Authors Electric

The Art Shop: delightfully situated in an old traditional row! Earlier this week I visited our local Art Shop… Why was this significant enough to post on Facebook (my only regular one of ‘ the socials’ )?  Maybe it’s continuity – continuity, like community, is important to human life. In my post, I also told readers that the Art Shop was a very human place. It is. For artists, crafters, sewing and modelling creatives, the art shop is an essential. Its raw materials – paints, canvases, sketchbooks, embroidery thread, pastels, drawing pens – and that essential art-shop smell… remembered from childhood, the Art Shop, with it brown painted outside, and its inner scent of pencils… Noticeably, this art shop post has attracted the longest list of ‘likes’ I can remember having – friends (‘real life’), friends (FB, only), and relatives crowded to endorse the good vibes of of a shop selling artist’s materials... Evidently, all regarding the Art Shop as a humane and satisfying place! So, why ...

  Once upon a time, everyone came to us for Christmas, the kids and their partners, their half-brother, my ex-husband, his wife, my sister and brother-in-law. It might have meant eating on our laps but we opened the doors between the sitting and dining rooms and squeezed everyone on in. It was great, everyone brought a contribution to the meal so there was no panic about getting it all ready and we ate and drank and once or twice even made it to the mid-night service. Then the kids grew up and had their kids and their own houses and our roles changed. Instead of being hosts, we were guests. For the first few years this felt strange and a little sad, then gradually I became aware of the advantages. I was no longer the one who organised everything, nor did I have to worry about cleaning the house, or making sure there was enough cutlery, crockery, crackers and paper napkins. This year will be different again. It will be just the two of us. Mike is having a hip operation in Ja...

  Sometimes when the writing is going very slowly, or the marketing has ground to a halt meeting up with a fellow writer can be a necessary spur to action. Before the pandemic Jan and I used to go out for a coffee every week where we would discuss our work in progress, or bemoan our lack of progress and share hint on how to extricate ourselves out of the mire of procrastination or self-doubt. We also considered setting up a regular writing slot, perhaps once a month,   where we got together with other writers,   to write and then to give each other feedback. Although in principal it sounded like a good idea there must have been some reluctance on both our parts because it never happened. Then came the pandemic and everything changed. Locked down, Jan and I discovered Facebook video calls. The writing group I go to went on line and I began to Zoom or FaceTime regularly with friends. So when I found that Kris Johnson runs a lunchtime write in in the Mslexia Salon each M...

'Off my branch, young squirrel!' Just look at that pigeon's face! Depending on the place, the era, what’s fashionable, your face conforming to the ‘look’, whether revolution or conformism is in the ascendent, being the most popular person in your group takes work. Learning the latest lingo, and using it correctly. Wearing what’s on trend. Being seen where it matters. As a writer, you learn (or defy) the memes:   taking a (pretty) notebook everywhere, all-day pjs and writing in bed…Popularity, ironically, can and often does come to those who conform to the memes of the age and stage… and includes nascent ‘leadership skills…’ So, once ‘lockdown’ was achieved, memes shot around, people inevitably were picking them up. One popular stance was resentment: you were bored, you felt like a prisoner, you were buying jigsaws to do, or flour to play baking with the children (flour, for a while, disappeared). Whatever it was, nobody should welcome lockdown, and those who did were in d...

For many years I’ve been a member of various writing groups. Most of these have involved meeting in person and then sharing work and feeding back via e-mail. Since the pandemic everything has gone on-line – for me that’s my local writing group and poetry group - and I’ve also joined a new online group where we read and feedback on work in progress. I’ve also ‘attended’ a couple of Arvon Masterclasses and ‘Novelnights.’ There are many advantages to online Zoom sessions. The cost of these sessions is usually affordable and there is no travelling - which involves both cost and time. Online sessions are also more accessible for those who are rarely, or never, able to travel. ‘Novelnights’ runs in Bristol, which is many miles from my home and would certainly not be practical for me. But I’ll be honest – I don’t really like Zoom. For one thing I find my own face distracts me and I really don’t want to look at it when I’m speaking - and more importantly I miss in-person human contact and inte...

At the start of this pandemic, when the first UK lockdown knocked everyone's life sideways, I took out a two-year subscription offer to Psychologies magazine as a treat to myself. I never imagined my subscription might be in danger of running out before this is all over, but perhaps I instinctively knew something at the time? Almost a year later, and we are still in lockdown, with even more restrictions and mandates than the first one, and with apparently no plan any time soon to emerge from lockdownitis (I just invented that word, but perhaps it'll be added to the dictionary in a year or so for future generations to wonder at). Anyway, we are still living through it all, and I am finding staying positive increasingly difficult, even with such a brilliant magazine popping through my letterbox each month. In the latest issue, coach Kim Morgan invited us to write about our current life as a fairy tale, complete with heroes and villains and a happy ending and just desserts for th...

