Authors Electric

This month,  I take a look at Alexander Waugh's 1999 discussion of Time as we know it (or as we think we know it). This book begins at the beginning and works fairly logically through our accepted periods of time from smallest to largest, starting with a chapter on seconds  and progressing through  minutes, hours, days, weeks,  to eras and  aeons . It ends with a discussion of simple and complex time, followed by a final chapter tantalisingly entitled 'End' - which, as I read through the earlier chapters, I imagined to be a mind-blowing comment on the end of days but actually involves a discussion of death and the afterlife according to different religions. (If you're wondering about the words in bold, I thought it might be fun to highlight our attempts to divide and control time - just consider how his post might read without those useful labels!) Time by Alexander Waugh While it's tempting to compare this book to Stephen Hawking's book ' A Brief His...

  It’s been a busy few days. Last week we visited a couple of castles, Linlithgow Palace first, most famous for its connection to Mary, Queen of Scots. My wife has had a fascination with Mary for as long as I’ve known her and the castle has been closed for the past few years for renovation work, so it was good to finally get there and soak up the atmosphere. As an aside, we also popped into the church that sits alongside, both for the stunning architecture and stained glass windows, and, for myself, to have a close look at the pipe organ they have – I’ve heard it in recordings of Bach and Widor, so it was good to see it in the flesh. Thursday was another train ride, over the Forth Rail Bride, to Aberdour, and have a look around the castle and gardens. This one will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Outlander, as it features as the Benedictine Monastery in the first series. One of the parts that really got me was the room with the painted ceiling. Yes, it’s faint, and...

     Look at this little fella. Isn't he great?           I imagine most, if not all, of my readers will immediately recognise him — even without the caption — as a knight from the Lewis chessmen. The photograph above, though, was taken by me of one that sits on my shelf. It's a replica, quite a good one, I think, and it allows you to hold the little character in your hand and get a good close look at him.           He's very like a Norman (norse-man) knight, with his kite-shaped shield and his conical helmet with a nose-piece. His horse is a sturdy little beast — I think its size, proportionate to its rider, was probably accurately observed.  The rider has stirrups, and the horse has a caparison.           Here's the other piece I own: a Bishop.     ...

It’s been a funny few weeks for me. After my week off last month, I managed to catch a rather unpleasant bug and ended up in bed for a week. On the plus side, this gave me a lot of time to read (as I couldn’t do much more than that). It kept me sane (I get rather grumpy when unwell, as I don’t like to be inactive, and I knew I had a fair few jobs planned for the garden), and at least allowed me to make inroads into the huge TBR pile we have – last count had over 500 books still to be read… I also jumped about genres and styles, from horror, to crime fiction, with drama and science fiction in the mix somewhere. But one of the books I most enjoyed was a work of non-fiction, by John Nichol (the navigator from the Tornado shot down during the first Gulf War), called Eject! Eject! . Pauline, my wife, picked this up for my birthday, thinking it would interest me as I used to work on ejection seats. It’s a fascinating read, charting the development of egress systems from the ...

So I’ve been conspicuously absent from this blog – and life in general for a few months. If 2023 was the year of health and getting my teeth done, then 2024 has so far been the year of death and the major life-changes that death brings to those of us left behind.  In January I lost my dad after a long, and slow decline into dementia. He’d been existing (I don’t use the term living, because he really wasn’t) for 18 months in a lovely care home, but passed away quietly in his sleep one night – a week before my 60th birthday and the party I’d planned.  My mum was in hospital at the time – she’d been admitted after some blood tests – and we didn’t realise then that she’d never live on her own again. After a terminal cancer diagnosis, she was in and out of hospital, respite care, her own home with carers 3 times a day (and me living with her on and off) and then she declined rapidly over a period of days and was suddenly gone. Overnight. No real goodbyes. My adult daughter and I sp...

Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Many thanks to Gill James for taking the image of me reading from From Light to Dark and Back Again at the Bridge House Publishing Celebration event in December 2023. All good fun! What are you hoping for in this new writing/reading year? Writing wise, I would like more things in print. Reading wise, I would like to discover authors new to me. The big eye opener for me in recent years has been discovering the wonderful world of non-fiction, especially history. The start of a year is when I miss most favourite authors no longer with us. I always looked forward to the new Terry Pratchett book for example. Nearly always ended up having that as a Christmas present.  Having said that I was given A Life In Footnotes which is his biography (written by Rob Wilkins) and am loving that. (Wouldn’t surprise me now if I go on to discover more on the wonderful world of biographies!).     I look forward to book ...

 I very much doubt if anybody will take the trouble to update or censor my books after I'm no longer around to object, although of course you never know which topics are going to turn out to be contentious and what kind of descriptive language might be considered offensive by later generations. I've seen several examples of this kind of thing lately in the press and social media, and also of people pushing back against it, sometimes with a degree of success. Of course there are always topics that naturally go out of fashion and books that are no longer bought for various reasons, but this latest trend is something a bit different. I have an instinctive dislike of updating something that's already been written, which I think is partly based on my having studied history and having lived long enough to see parts of it re-written several times over. At one time this was something that was mostly thought to be done in Communist countries but I think it happens everywhere. In som...

 August has been a strange month, which has traditionally been the case in Edinburgh anyway with its multiplicity of summer festivals. This year I managed not to go to any of the official Festival or Fringe shows, but I did get to a Book Festival session which was excellent and also gave me an idea of what the 'new' Book Festival venue is like (it's very nice).  I had started the month intending to finish a novel in my historical series, but something made me change my mind, and instead I shelved it at 40,000 words and started work on the 25th in my mystery series. I wasn't sure what made me do this, although now, a few weeks after my change of mind, I feel it was the right thing to do, because I've taken my series characters up to Highland Perthshire and I wouldn't have wanted to leave it any later than the autumn to do this because of the weather! Also I love Highland Perthshire and ideally I would have gone there myself this year, but after catching something...

The Carpenter and Other Stories  Years ago, more than forty of 'em, I landed a year as a writing fellow at a teaching college in Scarborough. I apologise to the college. Young and inexperienced as I was, I didn't shine as a fellow. In fact, I think the only reason I got the place was because as soon as I saw the calibre of the other applicants, I gave up all hope of getting the job. (One was, for instance, Authors Electric's very own Jan Needle, who would have made a far better fellow in every way than me. Sorry, Jan.) Knowing that I had no chance took all the pressure off and I decided to just practice my interview technique. When called in to meet 'the board,' I was relaxed and chatty and rather looking forward to a cuppa at the train station. Only towards the end of the interview did I start to read the glances the interviewing board were shooting each other and realised, with cold horror, that they might actually choose me. I knew I'd be no good but, if...

  Dino Moro Sanchez, c 2012 Two phone numbers stare at me from a yellow, 3"x5"  Post-It note on a bulletin board next to my computer. They are the last two clues I uncovered in my search for a long-lost friend. I make an excuse and vow to try the numbers soon. Coward, I call myself.  Like Schrödinger's cat, my erstwhile friend would exist both alive and dead until I dialed those numbers and, if I was lucky, discovered what had become of him.But nothing was certain, only probability curves. The numbers could turn out to be dead ends. I might not discover either possibility conclusively.  From what I could gather searching records and reports extensively over the past weeks, my friend no longer lives at his last known address- - a Hollywood Hills house he owned for decades. He could be alive, but institutionalized. A ten-year-old LAPD report listed him as missing and suffering from dementia, "possibly abducted." That missing person's report included a phone n...