Authors Electric

 " ... The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die."   -- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way    From Stepanie Heuet's 2019 graphic novel adaptation It's been twenty five years since I last dove into Proust. I was living in San Francisco. The Millennium was still a couple of years off. I had my first cell phone, a nifty flip device. Looking back, I see that I was living  in two worlds - at least. I stretched myself between a demanding Silicon Valley start-up job and being an over-age, doting, divorced dad to a precocious, late-in-life eight-year old.  It was no more harried a lifestyle than that of many single parents, mostly moms, but that didn't make it any easier. I had zero time for much of anything reflective, enlight...

Memory is a strange thing. I have a special gift for forgetting -   names mainly   - I long ago mastered the art of the no introduction introduction, but it seems I have achieved a similar level of advanced forgetfulness about my own writing. Long ago, when I was good at exams I trained myself to forget the paper once It was done, as a kind of protective mechanism so I didn’t worry about my mistakes. Useful though that may have been to my teenage self’s mental health, it set an unfortunate precedent and I forget whatever I’ve written pretty much as soon as I’ve done it. I don’t remember the names of characters and I literally lose the plot.   I find this irritating especially for those books which I researched. It’s like my mind is sand – washed clean at the end of every project.   I must have seemed an air head when I was young and now I give an excellent impression of a half demented old bat. There is an upside, however. I recently reread a couple o...

I had a dream... No, not a Martin Luther King sort of dream (sadly), just an ordinary sort of one, a few nights ago. But it set me thinking on a subject I’ve thought about a few times before. The connection between dreams and the imagination of a writer. A couple of months ago one of the questions put to me in an  interview  about my writing asked, ‘Do you rely more on dreams, imagination, or planning?’ That was something of a surprise to me – that ‘dreams’ appeared in that list, let alone at the start. My answer was that I wouldn’t say I rely on them, but dreams have fed in to my writing at important times. Particularly those ‘between sleeping and waking’ types of dreams (one of which was responsible for my short story ‘The Beast of Middleham Moor’ that led to the charity anthology  Grant Me the Carving of My Name ). On this occasion, the other day, just before falling asleep I had been reading through some of the submissions for  Right Trusty ...

You know how it is – somebody mentions a particular subject on Facebook or Twitter, which sparks that domino effect of comments, which often stray off topic, interweaving with the original post but following trains of thought from a dozen, two dozen and more people. You watch the thread build and add to the chatter but in your head the memories are sparked of things only related to the subject by tenuous fibres of thought. It is the catching those thoughts that can be essential to a writer. Last night I danced on the edges of a thread that dealt with the subject of eating pet food. Specifically who had would own up to sampling dog or cat food, when and of what kind. It is the kind of topic that at one time you would only ever have heard in the dying hours of a party. Who was going to own up to eating dog food after all? Quite a number as it turned out. Dog biscuits seemed the most popular choice for the gourmet pet owner. Bonios and Spillers Shapes being the most mentioned. ...

Psychologist and author Alan Kennedy was researching wartime conditions in Vichy France for his fourth novel   Lucy   when he remembered that there was something he wanted to know about the bombing of Coventry in November 1940. Did Winston Churchill have advance warning of the raid? Could he have saved the city at the cost of alerting the enemy that their Enigma code had been broken? Coventry, November 1940 All of us, I’m sure, will have had the experience being led astray from our main path of research along some elusive but compelling byway which, startlingly often, turns out to be relevant in some way we could not possibly have anticipated. Alan Kennedy was born in the West Midlands, about thirty miles from Coventry. He was a baby in his cot at the time of the bombing: his father left for work every day - often at night- but what did he do? Why wasn't he in uniform? His mother was terrified for the rest of her life by the sound of the air raid siren. Why? Anyone a...