Authors Electric

  After reading a novel...   I first encountered Sam Mills when I answered an advertisement on Twitter (now X) about a book group that was meeting to discuss the novel,  The Enchanted April  (1922) by Elizabeth von Arnim. As I knew the novel well, I signed up to the Zoom account for “CarersFirst” the name of the organisation that was hosting the event. It was an organisation formed to help people who were looking after partners or relatives, with various degrees of illness and disability.   I myself was not in this position, although my mother had for a long time cared for my father during his struggles with MS which had led up to his death. I had myself suffered years of depression and anxiety which I linked to that event - or these ailments may simply have been a consequence of my own ‘sensitive’ nature as my mother used to call it. This had filled me with a strange anger and fuelled much of the performance poetry that I read in a Bedford pub during the eighti...

Lately, I've been reading – or I should say, tripping on –  The Beginning of Infinity  [New York, Penguin Group, 2011] by  Oxford theoretical physicist  David Deutsch , also best-selling author of  The Fabric of Reality . Professor Deutsch  speculates that much of what happens in fiction is close to a reality somewhere in the  multiverse . As a writer, I find that comforting, especially when I postulate that Deutsch's projection could just as well apply to the abandoned narratives that litter my garden of forking drafts.       Maybe the happenings in my uncompleted drafts actually occurred in dimensions where momentary universes collapse due to off-kilter physical laws. Not being a mathematician, I can't work out the equations, but this projection might serve me well in offsetting blame for failed drafts. It wasn't me. It was those darn skewed dimensions. Indeed, a draft can seem copacetic one day, and melt off the page w...

Lately, I've been reading – or I should say, tripping on – The Beginning of Infinity [New York, Penguin Group, 2011] by Oxford theoretical physicist David Deutsch , also best-selling author of The Fabric of Reality . Professor Deutsch speculates that much of what happens in fiction is close to a reality somewhere in the multiverse . As a writer, I find that comforting, especially when I postulate that Deutsch's projection could just as well apply to the abandoned narratives that litter my garden of forking drafts.      Maybe the happenings in my uncompleted drafts actually occurred in dimensions where momentary universes collapse due to off-kilter physical laws. Not being a mathematician, I can't work out the equations, but this projection might serve me well in offsetting blame for failed drafts. It wasn't me. It was those darn skewed dimensions. Indeed, as I wrote them, everything seemed to be going along just fine until, one day I open the file and, nightmare...