Authors Electric

  After a few months delving into the classics, I’ve now gone back to reading more in the genre I write – when asked, I usually say ‘crime’ as that’s easier than saying, ‘Well, it’s a mix of dark psychological thriller with occasional horror thrown in, plus a bit of action and adventure on the side.’ The truth is, as I suspect for most of us who write, it’s hard to pigeonhole oneself into a specific box. I write stories; that’s the more honest answer, but give that as an answer and you get a frown, followed by, ‘Well yes, but what sort?’ For me, writing is a way to tell a story. That’s my motivation. It’s a way to explore topics I’m interested in. The genre I write in is secondary to that. I generally choose crime, as I enjoy reading it, and I understand the structure. But another writer may take the same idea and approach it from the opposite direction, with equally valid results. I think the same holds true for the reader – each reader’s life experiences will shape their percep...

  A “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is my favourite Shakespeare Play, I’ve acted in it, produced and directed it and seen countless versions on stage and screen. One of the many things I love about it is the play the mechanicals put on for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding feast. I still laugh at “The Lamentable Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe”− especially the scene with the Wall. The humour may be slapstick, but there is an element of satire too. Shakespeare is gently mocking fellow actors and their need to be centre stage. When Quince casts Bottom the Weaver as Pyramus, Bottom is, at first, delighted to be given the lead role, but as each new part comes up he thinks he’d like to give that one a try too “An I may hide my face, let me play Thisby too, I'll speak in a monstrous little voice. 'Thisne, Thisne;' 'Ah, Pyramus, lover dear! thy Thisby dear, and lady dear!' ” Or “Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that I will do any man's heart good to hear me; I ...

So  here’s my first post on  Authors Electric,  and hoping I’ll fit in here… and here’s what I am doing, while  ‘wearing my writing hat’. It’s November, which to many writers means NaNoWriMo, when we’re invited to write a novel in a month. I’m not trying to do that, (though one year I wrote a rather cheerful poem about it...)  But I am, as I join the group, trying to revive - and complete within the coming months - Book Three of a series. The first two novels in the Mullins Family Saga were written and published before the Brexit debate went public in 2016, and Book Three’s timescale takes my readers to 2007. How to complete this book, which was meant to tell the story of my characters encountering a more domestic tragedy, back before ISIS, the financial crash, and Brexit? It was another world. The Importance of Genre In an article on NaNo I read recently, we’re advised that before starting to write, we shoul...

My hero D.O. Hill, by permission Preus Museum, Norway I may not have said much about my latest project here on Authors Electric, so in case you haven't heard, I have a novel coming out in April called In the Blink of an Eye . I was inspired to write it by the real story of one man's journey through art and photography and the women who fell, in different ways, under his spell.   The accepted term for  a life-story written as a novel  is 'fictional biography' , but t rawling through some older posts across at https://alibacon.com , I remember that for quite some time I wasn't sure what kind of book In the Blink of an Eye   was going to be.   While I explored the shape of the story on the page, I was aware of keeping as closely as I could to ‘the facts’. And new facts were popping up all the time. If I included them all  surely it would be non-fiction, or perhaps more correctly 'narrative non-fiction'.   Had I really only plumped f...

So, I now knew a bit about life in nineteenth century New Zealand. But I also knew that Barbara Weldon came from Ireland, so it was time to find out about where she came from and why she might have left. I knew she was born in Ireland in the 1830s ... and in the 1840s Ireland suffered three years of potato famine. So - that gave ma a context. And it wasn't difficult to find out plenty of details about the famine - from the stink of rotten potatoes to the mass migration of starving people. But ... it was the Catholics, as tenant farmers, who were hit hardest by the famine, and I knew that Weldon was a Protestant name. As landowners, they farmed huge estates, growing a variety of crops and thus protected from the ravages of the famine. What's more, many grew grain, which they exported to England and America - while their tenants starved. (Imagine that happening today:  rich people with tables taken with food while people are starving on their doorsteps ...) Not all, of cou...

Woody Allen has said in an interview how much he had loved Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black satirical comedy, DR STRANGELOVE, and that, like many others, he then waited four expectant years for Kubrick’s next film to appear. Allen sat in the darkness of the cinema and watched all of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. He exited the cinema, just thinking “what was that?” He couldn’t make head nor tail of Kubrick’s new film and was very disappointed. A week later, says Allen, he went back to see 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. On the second viewing, Allen loved it and concluded this was one of the best films he had ever seen in his life. And so the confounding of expectations…particularly in cinema and literature, genre expectations, can go… Kubrick seemed to delight in radical shifts in subject matter from film to film: from noir to war, from satire to science fiction, from the distant past of SPARTACUS to the dystopian future of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE; from the candle-lit 18 th century picture-frame ...

Author Linda Gillard What do you like to read? Do you like to know exactly what to expect when you open a book? Or do you like to be surprised? Do you stick to favourite authors? Do you read only certain genres or do you like to try something new? The publishing industry is based on guessing what readers like to read. (I say “guessing” because I’m yet to come across any adult fiction publisher who does reader market research, apart from Harlequin, Mills & Boon.) Sales figures show what readers bought, but not what they enjoyed and there’s a difference between the two, as you’ll know if you’ve ever been disappointed by the gap between what a much-hyped book promised to deliver and what actually lay within its pages. I write fiction for a living, so I have more than a passing interest in what readers like to read. Over the years, I’ve found myself at odds with editors over this - which brings me to the thorny question of “genre issues”, a problem that has dogged many an autho...