Authors Electric

I've always had the urge to learn new things, almost to the point where it might be diagnosed as an addiction. It doesn't appear to be going away as I get older. Learning new things does come in useful for a novelist, however.  My usual reaction to wanting to know something is to look it up. In pre-internet times I would go to a book for the answer, but if I didn't have the appropriate book on my own shelves I would have had to go to the library and try to find it there, and perhaps to a larger better-stocked library, which is all right for someone living in a place with more than one library but not so useful for people in smaller towns and villages. I grew up in a village which only had a visit from a library van once a fortnight. My father and I quickly exhausted their supply of murder mysteries, and my father joined a book club and got one new book a month in the post to supplement the library's offerings.     The internet has opened up many and varied possibilities...

Photo from 'The Telegraph', Kolkata - 20 May 2020 Corona + Amphan is the worst double whammy one can think of - and we are facing that at the moment. By “we”, I mean Bangladesh and two eastern states of India – Orissa and West Bengal. Cyclone Amphan hit us on 20 th May. Last year, a similar cyclone - Fani - had hit the coastal belt lining the Bay of Bengal in early May. It coincided with my daughter Srishti’s Birthday - so, the small party I’d arranged at home for her had to be cancelled. This year, a day after Amphan, with no internet, we could barely wish our niece in Hyderabad on her Birthday. While the ISD call did connect, all that could be heard from the other side were garbled voices… but at least, we could shout out a “Happy Birthday”!  Privileged kids Birthday celebrations are luxuries that can be done without for a year or two (though for children it can be a bitter disappointment; eagerly wait as they do for months for their BIG day). But even for them,...

I’m possibly speaking only for myself here - but when I read a blog or a newspaper online I read the title and the opening argument and then decide I’ve got the gist of it and decide if I want to skim from there or if it’s going to repay the time investment to read it thoroughly. These days more and more pieces are skimmed - it’s so easy to get the general idea and then click on something else. Many online newspapers make the process easier by confusing sentences with paragraphs - everything is divided into three-line chunks. Facebook posts - if someone has something deep and meaningful to say, they need to grab me in the first couple of sentences.  And then I sit down to read a real book. I curl up on the sofa with tea (or wine). I have an hour or two to wallow in real print on real paper. But after half an hour I’m restless - it’s time to move on to something else. A few years ago I could read the clock round and move only when I needed a wee. I sit down to research som...

Since the beginning of August, I have been without incoming calls on my landline . I can call out with no problem, and the broadband is (mostly) there when I want it, but hardly anyone can actually call me. Ringing my number results in a message saying "you have dialled an incorrect number" or "invalid number" or  - rather more cryptically - three electronic beeps. The only exception to this rule seems to be when my phone provider rings to test the line or to apologize - they can get through just fine. Rather annoyingly, as it turns out, so can other call centres (so far a couple of random telemarketers and a robot survey) - although I have to admit things have been rather peaceful on the unsolicited calls front lately, so I assume most of them are getting blocked, just like my friends and family. The saga of investigations into this mysterious phenomenon could fill a whole book. Suffice to say that I have almost forgotten what my landline phone sounds like, to s...

When I first flirted with the idea of publishing, I was told that I needed an online presence - beginning with a blog. Well, that was easy - I'd begun a blog when I first went travelling, not for any literary reason but simply to keep in touch with friends and family at home. So extending that to write about writing wasn't so hard. Then - that wasn't enough. I needed a website. So I set about teaching myself HTML, wrote my own website and, with a click of the mouse, it was live. It's a bit amateur, I know, but I can amend it myself, which feels important to me. ( www.jocarroll.co.uk ) Then - that wasn't enough. I had to be on Twitter. That was where all the fun was, where people could set up a chatty platform and leap from there into promoting books. So I joined Twitter, spent some time getting my head round it, and it was, for a while, fun. Though I've no idea if it sold any books. Then - that wasn't enough. I had join to Facebook. I'd res...

Recently there’s been quite a lot of handwringing about the internet’s effect on “deep reading”, and about the so-called “ADHD Generation”, who supposedly can’t concentrate on anything longer than a tweet or Facebook update. If that is indeed so, then it’s obviously bad news for all authors – but is it true? There’s a sense in which it’s hard not to sympathise with this doom-laden scenario. After all, the internet makes a wealth of information available at your fingertips, and in order to process and absorb even a fraction of it you have to be slightly selective. Surfing the web entails an awful lot of grazing and skimming, not to mention a degree of online promiscuity: one leaps onto a webpage, quickly scans a few sentences, and then – if not sufficiently entranced – hotfoots it out of the virtual door and over to the next page. Hyperlinks make that process even more simple; it’s very easy to get distracted when a juicy new page is beckoning enticingly. Why, there’s even a n...

Writing can be a lonely business. Whether you live alone or are married and/or have a large family, the act of committing your imagination to paper or computer is highly personal – just you and your words against the world. Of course I’m discounting all the people that live in your head and whisper to you at odd hours of the day – if I admitted I talked to imaginary people, I’d have even less of a social life than I do already! It’s slightly different in the 21 st century – the internet helps us connect to other like-minded people, sharing ideas and offering support across the world via facebook, blogs and even sites set up specifically for writers to share their work. These can help even the most isolated of writers to talk to people who understand what it’s like to sometimes feel you are living two lives at the same time. But you can't beat physically meeting up with other writers. Whether it's to share work in progress or just socialise, you know you are with people ...