Authors Electric

A Book Birthday this month, on the 1st of May. Meet friendless old Stan whose only passion is for money which he never actually spends - he just enjoys counting it. Cue his somewhat overweight Fairy Godmother who can still fly - well she's magic, so no problems there. She's come to, rather reluctantly, give him his obligatory three wishes, but hey! Stan's clever, and take the obvious route of asking for even more wishes. If you want to know what happens next, you'll have to buy the book. It's published by Franklin Watts at Hachette Children's, and you can find it on their website. It's an old story, of course, and based on greed and its possible consequences. The earliest version was called, I think, HOW THE SEA BECAME SALT, and there's another one about a magic porridge pot. The moral is that greed, and wanting more and more of something without thinking of the consequences, tends to misfire. These ancient stories seem to be in our blood and get re-...

So. I hope you’ll notice how on-trend this is. It is the latest thing, to begin a statement or an answer with ‘So.’ It’s peculiar, but with any luck it will supersede the idiotic ‘like’, which Alexander Armstrong twitted so nicely in a sketch set in (I think) 18 th century: ‘I fear the speech of the young has fallen off sadly of late; I can remember when they would commonly use as many as six similes in a single sentence: I was like, and he was like, then we were like...’ etc.   I can’t remember the exact words so this is an approximation.  Why bother about these things at all, I hear you ask. Because I’m at a loose end, that’s why. Bad case of the dreaded Writer’s Block. Too much time on my hands in which to nitpick and grump. The garden has been too sodden to do anything much. I’ve tried taking up knitting and I’m very proud of the sweater shown here, made of leftover yarns and bits and pieces. Not as proud as I would be if I didn’t know about all the mistakes, but...

I’m in a terrible flat spot. I got to poem 38 of the 52 poems challenge and just came to a stop. I made notes for the next two and wrote one verse but just couldn’t go on. For all these past weeks, I’ve just fiddled about with old stuff – poetry and prose – but have not been able to be creative at all. It’s a familiar dilemma, but doesn’t usually last this long. Often in the past, walking somewhere beautiful starts the process going and recently, we’ve been in the Lakes, in glorious sunny weather. Blue skies above just-turning autumn leaves reflected in the water. The roar and magnetic pull of a waterfall in spate. Saddleback blueish in the distance. Evenings around a log fire. A squelchy walk from Pooley Bridge to Barton Church to rescue a wren that might have been trapped in there (it wasn’t). Everything, in fact, to gladden the heart and get the creative juices flowing. Except they didn’t.  This is a lake, not a story    At one point I put it down to...

The days of reliable editors in publishing houses and magazines are long gone. Although many of them are still excellent, the changes in English teaching here in Great Britain over the decades have taken their toll. I notice far more mistakes in professionally-published books than I ever did forty years ago. And if you’re considering the self-publishing route, you need to be your own editor which is very hard work. Always remember that writing is about communicating; if you cannot express yourself adequately, without waffling, you won’t achieve the impact you want. In the commercial world, word-count is very important. Magazines have specific slots to fill, and children’s books may be part of a series with a house style that doesn’t vary. Competitions will have a maximum word-lengths for short stories, and if you run over you’ll be disqualified. It is always possible to cut, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Honestly. For the first pass, look at ways of eliminating repetitions...

Not adding up Writers write, right? And for many of us there are so many other things to do that writing fills all the available spare time that’s going. But I recently got into an odd situation of doing too much writing or applying too much of my headspace to a single writing project - and it wasn’t working. The novel had ground to a halt and parts of it had been written and rewritten to a point where I felt I was simply moving words around in the hope that they would fall into place like one of those old sliding puzzles. Of course there was no perfect solution but that didn’t stop me going round in ever-decreasing circles. I decided to down tools. Since then I have meandered back to some bits of writing but I’m a lot more aware of the importance of the other things I do and it’s made me think about how and why they contribute to my sanity. Making and doing Only a bit of unpicking! I used to joke I took up writing because I was no good at knitting. But in fact that’s ...