Authors Electric

 When everyone seems to have mastered the art of crying it out at the top of their lungs, and we feel deafened by the roars, what are we to do?   --They've just finished writing their new novel of the month. --Once again they've written 10K words a day. --They've just landed a 3-book, 7-figure contract. --They've lost a hundred pounds and signed on with a modeling agency. --They've landed a new job at twice their salary and half their hours. And on and on and on, until our own cry is crushing: So, with lumps in our throats, we get back to the slogs we seem trapped in: crappy sales...zero online visibility...unending rejections...a novel that threatens to need at least 5 more revisions...age discrimination... I'm no Pollyanna telling you that this is the best of all worlds for us all. But I believe we can better our chances and lives by starting now to do  two things:   1) Devise effective strategies for staying in The Zone and in fighting trim.   2) Take real pl...

I think about motivation a lot, perhaps more than I should do. I would consider myself a fairly motivated person and yet, there are days where my get up and go fancies a wee holiday. The difficulty with giving your get up and go a holiday, is the danger of it shoving off permanently. I firmly believe that Motivation Matters and that we should do everything in our power to keep our motivation going.  One of the ways we can do this is by joining in with NaNoWriMo or national Novel Writing Month, to give it its full name. For those of you who haven't heard of it, you pledge to write 50,000 words in the month of November, which works out at 1,677 words a day. Trust me that is doable. NaNoWriMo works in many different ways. Firstly, it gets you into a daily writing habit. Secondly, it encourages you just to write with no stops and starts. Thirdly, it helps with accountability. The site, itself, rewards you for writing streaks and gives badges at set times. There are also writi...

There is always one thing you can guarantee in life, that being, change will inevitably come. The world is changing at a rapid rate. Technology is changing at a rapid rate. Life moves ever faster and often it feels that the changes are propelling us. The reason I am thinking so deeply about change at the  moment is because I own apple everything. iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac - there's an apple on the back of every piece of technology I own.  This forced me into a lot of change recently due to the fact apple has updated all its operating systems - IOS, the new iPad OS and OSX Cantana. If this sounds like double dutch to you and you're an apple owner, you'll soon find out what it means. How, I hear you ask, does this affect me as a writer. The first impact of this universal upgrade is the time it takes. I had a small window of opportunity, whilst I had a cup of tea, to upgrade my iMac. Or so I thought. I duly clicked download and, before my very eyes, a message poppe...

For the last several months I have found myself thinking a lot about motivation and inspiration. Many of my writer friends, several of whom have been writers for years, have been saying that they just can't seem to get motivated. Why is this? What is happening that their get up and go seems to be on an extended holiday? It was these questions that got me thinking about what motivates us and what keeps us writing.  Motivation can be both extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic can be monetary reward - your paycheque at the end of the month, or selling more books. Intrinsic is what keeps us going when times are hard, what allows us to put one finger in front of the other on the keyboard, or keep turning those pages in our notebooks. Ultimately it is intrinsic motivation which gives us resilience and is most important to our writing career. So why does it disappear? In my view, the biggest barrier today is that our creative reservoirs have run dry. Modern life, despite numero...

Often when writers get together talk turns to two things; 1. I can’t seem to get motivated 2. I can’t find time to write When someone says this, I know exactly how they feel. This thing called life always seems to get in the way. Also, most writers have at least a first degree, or maybe even a PhD in procrastination. A writers house is never cleaner than when there is a fast approaching deadline. So how do we overcome this and settle down to some actual writing. First let us consider this: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done,  you’ll always get what you’ve always got.’ Henry Ford Something has to change to help us to move forward. There are several ways we can do this. 1. Mindset matters - the way your brain thinks is going to happen is what will happen 2. It’s time to change your mind - tell yourself you can. You’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain 3. Do 5 minutes of free writing before you start writing for the day. This can be on any topic ...

          My new picture book, 'QUICKER THAN A PRINCESS', has had its publication date postponed because certain key buyers weren't impressed enough. It was supposed to be coming out next month, which would have been a mixed occasion emotionally for me because it will be the first anniversary of David's death. Now the already illustrated book will be doing the rounds at the book fairs, where we all hope it will fare better. As so often with these things, friends who've read it, love it, but hey-ho, that's the way publishing is these days (the image of baked bean salesmen comes to mind).           The theme is of a whole lot of creatures showing off because they can gestate their babies much faster than our very pregnant princess, and I love the illustrations which were done by Inna Chernak, who lives in the Ukraine (and I am currently fearing for her safety, and hoping that she lives somewhere...

A huge thank you to all the kind folk who helped me untangle the Suvi and the Sky Folk by Sandra Horn knot I made last time. I wish I were the kind of writer who sits down at a desk after breakfast and writes until lunchtime, pausing only for a swift coffee, then starts again until late afternoon. I wish I had a desk uncluttered by scribbled odds and ends. I understood novelist Alice Thomas Ellis only too well when she thought about going outside in a thunderstorm. She said she didn't REALLY want to get struck by lightning, but it might be better than going back in to try to get on with the book. Yet I love writing. It's one of the major pleasures of life. Playing blasted Solitaire on the pc isn't - so why? I wish I knew.           The odd thing is, if someone gives me a commission with a tight brief and a short deadline, I'm in there! I'm like the proverbial ferret up a drainpipe and I pause neither to eat nor sleep until it's done. ...

What do your characters want? Every major character in your story has a purpose – a need to gain something or go somewhere. It may be as simple as finding true love, or escaping a bad relationship, or it may be more complex – finding peace after some inner turmoil, or finding his or her place in a new world after some life-changing event. It’s these desires and motivations that drive your story and often push it off into new dimensions. Even your minor characters need a reason for being in your story, although your walk-on people may not have much of a motivation other than serving your character in a shop! When the desires of character A directly conflict with the motivations of character B is where the fun starts, especially when B’s motivations are not necessarily apparent form the start. B may not even realise what he wants, although it might be obvious to everybody else!   That’s why many novels – and this probably applies more to genre fiction than literary fiction – have a...