Authors Electric

It's quite unusual for me to write anything by hand, not least because of the difficulties in deciphering it afterwards. But I do have a series of writing notebooks, which I tend to use for planning novels, although I'm doing well if a plan exceeds a page or so, for editing notes and for making monthly and annual plans, each more flexible than the preceding one. For instance, I see my plan for September had 6 items in it, of which I only managed to achieve one. It was when I found my planning notebook and reached for a pen to start a new page for October, which I hope will be more organised than September, although I seriously doubt it, that I realised there were no pens on the table I use as my writing desk, in the corner of the conservatory. I read once upon a time in a book about de-cluttering - despite my failure to de-clutter, I often try to come to terms with it in the only way I know how, which is to understand it in theory - that if you get hold of lovely container...

First of all, my apologies to Jeanette Winterson (who is, incidentally, one of my favourite authors) for playing with the title of her wonderful book Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (If you'd like to read my review of this book, please see my blog, Rosalie Reviews .) Why be a writer when you could be normal? Why be a writer when you could be happy? Why be happy when you could be a writer? Why be a writer...? OK, that's enough permutations for now. But all these questions are currently very much on my mind, and I'm going to try to make a few clunky stabs at answering them here. For years and years I wanted to be a writer, but was, on the whole, too busy getting on with life to do very much about it. Six years ago I took early retirement for reasons of ill-health, and since then I've been, as they say, time-rich. I started (and continued) writing because I wanted to, and because it felt as though I had at least two-thirds of a lifetime's accumulation of stu...