Authors Electric

                         This will be--I promise you--my only post about doody...American slang for poop.      If you're still with me, I refer to literary doody. And I don't mean hack novels ground out in a month or a week between shifts at Walmart or McDonald's. I mean the sort of doody real writers like the lot of us have to flush out as we work now and then.     May I share one gross example?     Thanks.     About halfway through my WIP, which was coming right along, I found myself in real trouble. The next scene was already clear in my mind, one involving a smash action scene and a crucial change in my lead character. The pacing seemed almost right for this scene. But my character wasn't quite ready. He had to learn, hear, or see something that galvanizes him.     I had an obligation as a writer to honor this need. But my duty led me to doody as I kept t...

  So you've finished the novel you've worked on for months or even years. You've done three drafts or five or ten. You've proofread it frontwards and backwards, then hired a good editor. And this is as good as it gets, you believe. Time to move on to the next one. But is the game really over? Might you still have a strong trick or two up your sleeve? These thoughts were on my mind as I came to the finale of a novel I've worked on for nearly six years. In the long stretch I'd lost sight of certain details and made changes I hadn't expected. I'd also lost track of the time that had passed and couldn't be sure, in my mystery, that the clues had been placed to perfection. When I chanced on the term punch list, a dandy tool for use when a novel appears to be finished. Setting the ms. aside next month, I'll compose  a good long list of things my instinct tells me have to be added, deleted, or fixed. I'll tracked the placement of the clues and the t...

 Alicia Sammons I worked as an editor for the better part of my too long professional career. Editing can be demanding, but I never thought of it as a particularly glamourous or creative calling. Over the years I climbed my way up from proofreader to senior editorial positions on magazine, major metropolitan newspapers, and editing for independent publisher.  I always felt in awe of writers and aspired to their magic with words, an assessment shared in popular culture. We see a lot of juicy movies about authors like The Hours and Midnight in Paris. On the other hand, editors can't get much respect even from their writers, including a few authors with whom I've worked.  Vladimir Nabokov  sneered at them as ‘pompous avuncular brutes.’  Robert Gottlieb edited books of  Joseph Heller ,  John Le Carré ,  John Cheever , and  Toni Morrison . The legendary Maxwell Perkins  edited and famously mentored Lost Generation icons F. Scott Fitzgerald ...

When I posted in February, I'd just sent my MS off to my editor. She came back to me in March with only six pages of notes (when I used her for my debut it was fifteen pages so I consider this progress)! Overall she was happy and we clarified a few issues over a phone call. I started to work on the corrections but as I was working through, I noticed a few odd mistakes that I thought I'd corrected. If you remember from last time, I got Word to read out my MS so I heard the changes I needed to make. Had I forgotten to change them? I then got to a bit where I knew I'd added more detail. It wasn't there. Then it dawned on me. I hadn't sent my final draft. In a hurry to get everything done before going away, I'd send an earlier revision. For a day, it was the end of the world. Complete meltdown. Next day, a friend told me about the Compare option on Word. I tried it but there were too many changes for me to look at. I did my best to remember which passages I'd ch...

Either because of  an inevitable slowing down that comes with age, or because of various seasonal factors, it has taken me far longer than I wanted to finish the edits for my latest novel. Of course I hope it's just the latter, and in fact I do have a full set of excuses to hand, ranging from having to collate and send out the paperwork for an AGM held inexplicably in mid-December, to the largest radiator in the house having sprung a leak about the same time, just as the weather turned colder and we had a series of winter storms. Because of the resulting low temperatures downstairs in our house I have had to spend more time upstairs than usual, and as a result of this I've almost never had the right computer in the right place with all the notebooks, diaries etc that I rely on to keep myself on track. At the time of writing the heating engineers have just replaced the radiator with a very nice new one so I am hoping that's the signal for my brain to come out of hibernation,...

Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Many thanks to Julia Pattison for taking the photo of me at my editing workshop. Also thanks to Janet Williams for taking the image of me at a recent Book Fair. It was lovely taking part in a Book Fair in July. The last one I took part in was before the pandemic. It’s hard to imagine just how much that changed so much for so many so quickly. What was great was there was a good turn out for the fair (over 100 people). Like the authors present, everyone seemed pleased events like this are back.  In my part of the world, the nearest bookshops are miles away. I spread the word about the event as much as possible and my slogan for my marketing of the event was “bringing the books to you”. That is one of the great joys of a book fair.      Another is seeing a good range of books covering a wide range of ages and tastes. The organisers of the event also kept the writers well supplied with tea, coffee, a...

  I was driving along with a friend, who commented on the beauty of the English countryside. “It’s so green everywhere!” I had to agree with her, for many of the local roads are like green tunnels. Often, the road gives you a stunning view of green valleys, dotted with sheep and cattle, bordered by wildflowers. The thing is, as I explained to my friend, the reason it’s so green is because of the rain. I’m not a fan of rain, my children aren’t fans either, and being unable to get out makes my children very restless indeed. Cabin Fever, but with lots of capitals and exclamation marks. Once the rain has stopped, and the sun is out, however, it all looks amazing. It’s very much like writing. It’s hard work some days to find enough energy to sit down and think in a straight line. Other days, when I sit down with a corrected manuscript, working through each page and deleting entire paragraphs, I worry that there will be nothing left to publish. Or I moan at my grammar App, “What do y...

