Authors Electric

 Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love writing workshops. I’ve learned so much from them and now I’m running my own (flash fiction, the ups and downs of being a writer etc). I like workshops which give me plenty to think about and  exercises I can polish up at home. I want to be “doing” as well as listening. Knowing what I like has helped me tailor my workshops. I think good old-fashioned pen and paper still has a valuable role to play. This shows up best at a writing workshop. No worries about whether your PC battery will die halfway through the workshop. No worries about whether there will be enough charging points for said PC to avoid that. You just pick up a pen and jot down points of interest. Okay, there is a dilemma to be faced with pen and paper. Just which notebook will I use? Which pen to go with it? Is there any writer who doesn’t have a surfeit of notebooks and pens? When I worked in Winchester many moons ago, I avoided going...

No, I don’t mean those times when you hear a recording of yourself speaking and shudder with humiliation and embarrassment, though I’ve experienced that too. (Where did that flat-vowelled squeaky-voiced twelve-year-old with a frog in her throat spring from?) And no, I’m not at all ashamed of my Yorkshire accent – just amazed that it still survives after all these years of living in many different places.       Anyway, the subject under discussion is not my speaking but my writing voice. Anyone else get those times when you can’t write ten words in succession without recoiling in disgust? You may have an exciting new novel buzzing in your head, a bunch of characters all ready to express themselves and a plot worked out, if not down to the last detail then at least with some idea of what’s happening and when. But the actual words and sentences... it’s not so much that they won’t come as that when they do they make you want to rip up the page or clobber yo...

In 2015 I did NaNoWriMo, the writing challenge that encourages you to complete a 50,000 word first draft within the month of November. I needed a bit of motivation for my new science fiction novel, and I believed that the 1700 words (approximately) required per day would not be beyond me, since I often write (or used to write – see below) around 1500-2000 words a day anyway. NaNo seemed like a good way of making sure I kept to that, while enabling me to finish my first draft just in time to start my Christmas shopping. It proved to be a lot harder than I’d expected. What I’d forgotten was that, although I often wrote as much as 2000 words a day, I generally allowed myself at least one day off a week – sometimes two. I’d even give myself an extra day or so if I was travelling, babysitting, or feeling under the weather. NaNo permits no such luxuries. Or rather, it does, but you have to catch up on any time lost and the whole thing soon gets away from you. It was a tough month a...