Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love using a wide variety of writing prompts. They’re great for triggering further ideas. Sometimes they’re enough for me to picture a potential character. Sometimes the prompt gives me a theme. Sometimes, especially with opening line prompts, I have a way into a story and I then create the best character to meet the needs of that prompt. I’m unlikely to have a character with their head in a book taking part in an action story, for example. (It’s not impossible but it’s unlikely I’d do it).  Writing to prompts regularly has helped me get used to writing to prompts set by anyone else. This is useful for competitions with set themes. It’s also handy for responding to writing exercises set by workshop leaders at events such as The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick. I set prompts for the monthly Zoom meeting of the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group . I join in with the prompts on the night and, ...

It’s been a funny few weeks for me. After my week off last month, I managed to catch a rather unpleasant bug and ended up in bed for a week. On the plus side, this gave me a lot of time to read (as I couldn’t do much more than that). It kept me sane (I get rather grumpy when unwell, as I don’t like to be inactive, and I knew I had a fair few jobs planned for the garden), and at least allowed me to make inroads into the huge TBR pile we have – last count had over 500 books still to be read… I also jumped about genres and styles, from horror, to crime fiction, with drama and science fiction in the mix somewhere. But one of the books I most enjoyed was a work of non-fiction, by John Nichol (the navigator from the Tornado shot down during the first Gulf War), called Eject! Eject! . Pauline, my wife, picked this up for my birthday, thinking it would interest me as I used to work on ejection seats. It’s a fascinating read, charting the development of egress systems from the ...

Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Many thanks to Gill James for taking the image of me reading from From Light to Dark and Back Again at the Bridge House Publishing Celebration event in December 2023. All good fun! What are you hoping for in this new writing/reading year? Writing wise, I would like more things in print. Reading wise, I would like to discover authors new to me. The big eye opener for me in recent years has been discovering the wonderful world of non-fiction, especially history. The start of a year is when I miss most favourite authors no longer with us. I always looked forward to the new Terry Pratchett book for example. Nearly always ended up having that as a Christmas present.  Having said that I was given A Life In Footnotes which is his biography (written by Rob Wilkins) and am loving that. (Wouldn’t surprise me now if I go on to discover more on the wonderful world of biographies!).     I look forward to book ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Do you review how many books you’ve read/listened to this year? I don’t. This is because while I’ve read plenty of books, I always feel I should be reading more. I remind myself I only have so many hours in the day and the better question to ask is did I enjoy the books I read? The answer to that is a definite yes. Life is too short to waste on a boring book. I like to mix reading fiction and non-fiction. I also mix up forms of writing so will read novels, then go on to short story and flash collections, before resuming novel reading again. I mix up reading between formats - hardback, paperback, Kindle. Plus I ensure I read the writing magazines I find most helpful. Within fiction, I like to mix genres too. I try to have a good all-round reading “diet” then. I was fascinated by Churchill’s Wizards (read on Kindle ) which looked at how artists, amongst others, deceived the Nazis using sleight of hand, camouflage, ma...

  During April 2022 I did something I had never done before. This is not as exciting as it sounds, though I was unreasonably excited by the result. I think my former career in database-wrangling played a large part in the excitement, because I spent at least some of my working life trying to make it easier for people to search for information. These efforts were often foiled by people’s reluctance to use the search tools available, but that’s another story. I’ve already written on this blog about the family history narrative I published last year. Although it was framed by my own search back through the generations, I did include a list of sources, which because of the subject-matter incorporated places to visit – not that it was possible to visit most of them in real life at the time I published. However it was only recently that I thought of adding an index to the book. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the first place, but it might have been because I imagined any reade...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. How easy do you find coming up with ideas? I’m always on the lookout for new ones. I write flash fiction and blog for online magazines, so I always need a stock of ideas.    As well as writing on topics of interest to me (and I hope other writers), I use random generators to trigger ideas. These work especially well for fiction but I have used things like a random question generator to give me a blog theme.   I also use prompt books and have contributed to a couple. I like the challenge of rising to a theme set by someone else and bringing my take to it. With the random generators, I can do this via variety of means.  I have used the following:- Random word/object generators. Random noun/adjective/verb generators. Random name generators (a recent story of mine was accepted for an online magazine and the idea for it came from the generated name). Random question generators. (Great for use as...

