Authors Electric

A long-time colleague of mine recently left our team, taking up a new post. He’d been in the team for sixteen years, so a decent send-off was required. I usually get asked to write something when people leave (a short, humorous poem or sketch) – it’s become a bit of a tradition, in fact, and over the years I must have written seven or eight of these little comic vignettes, but this time was a little different – as I’m currently in charge of the department, it fell to me to do the ‘official’ leaving speech as well. I got there in the end – it was just a couple of hundred words, but took a surprising amount of time to write. It went down well, in the end – clean enough not to upset anyone, with some gentle ribbing recalling a few comic moments, and I managed to deliver it (after a few rehearsals behind a locked door) with perfect timing. So, a success. This was last Thursday morning. We’d also arranged to have a few drinks after work the next night, and during the afternoon, I began t...

For this post, I've been tagged by Valerie Laws to explain my writing process. We all tackle the job differently, don't we? There are one or two things we agree on, such as editing a lot and reading work aloud to spot the clunky bits, but there's no right and wrong way. It took me a while to find that out! Valerie Laws ( www.valerielaws.com ) is a crime novelist, poet, playwright and sci-art installation specialist. Of her thirteen published books, 4 are currently available as ebooks. A mathematics/physics graduate, she devises new poetic forms and science-themed poetry installations and commissions including the infamous Arts Council–funded   Quantum Sheep,   spray-painting haiku onto live sheep to celebrate quantum theory.   Much of her recent work arises from funded residencies with pathologists, neuroscientists, human specimens and dissections. Another quantum haiku on inflated beachballs in Hackney Lido featured in BBC2’...