Authors Electric

  In Isfahan                                                                                Chehel Sotoun Palace, Isfahan In Isfahan is the title of a short story by William Trevor and I turned to it after watching TV pictures of the war raging across Iran and tried to make some sense of the destruction that I was witnessing.   Isfahan is a beautiful city. In the words of its governor Mehdi Jamalinejad:   “Isfahan is not an ordinary city. It’s a museum without a roof…In none of the previous eras, not in the Afghan wars, not in the Moghul conflict, not even during the ‘sacred defence’ [the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war] was this ever done.   “This is a declaration of war on a civilisation. An enemy that has no culture pays no heed to symbols of culture. A country that has no hist...

  People who’ve read previous posts of mine will know I have a deep love of music, primarily classical but other genres as well. It forms a permanent soundtrack to my life, and provides a palette of colours as a background. See, I have synaesthesia. I ‘see’ colours when I hear music (well, all sound, really, but music is much more overt). It’s not something I’ve spent much about – I was in my twenties before I realised it wasn’t the normal state of being for people, and that it had a specific name. All I knew up to then was it was easy to tell when my guitar was in tune as each open string was a specific colour. I say I ‘see’ the colours, but that’s probably a simplification. It’s not the same as seeing something visually, as closing my eyes makes no difference – I still get the same images as I do with eyes open. It was earlier this year, when the BBC Proms were on, when my wife discovered that when I talked about the different colours of the music, I was being lite...

It’s been a week of firsts for me. Well, not really, but it feels like it, after the last couple of years. Firstly, I went to my local pub for a quiet drink with my wife and in-laws; I worked out whilst there that it was two years to the day since the last time I’d set foot in a pub. It was a pleasant afternoon, and the conversation ranged back and forth over various topics but as we are all avid readers, we spent some time discussing books and comparing the recent titles we’ve read. What was interesting was the way all of us had read outside our usual genres; myself, I’ve dabbled with the classics in addition to my usual diet of crime, science fiction, and horror. Some of them I liked; some...not so much. What did become clear was what I really wanted, regardless of genre, was story: I wanted something to happen to the characters, good or bad, and for them to change during the course of the story. I’ll not name the books I didn’t get on with. (My policy is to either give a positi...

  I’ve recently finished a deliberate break from writing. Not just the act of putting words on paper, but editing and tweaking, even thinking about it in any great depth. The Christmas period helped (I managed to get away to Yorkshire for five days, and deliberately didn’t take a laptop or even a pen with me). Never mind Zoom fatigue (or in my case, Teams (which is, shall we say, not the slickest piece of software I’ve ever used), I had screen fatigue. The thought of turning on my laptop after a full day of staring at a screen was demotivating to say the least. Add to that my job involves teaching all levels of clinicians and their admin staff how to use various digital systems, using both Teams and another piece of software (because Teams won’t do everything we need) and my digital energy levels were non-existent by the time I finished. For the past few months, I’ve ploughed on, trying alternatives such as writing by hand (quite satisfying but slow, and still needed ...

  I'm writing this listening to a broadcast of one of the BBC Proms. I have very little interest in sports (and I really dislike football, so the world cup, for me, is three weeks of trying to avoid TV) so my yearly fix is musical. As a fan of classical music, the BBC proms fits the bill perfectly. Some old classics, some new, and always something unusual. It's especially nice to see it back in the Royal Albert Hall with an audience. The reason I'm waxing lyrical about music is that it's integral to the writing process for me. I can write just about anywhere and have done so (trains, coffee shops, all the usual suspects apply) but the one thing I struggle to write without is music. It's a conversation I never tire of having with other writers – do you listen to music when you write? The answers are always varied and interesting. For some, it's an absolute no-no – they need silence to work; others need loud music for them to get words down on paper. Some li...

The tip of the organisational iceberg Tomorrow (more accurately 53 minutes from now) it's my daughter Georgie's Tennessee Fields Festival, 2021.  A country music festival to which she's expecting about 2000 people. 400 of them are campers, arriving tomorrow. The fun will begin with Country Karaoke, then the Honky Tonk Roadshow, Campfire social and the bars closing at midnight. Saturday, the main festival day begins with a Songwriters' Workshop while the main gates open to welcome the bulk of the audience (all of whom will have to show proof of a negative Lateral Flow Test after which, as it's all outside in a very large field, the atmosphere should be fairly relaxed. Eight acts on the main stage alternate with six on the acoustic stage in the big top. There's line-dancing too but only one artist directly from the USA. Jessica Lynn and her band arrived a week ago and have been quarantining in a cottage ever since. Today the Tests to Release came though so tomorro...

Until recently I had thought of myself as a skilled multi-tasker. However, the combined impact of the pandemic and retirement has made me think again. These days I seem to have trouble accomplishing one task at a time, never mind several. To take just one recent example, I managed to buy a new car yesterday, after months of dithering. I was quite pleased with myself for getting through all the paperwork and various real-world actions involved in this, such as emptying the old car of years' worth of stuff including the four pairs of shoes I seemed to have thought necessary for driving, but it occurred to me that in the process I had put off doing all sorts of other, unrelated things, feeling as if I couldn't possible cope with doing anything else before this one major task was complete.  While considering this, I realised I didn't know what the term multi-tasking really meant. I looked it up online to make sure what I thought of as multi-tasking was what everyone else meant ...

 Probably the most common question a writer of fiction gets asked is where do you get your ideas from. It's not something I usually think about too much, but I thought I'd explore it a little in this post.   Firstly, let me say that ideas are not something I struggle with. If anything, I struggle with the opposite, having too many ideas. I rarely write them down, though (I know, very bad, goes against all the advice), preferring to let my subconscious do the sorting. The bad ideas usually disappear; the good ones tend to be those that won't leave me alone, and keep popping up reminding me that they're still there, and hello, am I going to start writing them soon?   See, almost all writers seem to be avid people watchers. We can't help it (I know I can't). Out having a coffee (I vaguely remember doing things like this prior to lockdown…) with your partner, and you spot a couple at a nearby table. Before you know it, you've started to develop a narrati...

Recently, I was having an online argument with someone about the BBC. She wanted to abolish it. I pointed out that it didn’t just put out TV and radio programmes, but for a few measly quid a week there was Cardiff Singer of the Year, Young Musician of the Year, the link with Open University, the emerging artistes programme for singers and musicians, support for choirs, orchestras, and also such public amenities as weather reports, the shipping forecast, education packages for schools…etc. etc. ‘People don’t want that,’ she retorted. Really? Then recently a sound engineer was explaining the difficulty she was in during the covid crisis. She is self-employed, so did qualify for the government’s belated financial help, which included those in the creative industries, who were unable to work at present. Ah, but then she was offered a contract for a theatre job, so effectively stopped being self-employed for the duration. But she had a job anyway, right? Wrong! Theatres were closed. She, ...