Authors Electric

I recently spent an afternoon rootling around for an old remote hard drive and finally found it in an old box file full of letters! I plugged it in and scrolled through the contents, and was soon muttering dark imprecations about wasted time and useless computers. The data stored there only went back to 2000 and there were no other back-up files available. The floppy discs that had contained them originally were long since lost! Being the old biddy that I am it took a few moment to realise that this really is twenty years ago, and not last week... The items I wanted to find all predated the millennium by some years (even decades), and were doubtless produced on my trusty Amstrad PCW 8256 or its replacement 8512. For the younglings among you I should explain that my files would have been printed on a chattering dot matrix printer, using continuous paper, which required you to tear of the punched guide tapes on either side of the pages and separate each sheet along the dotted line...

As we are all still in lockdown the list of subjects available to chat about seems smaller. None of us are getting out and about - except for the allotment. Walking down to the plot recently I spotted a clump of plantain and wondered how many people now derive fun and games from the plants that grow in the hedgerows? Here are things to look for on those family walks. I doubt there are many children who have not blown the ‘clocks’of  a Dandelion,  Taraxacum officinale,  to tell the time.  Or laughed at anyone picking the yellow flowers, on the grounds that doing so would mean they would inevitably wet the bed! Of course they are also well known as a salad leaf, or as dandelion and burdock fizzy pop. Its number of country names are only exceeded by it listed medicinal properties, from liver function to heart disease via diabetes and weight loss – but to the child? It is a fun clock! Holding a  Buttercup,  Ranunculaceae,  flower beneath  some...

Recently (20th Dec) the author and editor Diana Athill was interviewed on the Today programme for her 100 th birthday. Happy birthday! One of the things Ms Athill mentioned in her interview was her first memory, which was of falling into a puddle and being hauled out again. It set me musing on my own earliest memories. I can think of several, and because we moved house two weeks after my 4 th birthday I can accurately date them as being three or even two years old at the time. Most of those images involved getting into trouble with Mother. And most often came out of trying to keep up with two elder brothers (then aged seven and nine) who did not want their tiny little sister to tag along in the first place. Memory 1/ Throwing a monumental hissy fit because I could see my brothers building a snowman in the garden. I clearly recall standing in my cot and shaking the bars, whilst my mother stood at the sink washing up. (I was sick often and the kitchen was heated overnight ...

As this is the last of my AE blogs for 2017, I have been casting around for a suitable topic to sum up the past 12 months.  New year resolutions sprang to mind but they can be such a mine field when you make your own choice a matter of public record. I am quite bad at them. I start with the best of intentions but by the end of January my well meant promises are already being shoved to the back of the queue as life gets in the way and by the 1 st March I am usually trying to forget I ever made them in the first place. So what then? The general wisdom is to make a resolution that is within your grasp and to be specific. I was giving this very matter some thought as I struggled through a step routine for the first time this year! It would be fair to say that I am not a natural athlete, and that, combined with hours spent at the keyboard, does mean a certain tendency to spreading out a little. The recent weather has even limited my walking any distance – and if I am perfectl...

My other half and I recently gave in to the wave of nothingness and repeats on Freeview TV and acquired Netflix.  A week on, and several evenings of watching we've only touched the surface the stuff that is available.  When I say that I now have Netflix people often smile knowingly and utter dire warning of  binge-watching, but a week on I can’t say it has been any different to before.  Oh  I admit there is an awful lot more of it, and it is so very easy to access, but that Curate's egg conundrum of good versus bad in more or less equal measures remains. We’ve done a lot of sampling and/or catching up on things that we've missed. Watched random episodes of things that we’ve only ever heard about before. My other half likes super-hero fiction whereas I am fairly indifferent to it so perhaps I have not really indulged in bingeing as such. Watching a whole series in a few days is not exactly new to us.  We have bought enough boxsets to prove that!  ...

If you ask writers why they write most will say tell you it is a compulsion, or, as Terry Pratchett once said, ‘writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.’ If we manage to make a few bucks in the process all the better. If we come to be recognised as a writer of some merit, better still, but to do that the writing needs a reader.   So how do we get noticed? During September I had quite a few changes going on around me on a personal/family level. Moving house and also the marriage of my step-son Graham to his lovely wife, Anna. In addition there was Fantasycon, an event that I have haunted for the past 25 years, either as an organiser, a bookseller, a book editor,  an author (and sometimes all at once). For the uninitiated, Fantasycon is the annual convention organised on behalf of the British Fantasy Society at which the British Fantasy Awards are announced. This year’s event was held in Peterborough  between 29 th September to October 1 st So many people w...

House moving looms and we find that BT are unable to supply a telephone line until 14 days after the current house owner has moved out, and can't supply us with a telephone number until then. Our internet provider cannot supply us with a connection until we have our new number - and there is a ten day wait. Well that was the first rendering. My other half spending half a day on the phone has resulted in shortening those time scales a little, with luck, but only time will tell by how much. Yes, I know most people will use their tablet or smart phone instead but I am one of those people who kill things electronic, meaning I don't have a phone capable of email. The long and short of it is that, as you read this, I shall be languishing in the new house, surrounded by cardboard boxes and unable to get online. My first reaction was eeek! But given time to think about it this may be a blessing in disguise. I suspect many of us have come to rely on social media far too much. Ma...

I am very much aware of the fact that I can be a bit of a cracked record when it comes to research, constantly banging on about how important it is to check even the smallest details before using them in any sort of writing. It is something that I maintain is hugely important, but when I  came against a phenomenon of commonly held perceptions and whether being correct in the face of general opinion will alienate a reader, I had to wonder if veracity is always seen in that light through a readers’ perception. A few weeks ago I read a small section from the first draft of Bunch Courtney bk 2. This latest crime novel is firmly anchored in the first weeks of May 1940.  Dunkirk, the Blitz and Battle of Britain are yet to come, yet May remains a pivotal month during the conflict as a whole, not least because it saw a momentous change in our Government.   As I saw it, in order to place a peg in time, quoting a newspaper headline in which the Prime Minister, Mr Chambe...

Writing is a solitary occupation. Even if you are one of those people who can happily work in a coffee shop, or on the kitchen table with life going on around you, you are still working on your own and in your own world. When I am in the middle of a novel or short story, I sometimes feel as if I’m moving around in a bubble. There is the world out there that everyone else belongs to and the world I am currently inhabiting with a cast of characters that I know well, or am getting to know and in a place that may or may not exist, but is coming clearer, like an old fashioned negative in developer liquid, minute by minute. Sometimes this means I have to stop mid task, or even mid-sentence to rush back to my computer. This state of distraction can be annoying to those around me and is also isolating as no one who hasn’t experienced it can truly understand what it’s like. Non writers find it hard to empathise with the ups and downs of a writing life, how some days the story flows and yo...

  A recent Facebook thread was discussing the pronunciation of A in conjunction with an invisible H at some length.   I suspect we have all come across that old chestnut of how to enunciate  ‘bath’ (or ‘grass’, ‘class’, ‘pass’) and whether it/they should be pronounced with or without the unseen H as in ‘b-ah-th as opposed to b-a-th. Though the originator of the Facebook post now lives in California he is a Brit by birth, and, his original question was to his US counterparts on how they heard those invisible  H sounds. In his case he was specifying the distinction between ‘ass’ and ‘arse’ as a play on words. Perhaps not the best example as it turned out. Several people appeared genuinely confused to learn that in the UK the word ‘ass’ generally refers to a donkey and/or a stupid person, whilst an ‘arse’ is a part of the anatomy (and yes, occasionally also a stupid person). This would seem to be a different question on the surface but one can see...