Authors Electric

Another distraction - view from my window as I type When I’m not writing my own books or not-very-successfully trying to promote them, my chief occupation is being an editor, proofreader and appraiser of other people’s work, and I must admit I love these things almost as much as I love doing my own writing. The processes are very different, however, and seem to use entirely different bits of my brain. It would be lovely to be able to do my own work in the mornings, for example, and work on other people’s books in the afternoons. I know some editors who do this, but for me it simply doesn’t work. It was the same with lecturing and research, in the days when I did those things. In UK universities, lecturers are expected to fit their original research into the gaps between all their various teaching commitments and administrative functions. There are exceptions in a few places, I believe, and perhaps for some who’ve achieved the dizzy heights of academic stardom, but on the who...

Rivers was his mother's first child Rivers and June with their nanny My uncle, Rivers Scott, was his mother's first child and his father's third. Not all WW1 wives had been content to stay bravely at home awaiting their husband's return from the front and my grandfather's first wife had left their two small sons and decamped. The second wife, my grandmother, had been nursing in the war. She welcomed the two older boys and gave birth to four children of her own: boy-girl, boy-girl.  Rivers (Bill to his family) and my mother, June, were the first two of the second batch and enjoyed a notably secure and happy childhood. They had ponies and skiing holidays, private theatricals and big summer camps when multitudes of cousins came to stay. My grandfather had been child number twelve in a middle-class family of thirteen and had become a successful stockbroker. There was a nanny and a cook, a butler, chauffeur, housemaid, grooms and gardeners. (I find this oddly ...

Two hours, fifty-five minutes and counting. By my reckoning I should be able to file this blog at midnight. I wrote 1200 words in 90 minutes the other evening between 9pm and 11pm. But I won’t write even 300 words now unless I can go into the bubble. The bubble is a quiet place. It’s a soothing, yet dynamic space where the ideas and words appear exactly as you need them. You don’t fight the words in the bubble. They plip into your consciousness as if by magic. Ah yes, you think, as you type the words. Of course . . . For me, the bubble appears in the evening. When the day’s busy-ness recedes, when the business of eating is complete and when I can find no other excuses – that’s when I sit down and write the words that have eluded me all day, maybe all week. It is time to write this chapter, I tell myself as I settle at my desk – and write it I will before I go to sleep tonight. And, somehow, I do. I may have faffed about all day, but around 9pm my brain s...