Authors Electric

As well as being a large New World monkey, a werewolf in full cry, or an unpleasant letter in a red envelope sent to someone at Hogwarts, the other definition of howler is a stupid mistake or ludicrous blunder.  Some of them find their way into general parlance, particularly when used by a person of note, and Covfefe appears to have achieved this rather dubious status with the greatest of ease. Like most writers, I have other forms of income and, like most writers, a lot of it consists of teaching. In the old days, before everyone thought they could write because their computers made everything look professional, howlers were limited to hard copy, whether it was a manuscript or a sign in a shop window. I fondly remember such delights as the notice in my local butcher’s, during a salmonella outbreak one Christmas: AVOID SALMONELLA BY OUR TURKEYS. It took me a moment to realise that it was the letter U that was missing. Both spelling mistakes and punctuation can radically ...

   Cinnamon hummingbird I’ve recently returned from three weeks in central America. The first part was an organised tour of Nicaragua, with seven participants, including me, plus our guide, and the second part was staying with a friend in Costa Rica.      I’ve always used these holidays as material for stories, but this time I was intrigued by the differing reading habits of the others on the first trip. Most people brought books, not e-readers, much to my surprise. When you have a 20 kilo weight limit on an aircraft books take up quite a lot of it, so for me an e-reader has been a real bonus as I never run out of something to read.      What seems to happen is that people read the paperbacks they’ve brought, and then leave them somewhere for other people to read and use the resulting space to bring back souvenirs. It never seems to occur to them that authors get nothing when a book is passed on, or sent to a charity shop. ...