  Hello! We haven’t met, so I thought I’d kick things off by telling you five facts about me. Like an ice breaker. As if we were all together at a party. Remember those? I hate fresh tomatoes with a passion. I once found myself at a dinner party faced with a vast slice of the said fruit prettily sprinkled with fresh herbs. Rejecting it was out of the question, so I cut it into four and washed each chunk down, unchewed, with gulps of white wine. Bill Bailey called my baby cute (he was, too). I can recite all the books of the New Testament in order. Just sayin’. My fifteen times great grandfather was the Bishop of Gloucester, burned at the stake by Mary Tudor. I once won a Walnut Whip eating competition (it was a grudge match back in my carefree twenties). Now we’re acquainted, let’s go! I’ve been a freelance writer for nearly thirteen years, an obsessive and voracious reader all my life and a novelist since I wrote my first work of fiction last year in lock down. That book, th...

 Probably the most common question a writer of fiction gets asked is where do you get your ideas from. It's not something I usually think about too much, but I thought I'd explore it a little in this post.   Firstly, let me say that ideas are not something I struggle with. If anything, I struggle with the opposite, having too many ideas. I rarely write them down, though (I know, very bad, goes against all the advice), preferring to let my subconscious do the sorting. The bad ideas usually disappear; the good ones tend to be those that won't leave me alone, and keep popping up reminding me that they're still there, and hello, am I going to start writing them soon?   See, almost all writers seem to be avid people watchers. We can't help it (I know I can't). Out having a coffee (I vaguely remember doing things like this prior to lockdown…) with your partner, and you spot a couple at a nearby table. Before you know it, you've started to develop a narrati...

This is my first post of 2021 here, so I'd like to wish a Happy New Year to readers!  When I was thinking of a topic to write, I came across a post on a friend’s Facebook page that made me laugh.  The caption read: For the next time you think the 80s were cool.  Yeah, it was the decade of big hair and outlandish fashion.  The reason I found it funny was because I used to be a slave to fashion. My jeans had to sit above the waist, not below it. They couldn’t be too faded or too dark. They had to conform nicely around my butt and not cut off the circulation in my legs. I preferred the skinny fit over a baggy, loose pair, and if there were holes in them, they had to look as if they'd been ripped accidentally, not deliberately. The pressure of buying a pair of pants!  I wanted "the look" with Jordache jeans. Didn't we all? Looking back now, I pity my younger, insecure self. I was pretty shy in the eighties, and fashion gave me a sense of belonging. The eclectic styl...

The good old 12 days of Christmas... remember those? *DISCLAIMER: The following post was written last week and scheduled ahead of time, so is now out of date due to the latest round of last-minute changes to our lives under the UK Government's emergency coronavirus rules. But I don't have the time or patience to write another blog now, and it wouldn't be a very entertaining one if I edited it down to just one day. So, without further apology, here is last week's version (the sentiment is pretty much the same). On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me a phone mast in a pine tree. On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me two socially-distanced doves, and a phone mast in a pine tree. On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me three quarantined hens, two socially-distanced doves, and a phone mast in a pine tree. On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me four silent birds, three quarantined hens, two socially-distanced d...

The last month has been an odd one for me. I'm not sure it's writer's block, at least not in the traditional sense, as I've still been writing, but the problem is making progress. Like, I suspect, a lot of writers, when lockdown first started, I thought it would be a boon to productivity - after all, I'm no longer spending an hour or more commuting, time which could be better spent writing. I quickly discovered the opposite - I was writing more slowly. I put a large part of this down to screen fatigue - now I'm working from home, I spend most of the day either staring at a screen or delivering training virtually, using Teams as a platform. By the end of the day, I've been finding the thought of staring at a screen for another couple of hours less than thrilling. Some evenings, I've not bothered at all and resorted to pen and paper. I now have quite a lot of potential material for future stories (assuming I can decipher my own handwriting) and have id...

2020. Perfect vision and all that. What a joke. 2020 was the year it all started; the year of the pandemic; the year of lockdown. The year the economy nose-dived into oblivion and life as we’d known it changed forever.  If we’d known how it would end, would we have done things any differently? I don’t know. I suspect society would have collapsed sooner rather than later. I don’t think we’d have spent a year and more sleep-walking into a political and cultural nightmare – with shops and businesses closing daily, neighbour tattling on neighbour and the surge in sales of black shower curtains, furtive comings-and-goings at all hours, and the police too busy arresting people who mostly didn’t have a clue whether today was rule-of-six or two-household (not including children) meeting outdoors in a private place that wasn’t a park and didn’t sell alcohol except as part of a substantial meal, which had to be eaten in two hours. Although you could go to the gym with whoever you liked. An...

I was stuck for a topic for this month’s blog until I read Griselda Heppel’s article on woodcuts (published 1 st November). Her blog reminded me of how important illustrations were for me as a young reader – for all young readers I imagine. Even now, I adore illustrated books. A few years ago I purchased a book called Waterlife , which is purely illustrations. It’s a treasured possession. Few novels, besides specifically graphic novels (which have become quite popular) are illustrated. 19 th century novels often contained illustrations but that has gone out of fashion. Now, only a handful of fiction books for adults have illustrations. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy contains a small number. The Hobbit includes illustrations but Tolkien had trouble persuading his publisher to include his drawing of the The Book of Mazarbul in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. In fact it was not included in the first edition. The Silmarillion was illustrated but Tolkein did not live to see it in pr...