  I have a confession. Sometimes I change my mind. Not about big things: I still think Brexit a terrible idea, I still think marrying my husband was a great one, but on smaller issues I like to try things out. I like to try a new idea for fit, challenge it then move on.  My hair is a case in point. I have a lot of ideas about it - most of them terrible. At one time or another I have tried out most cuts, hairstyles and colours: waist length to super short crop, curly perms, root perms and ringlets, bobs, shags, page boys, the Purdy, the Farah Fawcett flick, the Jennifer Aniston layered thing, even (whisper it) a mullet. (Thankfully, most photographic evidence has been lost.) I've been several shades of  blonde, red, brown, grey and latterly lilac.  I've never been tempted by cosmetic surgery but hair grows back, most mistakes can be fixed. So, finally, I come to my point: my approach to hair is very much my approach to editing. You can mess up a lot in writing, but yo...

Image Credit:  All images created in Book Brush using Pixabay pictures. I’ll put my hands up and say I love editing. I’ll also confess to being an editor.   So not unbiased here, are you, Allison?  Correct.  Am not sorry.     I learned a long, long time ago (and in a galaxy far, far away) nobody writes the perfect first draft. Shakespeare didn’t. Dickens didn’t. Austen didn’t. So the chances of yours truly writing a perfect first draft are zilch to the power of ten million squared, cross out the first number you thought of etc. That’s fine. Knowing this has made me feel better about editing. Feeling better has been the first step for me getting on with the business of editing and finding this is okay. It can be creative in its own right.     What I love about editing is when you sense your draft has been “sharpened”. As a flash fiction writer, I must make every word count, which has brought on my editing skills considerably. I now know what ...

  Only two things are certain in life, Ben Franklin said. But to death and taxes, a third can be added for most working novelists: sooner or later they're sure to encounter a heavyweight problem they must beat or abandon a book. And no matter how many lesser ton fights have been won in the past, the heavyweight variety can take the wind out of one's sails. This is a true account of how I succeeded in making 17k tons of metal and glass disappear. The problem shouldn't have been there at all. My work in progress had a strong outline and was rolling along toward the final section set on board a train speeding through the American Southwest. The desert setting was essential for the type of creepy karma that I had in mind. Though I'd never ridden a train on this route, I had ridden numerous Amtrak trains and felt confident that Amtrak would sponsor a trip in exchange for a travel piece to print in its on-train magazine. Thus I could nail my research for the setting and the u...

Once again , I go into a novel I wrote aeons ago with the honourable intention of editing. One glaring error of judgement jumps out at me - the quoting of the lyric of an actual song, which if published, would cost me an arm and a leg in legal fees, so I need to take that out, and just convey its feeling without the actual words. And then, as always, I go blank, because at the time, I was writing in a drug-like state, on a high with words - no problem writing them down except a physical one with speed, hand with pen or pencil on paper, then pounding them out on an electric typewriter, errors manually corrected if, indeed, they were even noticed, because I was unstoppable. That was then, and this is now. After three decades of being rejected, then published - a lot, then going out of print, then experimenting with ebooks etc etc, I'm no longer unstoppable, and that old enchantment has long since faded to reveal a very harsh reality. There's a very interesting discussion goi...

There is always one thing you can guarantee in life, that being, change will inevitably come. The world is changing at a rapid rate. Technology is changing at a rapid rate. Life moves ever faster and often it feels that the changes are propelling us. The reason I am thinking so deeply about change at the  moment is because I own apple everything. iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac - there's an apple on the back of every piece of technology I own.  This forced me into a lot of change recently due to the fact apple has updated all its operating systems - IOS, the new iPad OS and OSX Cantana. If this sounds like double dutch to you and you're an apple owner, you'll soon find out what it means. How, I hear you ask, does this affect me as a writer. The first impact of this universal upgrade is the time it takes. I had a small window of opportunity, whilst I had a cup of tea, to upgrade my iMac. Or so I thought. I duly clicked download and, before my very eyes, a message poppe...

In the last two months, I haven't had an entire night's sleep. I'm lucky if I have five hours. No weekends. No evenings out. Almost no cooking or gardening. The worst thing? No creative writing, and almost no reading. I'm on a hamster wheel and the faster I run, the faster it spins--the book tour gig is not for sissies. I'm traveling to various cities in India with You Beneath Your Skin , attending panels and discussions and lit-fests and all throughout an inner voice that remains calm and detached keeps asking me when I plan to get back to my current WIP again. I'm fundraising for two charities I've volunteered with for a while: Project WHY and Stop Acid Attacks : all my proceeds go to them. This adds an impetus--I'm pretty sure if this was a normal book, with no causes attached to it, I would have bolted into a hidey-hole a long time ago. To de-stress and keep myself functional, I've turned to meditation--just learning to breathe and rem...

I am a compulsive editor, especially of picture book texts which really have to be spot-on perfect, so from time to time I check over the ones that haven't flown, to find out why, and to see if they can be improved. If I haven't checked them for ages, I feel I'm coming at them from a different place - as a very picky reader. I was once passionate about the concept, but now I'm reading it cold, with all passion spent, and I can see its flaws, often glaring, but once upon a time I was in love with this story, so can it be rescued? At present I've been re-acquainting myself with my "Little Bad King", partly because it slots into current politics, which won't interest its intended age group one whit, except for the themes of fairness, greed, and nasty people getting their come-uppance in amusing ways, none of which is age exclusive. This is how it starts: SPREAD ONE. ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A LITTLE BAD KING. HE WAS MEAN. HE WAS GREEDY, AND ...