Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Do you write anything connected to holidays, whether they’re ones you’ve taken, or ones where you've sent your characters away? I don’t though I can see the appeal. You’ve got the chance to put your characters out of their normal environment. How would that change their behaviour and attitudes? What would be the consequences? I’m thinking about Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie here. What was supposed to be a honeymoon trip became something different. How could you make use of holidays you’ve taken to enhance your stories? One idea is to use the landscape of where you’ve visited as a model for the setting for your story.  I was in lovely Northumberland last autumn and was staying near a lovely town with a gorgeous river running through it. So I could take that idea and fictionalise it for my story or I could take certain elements only and put those in my tale. Holiday photos can also inspire ideas later. Lan...

 As I write this, it's the last day of June, and despite having signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo in July I feel I can relax for the first time in a while. This wasn't really what I expected when I retired from my day job! There are various reasons why June has been exceptionally busy. The first reason was a self-imposed one, and as usual, it is that I had given myself more writing deadlines than I should have done. I'd been working for some time on creating a coherent longer story out of five connected short stories I wrote during June 2021 as part of a short story challenge. During May I seemed to be nearing the end of this process and had published a mystery novel I'd also been working on, so I signed up both for July's Camp NaNoWriMo and for a new short story challenge this June. This entailed writing a short story every day based on a prompt that arrived by email at around lunchtime every day. It was a bit more flexible than last year's challenge, and occasional...

As I suppose is the case with many people at the time of writing this, my mind has been taken up with monitoring the news via various sources. There is only so much of the current news footage I can cope with at one time, and I don’t want to comment directly on what’s happening now. However, as I get older my mind tends to wander back to things I had almost forgotten about, and so the other day I found myself remembering a conversation I once had as a teenager in a park in Leningrad (St Petersburg). I was fortunate enough, although perhaps that isn’t the right word for it, to be able to study Russian and German at school instead of the more usual French and/or Latin. I found Russian was much more difficult than German because of all the endings that had to be learnt, which in some cases replaced the need for definite and indefinite articles, and sometimes made prepositions redundant. However I did persevere with it for six years and almost went on to study it at university, but I had...

 I'm not sure whether I've been writing too much lately and have burnt out, or whether this always happens in the summer - maybe I have a sort of vague memory of long school holidays at this time of year. It would certainly be nice to spend a month at the seaside as we sometimes did when I was a child. This year we will be lucky to get away for a planned long weekend in Llandudno, which is at least by the sea as well as having a lovely long promenade for walking. Unfortunately our journey there relies on all four trains we have to catch being present and more or less correct at the right times. That's four trains there and another four back, by the way. Llandudno must be one of the most difficult places in the country to get to from here. But I mustn't ramble on about trains, tempting though it is. View from Conwy Castle No matter what the cause, I am having trouble concentrating on my work in progress. It may be because I've made it too serious and so it isn't ...

I don't think I've ever needed a break so desperately. Even at the last moment it seemed as if there were forces at work trying to stop me from escaping. I had just finished packing that morning when one of the kitchen lights suddenly began flickering on and off rather dramatically, even after I used the nearest switch to turn it off. Of course it could have been caused by an alien invasion, as in the scene from 'Close Encounters' where the little boy sees all his toys start to work on their own, but I suppose that was always an unlikely hypothesis. When I tried again with the other switch, at the far end of the kitchen, it gave me an electric shock. While still waiting for the taxi, I sent an online message to an electrician begging him to hurry round and do something about it, ran upstairs to tell the bed-ridden member of the family to drag himself downstairs and out the door if he smelt burning -- leaving the door open for the cat, naturally -- and a few moments l...

I was thinking about the weather the other day. That's something British people are famous for doing, of course, as well as for talking about it. My late father-in-law used to panic about weather extremes, especially gales, which everyone found quite harmless and even amusing until a hypnotherapist helped him to work out that it was caused by post-traumatic stress following his wartime experiences driving ammunition trucks in the desert during sandstorms. However without even noticing it, I seem to have suddenly reached the stage in my life where I don't mind too much what the weather throws at me -- within reason, that is. I am not keen on the kind of gales we get sometimes which literally throw things at you, from trees to trampolines. I am also slightly baffled by the fact that during the various named storms we now have during every season except summer, the trains stop running somewhere in Scotland because of trampolines on the tracks. When I was a child the wea...

Last week after much back-and-forth, I finally got the okay from Polar HQ to interview The Elf Himself. I wasn't going to complain about being offered this primo "get" at the last minute, what with December here and lights already strung everywhere. I would like to think that I got the twinkle-and-nod because the Jolly Red One wanted to meet the author of Milagro on 34th Street . I even fantasized that might give me an award for my past service as a "real bearded," department-store Santa. No dice, however. The reality, I suspect, was that Polar PR had called on me as a substitute after a celebrity television interviewer dropped out due to sexual misconduct charges. Can't have Santa's name mixed up in all that. "Unseasonably warm," Kringle muttered, fiddling with a thermostat as I was escorted into his cluttered workshop office by a bony, baleful, elf from IT, who obviously didn't like the task. Santa extended a chubby white-gloved hand...

Holidays begin with lists. First there are the things that must be done, the travel arrangements, booking hotels and flights and making sure that passports are in date. Then all the domestic stuff, who is going to look after the cat, water the garden, collect the post etc. Finally, what has to be bought, sun cream, new swimwear and books.      When it’s time to pack there are other decisions to be made, which clothes and shoes to take and which to leave behind. At which point the laptop/notebook question has to be addressed.      Is this going to be a holiday with, or without? Am I going to take my work with me and have a holiday like any normal person?      On a practical level, this means that my hand luggage will be lighter and there will be no tangles of wires to wrestle with at check in when, inevitably, after passing through the x-ray machine, mine is the case which is selected to be unpacked. Even though I know...

I sometimes feel that I'm not very helpful in this blog. Some posts by other people are full of information and suggestions, more likely to be to do with how and what to write than baking scones. I don't know if I'm meant to dispense handy tips from whatever imagined reservoir of expertise I might be supposed to have (non-clumsy sentences being at the end of that list, judging from that one!) But a couple of nights ago I had a revelation, and I'm going to share it with you. Pin back your lug’oles! Trying to look serious for once I was sitting in my bed (one of my favourite writing stations) flipping through the Kindle notes I have made on a textbook I've been working from. I made the notes as they occurred to me, and they're all germane to a novel that I have in hand. I knew the novel had several specific points I needed to research more, or to polish up, and as I read the textbook over days and weeks I put in a Kindle bookmark at any point that struck ...

So we recently succumbed to the siren call of all those fellow retirees who live their lives on the high seas by taking a short cruise around the Arabian Gulf .  We loved the sunshine but if you’re thinking of doing it, you might want to take this short test to decide if cruising is for you! 1. Time to pack! So do you: a)    Start planning your wardrobe a month in advance, using a printed timetable of which nights will be formal, casual, or themed and with your favourite weather app to hand. (You can always pay for extra baggage). b)    You assemble most of last year’s summer wardrobe and your one posh frock, throw in a few panic buys then throw them out again in case you go over the baggage allowance   c)     Your Rohan gear is light and crinkle-proof. You share a rucksack as usual 2. After an overnight flight you’ve been embarked (yes, this is a transitive verb) but have yet to be  reunited with you...