Authors Electric

Only Connect, Part Two                                                                 The Woodlanders                                                                   It could have been a change of medication or my final retirement from a long-cherished teaching role, or it may have been simply that I was getting older. Whatever the cause, I was  struck down soon after my last birthday by the most awful bout of insomnia linked to the anxiety that I had so often suffered from. I had tried a number of remedies – lots of exercise, further medication, daily sessions of yoga nidra, counselling - even rereading favourite novels in search of the bibliotherapy that had...

  I talk to myself in the shower in the mornings – in my head, you understand, out loud would be weird. It’s usually fairly mindless chatter, reminding myself what day it is, etc. but it will be coloured by whatever I’ve been reading during the EMC (early morning cuppa) before I get up. This morning it was in the voice of the Russian narrator of Life's Music, yesterday, suave Italian   Marco from The Hummingbird. If it was poetry, the internal monologue might be in iambic pentameters. It’s not a skill – I just can’t help it. It tends to wear off by the time I'm talking, which is probably just as well, but the mood invoked can last. A couple of blogs ago, I had a brief online conversation with Peter Leyland via the comments section. He mentioned his interest in bibliotherapy and kindly included a link to a paper he had written about it in the magazine   Aeon/Psyche. It contains a fascinating account of his exploration of the impact of reading on mood and wellbeing, wit...

Last month my blog post  partly looked back at couple of interesting facts about my own family ancestry, including two studio photographs showing middle class women smartly dressed in the fashion of the time. In this post I want to talk about Sarah Moss ’ s follow-up novel, which continues the story of Alethea, (once ‘poor baby’), begun in Bodies of Light , the book which brought to mind for me the strange fact that the two families who would be later joined by my parents’ marriage both had connections to the Pre-Raphaelites. One thing which has really struck me reading these novels, and was brought to the fore of all our minds in the past week or so, is that the position of male and female has not changed since Victorian times. What do I mean by this? Surely today's woman is an independent person, capable of earning her own living in any field she chooses, spending her own money without necessary reference to any male relative?   Of course she has the vote, won by the hard c...

The covid19 scare is affecting even normally socially-isolated authors like me. Activities essential for our mental health and wellbeing, such as meeting other socially-isolated authors for coffee in a halfway cafe (often tens of miles away) are now almost impossible... either the cafe itself has closed, or the other authors are too afraid to venture out. Both of my local National Trust properties, which provide valuable respite from all the wireless radiation in town, as well as being a source of creative inspiration, have also closed for an indefinite period - possibly all summer - and further flung NT places that are kindly keeping their parks open for free during the crisis (but not their cafes, sadly!) are too far for me to reach on my bicycle without planning an overnight stay, which is now difficult because most hotels and B&Bs are shut. Pretty much all of my summer activities have been cancelled, including an authors' conference in rural Oxfordshire I always look forwar...

Long ago (it must be 25 years – help!), when I was writing my PhD thesis, one of my supervisors gave me a piece of advice I will never forget. Not because it was full of timeless wisdom (it may have been, but if so it passed me by) but because I didn’t understand it and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. She advised me to ‘Rewrite Chapter 3 from the inside out’. As though writing Chapter 3 hadn’t been difficult enough, in the conventional ‘start-at-the-beginning-define-your-terms-adduce-your-evidence-express-your-arguments-draw-your-conclusions’ kind of way. But no, apparently that wasn’t good enough, and my much-sweated-over chapter now had to be turned inside out like a grimy t-shirt having to be worn a second day because you lost your luggage. Partly, I feared that the turning inside out would expose all the messy loose ends I hadn’t tied off quite as neatly as I should have. Perhaps that was the idea? Or maybe my supervisor simply thought my chapter needed some restructuring and ...