Authors Electric

The ideas in this blog were developed for a recent talk at the Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich Northanger Abbey  is a novel with reading at its heart, a coming-of-age novel in which Catherine Morland, the seventeen-year-old heroine, discovers the fallibility of Gothic fiction as her guide to life: Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. “At least in the midland counties…”   Of the Alps and the Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland and the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine did not dare doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. Catherine is reading Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 bestseller The Myste...

I know, it seems like I just finished my last countdown . But once again, I find myself without an idea for this month's blog post. I used up all my righteous anger with Amazon last month, and it's been relatively quiet on the self-publishing front, so I don't have anything new to be upset about. The month before that, I gave advice on developing ideas , so anything I write about that will seem to be treading on my own toes. and that never ends well. I had thought about writing about creating convincing dialogue, but as soon as I sat down to do that, I forgot all the words. I could give you pointers on writing a self-published bestseller, but I'd have to do that first. So that leaves a countdown. However, I am going to do it a little differently this time around. Last time, I held fast to my schedule and made sure I continued the countdown until it was done. I put new ideas aside, determined to use them when I was finished with the countdown. I wound u...