Authors Electric

Recently I was lucky enough to have a short story chosen for the twice yearly Stroud Short Stories event which took place last Sunday and before this I'd already done two other reading 'gigs'  at Writers Unchained and Talking Tales , both in Bristol.  Reading at Talking Tales For all of these evenings I spent some time rehearsing my piece, especially for Stroud which has the biggest audience and called for a  story I hadn't read aloud before. As usual I found myself making small changes to my typescript - as I often do - to get the right emphasis or to smooth the flow of words.  Just to be clear, I had submitted these pieces in advance to a judge or judges as a document, but I justified these changes to myself on the grounds that spoken word and written word have slightly different requirements and none of these changes were substantial.  Or were they? After SSS organiser John Holland, reminding me that all SSS stories would go into a futu...

Since my recent post which touched on the early photographs of Hill and Adamson , I’ve not only paid a flying visit to St Andrews (my old university town and always a good place to go) but also been invited to read a selection of my historical fiction at the St Andrews Photography Festival . This is a huge thrill for me and has given me the nice job of making sure that by the time of my event on Sept 9 th . I've assembled the right words in exactly the right order.  Reading Silver Harvest in April at  Stroud Short Stories I’m planning to read five or six pieces which have already been written in one form or other, but I don’t want to read for more than 10 minutes at a time  - i.e. 1500 words max - and although the pieces are linked in theme, I would like each one to stand alone.  Looking at my raw material, only Silver Harvest fits the bill exactly. The others are either too long or, on closer inspection, betray their origins as fragments of a novel. ‘...