Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. No kidding, Sherlock, I know but I suspect there have been a few love stories doing the rounds this month. Wonder why…  That said the thought of Valentine’s Day and associated tales led me to wonder about popular themes and whether anything new can be said to still make the best of them. Naturally some themes will turn up time and again for competitions and markets because they will always appeal to us. The world isn’t going to run out of love stories. It doesn’t mean authors should stop writing them, far from it. Themes reflect the human condition, which is why we always identify with popular themes.   The ideal then is to bring something new to the mix. My way into that is via the character(s). There has to be something about them which would make them stand out to me first, then potential readers. If the character doesn’t grab my attention, I can hardly expect them to grab the attention of anyone else....

I’ve been out and about the last couple of days, and with more to come. The reason? Twofold, really. One is to spend some time with my family – my wife and I have next week off, and it’s the school holidays here in Scotland so what better opportunity. The other reason is more selfish – I’m looking around for inspiration and ideas of locations that may fit into current or future stories. Although I generally write contemporary crime for adults, I try to place it in a setting I’m familiar with, which usually means Edinburgh and its surroundings. As I usually have a few ideas of certain key scenes when working out the details of a book or story, I find it helpful if I can ground them in real places. My most recent book for adults, The Missing, had certain elements of the plot altered when I wrote the first draft as I worked in real places. (Of course, I usually change the names of places, although a person familiar with the area will almost certainly know what I’m really referring to.) ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Do you review how many books you’ve read/listened to this year? I don’t. This is because while I’ve read plenty of books, I always feel I should be reading more. I remind myself I only have so many hours in the day and the better question to ask is did I enjoy the books I read? The answer to that is a definite yes. Life is too short to waste on a boring book. I like to mix reading fiction and non-fiction. I also mix up forms of writing so will read novels, then go on to short story and flash collections, before resuming novel reading again. I mix up reading between formats - hardback, paperback, Kindle. Plus I ensure I read the writing magazines I find most helpful. Within fiction, I like to mix genres too. I try to have a good all-round reading “diet” then. I was fascinated by Churchill’s Wizards (read on Kindle ) which looked at how artists, amongst others, deceived the Nazis using sleight of hand, camouflage, ma...

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I took part in Flash NANO for the first time in November 2022. Novelists have NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) where the idea is to write 50,000 words over the month of November.  The flash fiction equivalent sets thirty prompts for the same period. The idea is to have thirty pieces of new flash fiction to edit, polish, and submit.  I did manage to get thirty stories written though, by the nature of these things, some prompts were easier to do than others. I normally write at least two new flash pieces a week. To write one a day was a new departure. It helps to accept you just write to the challenge. You worry about editing later.  What was interesting was finding some of my stories were coming in at the 200 word mark, others were at the higher end of flash territory (close to 1000) words. My normal “flash home” is 500 words or under so I assumed that is probably what I’d end up doing. It wasn’t alw...

Thanks. Obliged. Hallowe’en, yeah? Going to hang up your furry spiders and plastic skulls, eh? ‘Cos tonight’s the night graves open and give forth their dead. Ghosts on Hallowe’en? Get off. You can see ghosts any night of the week. Oooh, it’s behind you! And in front of you, and alongside you and following you up the stairs. Never seen a ghost? Well, you’ve never been homeless, have you? Never slept in a nice, comfy doorway. Except you don’t sleep. Too cold. Too dangerous. You doze, off and on, all night. Wake up with a jump every few minutes. Half-sleep is the best you get. A few nights like that strips something away. And you see the ghosts. They walk past you, walk around you, walk up and down the street, across the street, in and out of doors... They stop by your doorway and stand there and stare at you. And then walk on. No wonder they say ghosts ‘walk.’ They walk all right. Day and night. Go sleepless for a few nights and you see ‘em. You see ‘em in broad dayligh...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. How easy do you find coming up with ideas? I’m always on the lookout for new ones. I write flash fiction and blog for online magazines, so I always need a stock of ideas.    As well as writing on topics of interest to me (and I hope other writers), I use random generators to trigger ideas. These work especially well for fiction but I have used things like a random question generator to give me a blog theme.   I also use prompt books and have contributed to a couple. I like the challenge of rising to a theme set by someone else and bringing my take to it. With the random generators, I can do this via variety of means.  I have used the following:- Random word/object generators. Random noun/adjective/verb generators. Random name generators (a recent story of mine was accepted for an online magazine and the idea for it came from the generated name). Random question generators. (Great for use as...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One of the ways I fire up my imagination is to use random generators.   I’ve used the following to good effect. Random Noun/Adjective/Verb generators. Random Question generators (good for giving ideas for themes, sometimes titles). Random Number generators (I’ve used a number as a countdown in a story. I’ve also used it as part of an address where the action happened). Random Name generators (where you can generate a first name, surname, or both). Random Picture generator. If I select a landscape I come up with who might live there and what happens to them in this landscape. If I select a picture of a person, I prefer those where they are doing something, such as walking away from the camera at the time the shot was taken. I can rough out a story around that. Who is this person? What or whom are they walking away from? Could they be walking towards something instead? A successful generator makes me ask que...

  Becoming a published author rather unexpectedly, has opened up a whole new previously unexplored world to me. The whole publishing/marketing journey has been a steep learning curve, with a few full -blown side swipes included. There have been definite highs – like wonderful reviews, and uncomfortable lows – like the boxes of unsold books. But on the whole I’ve enjoyed the ride. There have been lots and lots of lessons learned - if I should ever do this again. It genuinely has been an enlightening and rewarding experience. This month I encountered another new experience – a real life, post lockdown, book signing – in a ACTUAL BOOK SHOP! I was excited and terrified in equal measure, not really knowing what to expect, being so grateful for the opportunity, and knowing it was something I had to do. At least once, anyway. So I thought it would be useful to record for posterity, some of the things I learned that day, and I am sharing them here in case they might be of use to any...