Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Book cover image from Chapeltown Books. AI images avoided. One of the lovely things about having a new flash fiction collection out is it will give me plenty of new stories to read at Open Prose Mic Nights.   I usually take part in the Open Prose Mic Night The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick  hold every August. It’s a great opportunity to discover how stories go down with the audience. In 2025 I read out one or two tales from my then forthcoming Seeing The Other Side precisely for that reason. Am glad to say the tales concerned did get laughs the way they were meant to. When I take part in these events, I look for a balance of old and new stories to share. I like to mix up the moods of the tales too to show what flash fiction can do and be. It is a wonderful format for humorous writing but it can also pull you up sharp and make you think, make you react. I still feel a chill at Hemingway’s classic For sa...

Image Credits:-   Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One photo from The Writers’ Summer School was taken by me, Allison Symes. Another two were kindly taken by Penny Blackburn at two Open Prose Mic Nights at Swanwick and used with permission. Book cover image is from Bridge House Publishing. AI images avoided. When this post goes live on 18th June 2026, my third flash fiction collection, Seeing The Other Side , should have been published by Bridge House Publishing  via their imprint, Chapeltown Books . The book has been a long time in coming and it is a joy to see it out there.  I’ve long thought what a pity it is you can’t bottle the feeling you have when your book comes out to draw on for encouragement and inspiration during the tougher times of the writing life. I’m busy preparing for launches. The book will have a physical launch, so to speak, at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick in Derbyshire in August. It has been a recent development for th...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. AI images avoided.   Fiction reflects life in all its shades of grey (I believe someone once thought there were fifty of those and then considered there were another fifty after that). At either end of the spectrum, fiction has its light and dark sides.  I’ve written both kinds in my flash and short story work. Indeed when I was putting my debut flash fiction collection together, the moods of the stories inspired the title, From Light to Dark and Back Again . This was also useful as the moods of the stories helped me with my ordering for this collection.  I always prefer writing and reading the lighter side of fiction but know that for some of my characters at least, the darker side of the spectrum is where they “fit”. This is due to their being of a darker nature or their situation is such the likely outcome will be on the darker side. The important thing here is it will ring true and that truth matte...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos  Every year is special in some way to us all but I hope 2026 will prove to stand out for all of the right reasons.  I reach a milestone birthday in a few days time after this blog goes out - the big 60 - but it also reminds me of another anniversary.  This year will mark thirty years since I took up the pen seriously. It did take a milestone birthday and another life changing event (the birth of my son later in 1996) to make me realise if I wanted to get stories written and out there somehow, I ought to get on with it!  Despite setbacks, and the proverbial rejections (more than enough to cover several walls and possible The Great Wall of China itself), I’ve kept writing since. This year is also due to see the publication of my third flash fiction collection, Seeing The Other Side too. I hope to have physical book launches as well as online ones for this.  When my last book, Tripping The Flash ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. It is ironic the longest month ever, January, is followed by the shortest, February. Writing wise, it gives me the shortest time to prepare my next author newsletter, due in March, but I discovered long ago the joys of drafting in advance so I add to my draft as the month goes on. I do likewise for my blogs and articles. It takes the pressure off.   I enter a number of reputable flash fiction and short story competitions in the year. It’s fun to do and a great challenge (and I always look for those where it is free or the fee is reasonable).    I’ve found it useful to take a week off any official deadline and make that the day I submit my entry. I pencil into my diary when I need to have my first draft done by, my first edit, my second one, and the final one to check for those pesky typos which have escaped the previous edits. I wish I could say there weren’t any but I’ve found it pays to assume there ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. When this post appears, I should have just returned from a fabulous break in stunning Northumberland. It led me to think about how getting out and about can inspire ideas. Grab your phone, take pictures. They can be random or specific images. I’ve used photos to give me ideas for how, for example, a landscape would look for my characters. I can also use that background to visualise who might live there. You could also use your images to write non-fiction pieces (were there historical events associated with that landscape?). Photos can be great for triggering ideas. I take far more than I normally do when away so try to make use of these for writing purposes later.   I love postcards and send some home. But why not use a typically sized card to create a story? It will be flash fiction because you won’t get more than a couple of hundred words on there at most. Indeed flash has been known as postcard fiction. Writ...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I didn’t start out writing in the short fiction forms. I began by seeing if I could write a novel. I did. It went through numerous rewrites, had professional editing twice, and was longlisted in a Debut Novel competition. It remains unpublished. I became tired of the rejections  so I turned my attention to the shorter fiction forms.  It took a long time for my stories to become publishable but I wasn’t surprised. I’d been reading plenty of sensible writing advice and still do. You are warned learning to get your work up to publication standard does take time. I saw this as fair game (and again still do). I did find quickly one advantage to writing short stories was I could get far more written in the time it took me to write my novel, edited, reworked, edited again etc. I was also able to get feedback on the short stories which I used to help me improve.  That eventually led to my first story in...

  Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One image of The Hayes, Swanwick was taken by me, Allison Symes. I read short and long form fiction and non-fiction. I mix up reading in print books or on Kindle. I often try works by authors new to me on the latter. If I like the ebooks, I often buy said authors’ paperbacks later. The Kindle is especially useful for non-fiction. I also write in short and longer format, fiction and non-fiction. It keeps my reading and writing life interesting. My writing life has been an upside down one. I started by writing novels.Talk about running before I could walk. I then went into short stories. From there I went into flash fiction. During the short form time, I branched out into non-fiction by blogging, writing articles etc. It is all fun. Almost certainly I’ve done everything the wrong way around! Having said that, this means when I go to a writing event, I have a wide range of topics to interest me. It is a rare day...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One positive thing to come from the pandemic was the increasing use of Zoom to enable people to still “meet”.   I use Zoom regularly to meet with distant family members and for workshops. One welcome thing I hadn’t expected was being able to run flash fiction workshops for writing groups all over the country. No travel fees and I’m paid. I like this - a lot! I now run a monthly flash fiction workshop, on different aspects of the craft, for a Christian writing organisation. The members could never meet in person - we live hundreds of miles apart - but Zoom comes to the rescue and it has made it possible for the organisation concerned to offer genre specific writing groups. I think it is a wonderful development. Zoom has also led to my rediscovering PowerPoint . I used it a lot in the 1990s, moved away, and then returned to it for Zoom workshops as these presentations are great (and easy) to share on s...