Authors Electric

I recently attended a conference which was held in a museum of natural history. One of the early speakers introduced what turned out to be an extremely successful ice-breaker. Normally ice-breakers are just there to be endured before the actual business of the meeting or conference starts, and they often involve speaking about your innermost secrets - unless you've had the foresight to invent something interesting to say about yourself - to complete strangers who happen to be sitting next to you. But in this case the ice-breaker took the form of discussion in small informal groupings about whether a sloth or a chameleon would win in a fight. Although I don't think many people in the room had very much knowledge of either animal, it was surprisingly entertaining to talk about this. My own feeling was that a sloth was probably bigger and heavier, and could simply fall out of its tree and squash the chameleon flat without too much effort, but I'm willing to be corrected abou...

          So you’re sitting on the patio with a Pimms, some pistachios and a laptop, surrounded by cascades of scented flowers with the gentle humming of bumble bees in the background, and the occasional burst of birdsong…       A lean, tanned figure appears with a single red rose, and an exquisite selection of Belgian chocolates. As he leans over you, his blond hair brushing your cheek, your thoughts turn to the next scene, when the heroine finds herself pressed up against a Viking warrior as she endeavours to rescue the family heirloom from the clutches of the one-eyed blacksmith who killed her brother… All of a sudden, a bit of research seems in order, and you shut the laptop and head back into the house with your…             Of course, that’s the sort of stuff I wrote under a pseudonym, and I’m not revealing the pen-name here! So how was it for you, tr...