 It's almost exactly a year since I published an account of my family history - under my real name, of course. It would seem quite odd to write something like that under my pen-name, although now that I come to think of it, a fictitious family history might be more interesting! After doing research on and off for years, I had been meaning to write it up for some time, and it turned out that the best time to do it was just when there was lots of other stuff going on in my life as well as in my writing. Actually I found it oddly relaxing to write non-fiction for a change, though there was a narrative thread running through this book as it was really the story of how I did the research, and I told it in the order the research happened, i.e. back to front in terms of chronology. I published it on Amazon, both electronically and in print, not to sell it to others particularly but to let the rest of the family, and some fairly distant relatives I've met in the course of my research, ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One of the ways I fire up my imagination is to use random generators.   I’ve used the following to good effect. Random Noun/Adjective/Verb generators. Random Question generators (good for giving ideas for themes, sometimes titles). Random Number generators (I’ve used a number as a countdown in a story. I’ve also used it as part of an address where the action happened). Random Name generators (where you can generate a first name, surname, or both). Random Picture generator. If I select a landscape I come up with who might live there and what happens to them in this landscape. If I select a picture of a person, I prefer those where they are doing something, such as walking away from the camera at the time the shot was taken. I can rough out a story around that. Who is this person? What or whom are they walking away from? Could they be walking towards something instead? A successful generator makes me ask que...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love reading and writing non-fiction but I came to the latter relatively recently. It was a result of discovering the joys of writing for an online magazine, Chandler’s Ford Today , I dipped my literary toes into the wonderful world of factual writing.  I’ve recently had the joy of being published in print for the first time in non-fiction with my chapter Why Write Flash Fiction and Short Stories in Creativity Matters: Find Your Passion for Writing , which has been compiled and edited by Wendy H Jones of this parish. So another reason to love non-fiction then. I hope to develop my non-fiction “string” to my writing “bow” further. My first love though is fiction (and especially humour, fairytales, fantasy etc) and it always will be. I also became a published author in that form long before anything of mine appeared in non-fiction. But is non-fiction still considered the poor relation to fiction? If it is, I ...

Image Credit:  All images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I like reviews. I write them reasonably regularly (mainly on books) and I use them as an indicator of whether I’m likely to enjoy a “product” or not for everything from groceries to books I’ve been recommended to read. It doesn’t mean reviews are always right of course but I find them a useful general guide. If everybody loathes something, there is usually a good reason for it. Now with my writing hat on, I find obtaining reviews difficult as most authors do and I refuse to go down the paid-for review route. Not very ethical to my mind. I want a review to be honest and not to be “bought”. (Also smacks of desperation to me but that’s another matter. I would far rather have fewer reviews honestly obtained). I recently received a one star review for my second flash fiction collection, Tripping the Flash Fantastic . Now ironically part of me is pleased about this. Every author gets these. It kind of shows you have p...

My A level English teacher once began a lesson with a challenge: ‘Why should people read novels?’    Easy, we thought. ‘To find out about the world.’    ‘Say I’m someone who works in an office, a bank, a business. I have my newspaper for that.’ Who needs books? Photo by James Abbott from FreeImages    ‘To find out about people, then; what makes them tick.’ ‘Feelings and emotions.’ ‘See what it’s like to go through something you haven’t experienced yourself.’    All of these answers – perfectly reasonable, we thought – he batted back like flies. ‘People! I know all about them, believe me. Work with people every day. What can a story someone has made up, all about characters they’ve also made up, tell me about life? That stuff’s just for kids. Pure entertainment. I don’t need to escape into fairy stories, thank you.’    It was a wind-up, of course. Boris, as we called him (I have no idea why – it wasn’t his nam...