Authors Electric

  Me with Toto in Boston, c. 1941    The PC system crash that I had been pretending not to expect happened in stages and became undeniable by my 87th birthday in mid-May. Somehow it felt catastrophic. I'm a creature of habit. I rely on routines to balance me over the voids of writer's block and dark neuroses. Expected or not, the crash disrupted various works in progress, including my Authors Electric post for June, which I missed. That's my excuse, anyway. Suddenly I needed to replace the familiar, multipurpose, desktop box with which I had been pounding out books, stories, secrets, images, videos, notes, missives, social media screeds and things personal for a dozen years. I knew its open-source Linux Ubuntu OS interface like the back of my hand - its folders and sub-folders, much like my cluttered desk and maybe my life - a friendly mess  whose pathways and objects I could navigate while sleepwalking. Tablets, laptops and smartphones just won't do for this clunky-...

What’s the earliest birthday of your own that you can remember? For me, along with quite a few other people, I believe, it’s my fourth. 1959, that would have been (no, please don’t bother to work out how old I am). May 1959 in St Eval, an RAF base near Newquay in Cornwall. I have a number of ‘memory glimpses’ that are clearly linked to this day, though nothing of much consequence happened, looking back. My grandmother – ‘Nana’ – came to stay, catching the train from Pontefract in Yorkshire and changing at Bristol… a long day’s journey which I remember making myself a number of times. It was always fun to have Nana to stay – she was different and exciting. And on this birthday she bought me a doll’s pram, a big one, nearly as big as a real baby’s pram, in my memory at least. It was second-hand – I’m not sure why, as we weren’t well-off but neither were we very poor. Not that its second-handedness bothered me – it made it more fun because it was navy blue and a bit shabby, and N...

Dilston Physic Garden, scene of a new co-writing project blending botany, folklore, neuroscience. There are some activities which are more fun with two. (Or even more. Allegedly.) Activities which are also fun solo. For most writers, the solitary vice is the chosen norm, though there are writing teams who are very successful. There’s thriller writer ‘Nicci French’, aka Nicci Gerrard and Sean French (see below); while Phoef Sutton has recently teamed up with Janet Evanovich. Some forms of writing involve inevitable collaboration. I write plays, which involve directors, producers and actors, but the actual original writing is mine. I’ve collaborated with visual artists, such as in my ‘science of dying’ project This Fatal Subject which won a Wellcome Trust Arts Award. Collaboration without competition or stifling each other can be a tricky line to walk, and there are few poets and artists who maintain those kind of projects for more than a limited time. Here's a video of one of...