topic, interweaving with the original post but following trains of thought from a dozen, two dozen and more people. You watch the thread build and add to the chatter but in your head the memories are sparked of things only related to the subject by tenuous fibres of thought. It is the catching those thoughts that can be essential to a writer. Last night I danced on the edges of a thread that dealt with the subject of eating pet food. Specifically who had would own up to sampling dog or cat food, when and of what kind. It is the kind of topic that at one time you would only ever have heard in the dying hours of a party. Who was going to own up to eating dog food after all? Quite a number as it turned out. Dog biscuits seemed the most popular choice for the gourmet pet owner. Bonios and Spillers Shapes being the most mentioned. ...

Sitting at my keyboard, or terminal as we call it nowadays, I look at my watch (or little panel at the bottom of my screen, as we et cetera et cetera) and realise I’ve done nothing at all in two hours, maybe longer, except twiddle and fiddle and piddle about in the name of being up with the times. I’ve looked at Facebook, I’ve even posted something on my ‘wall,’ I’ve wondered as so often before why it didn’t behave exactly as I expected it to,  and why a link I typed in (inputted?) did not appear as it should have done. I— Oh! New technology strikes again. My mobile phone, lying in front of me before the screen, has just given a couple of sickly buzzes. Why sickly? I set it up only yesterday to be loud and brash and insistent. Apparently it’s changed my mind for me – I deserve only a sickly buzz, and it’s just lucky it was lying in the open and not stashed in a pocket and inaudible. The message is interesting, and requires an answer. Unfortunately, the caller is ‘unnamed,’...