Authors Electric

 Short stories seem to multiply on my computers as well as in notebooks, though I often forget having written them. I embarked on an effort to tidy them up and do something useful with them some time ago, but the only visible result of these efforts was that I succeeded in unpublishing two very short collections of stories entitled Five Short Stories and Five More Short Stories. With hindsight, I think I could have made more effort with the titles! I realised only the other week, during another phase of our horrendous decluttering project, that in addition to the ones I vaguely remembered, I had a whole notebook full of hand-written short stories I had completely forgotten about. I have a feeling that forgetting them was probably the best option, and I’ve been putting off looking at them in case of embarrassment. Oddly the declutterers responsible for unearthing it, although they kept trying to talk me into getting rid of some things I definitely didn’t even want to consider gett...

These past few months have been, for me, a good example of the consequences of Failing to Plan, but as a result I now have one almost-completed novel and one half-written one, so I suppose I haven't completely wasted my time. I didn't realise until the other day, by which time it was too late, because it was almost the end of National Novel Wiritng Month, a festival I still observe despite it now being obsolete, that I hadn't written anything in my planning notebook since my hospital stay. In a sense my life is now divided into before and after surgery, though I'm still hoping the division will somehow heal once I've healed up physically. I've now been signed off by the surgical team so I am taking that as progress, and the fact that I've opened the notebook again tends to corroborate this. The impressive cover of my current writing notebook My planning notebook has been an essential tool for me for some years now, although the actual notebook in use has cha...

Wikimedia It's nearly Christmas and we're all even shorter of money than usual, so -- what to give as Christmas presents? BOOKS! Books, of course. And here's a link to BookShepherd, a site where you can find books recommended by 'authors and super-readers,' people who really know a good book when they find it. Book Shepherd You can even tailor your search by consulting such lists as 'The best books by journalists which capture a moment in time or history' or 'The best books that show life in the big city isn't all glitz and glam.' Recently, Book Shepherd asked me (and even some other writers) to report the best three books they'd read in the last year. Here's my Book Shepherd three... Follow the link to read the reviews There's also Book Shepherd's   '100 Best Books of 2023'   -- as voted for by '1,021 writers and super-readers. And the winner is.... You have to go and find out for yourself. But if you're buying ...

  For reasons I won't go into here, I have been preoccupied lately with the logistics of writing. None of the options I've tried to date has been entirely satisfactory, but some have been much better than others, so I thought I would review them here in case anybody else lands in a similar boat to mine - though I very much hope they won't as I happened to be working on three different novels when I unexpectedly landed in a hospital bed, and it was very frustrating not to be able to continue with my usual writing routine. The worst thing was that I had just finished the draft of one of the novels and made notes for the edit. One of the first things I asked the family to bring in for me was a notebook, and eventually I wrote several chapters of the project I had intended to start on that month in it. Writing by hand is not ideal for me, to put it mildly. It isn't a case of using a special fountain pen and inscribing carefully chosen words in an elegant copperplate hand, b...

There’s a Facebook group called Amazon KDP Books - Kindle Direct Publishing with a screenshot of the KDP logo as the group picture. It is in no way affiliated with Amazon and I can only assume that Amazon either no longer cares or has simply given up chasing people who appropriate their words and pictures. In the early days of this blog, we had the word kindle in the title and received a polite message from Amazon asking us to cease and desist as it was trademarked to them.  Anyway, this group has over 77 thousand members. I’m not entirely sure why I go there as it is of no benefit to me whatsoever. The majority of posts come from people who have apparently watched YouTube where there are entrepreneurs making a lot of money out of telling other people how to make a lot of money. Of course, it doesn’t work – it never works. There is no get-rich-quick scheme and if there was, few people would be altruistic enough to share it.  It’s all about low content . You can allegedly ma...

Parents, teachers, friends and casual acquaintances have, over the years, noticed how untidy I am, and failed, with all their well-intentioned comments, to change me.  I LOVE chaos. I do! I’m averse to order and routine, especially that imposed by other people. I dislike plans and ‘organised’. It feels anti-life.  By the side of my armchair, my nest, is my ‘pile’ of stuff. Books, notebook, diary, address book, photo albums of my grandchildren, sweets, aspirins, knitting, the stuff of me.   Upstairs in my office, it’s the same : desk, shelves, floor, piled high with stuff, all of it precious chaos. My notebooks the same, my mind the same, a mish-mash of untidy thoughts, memories, anxieties, plans, regrets, what ifs and shoulds, as  well as those magical random moments, those beautiful experiences, usually for me in my garden, the flash of a goldfinch,  a new flower, a party of jays on the lawn. Are all writers the same? To begin with my books are extrem...

As a writer I have been thinking about the different ways in which we write. Readers often think that writers fall into two camps, those who use a keyboard and those who write by hand. Indeed many writers would, themselves, say they are one or the other. Is this in fact true, and if true, is it always the best way? I am knee deep in editing at the moment and this entails sitting at a computer and going through the entire novel. I am sure most writers will agree, that it can be long and tiring work. Still, it is one of the most crucial aspects of writing a book. However, editing can, and should, be done in different ways. Once I have finished the edits on my computer, I will print the book out and will then go through it on paper. I will move to a completely different area of the house. Using another medium, and in a new place, can bring a fresh approach to the editing process. I will be wielding my pen and highlighting any areas which need to be changed or culled.  One...

I've always thought about things in terms of colours - the days of the week came up technicolour even as a child - Saturday was white, Sunday pink, Monday a kind of dirty beige, Tuesday blue, Wednesday green, Thursday grey and Friday black. When I was very small, four or five, I used to have nightmares that were all colour and sound.  Purple was a particularly awful screech that went straight through every nerve like finger nails on glass.  I've never been able to stand purple since. Words, like sounds, have colours too, mostly - though not always - associated with their meanings and images.  The word 'home' comes up a kind of warm pink (psychologists please don't bother to comment!), 'trunk' is brown unless it belongs to an elephant, 'harmony' is blue - a kind of lavender blue - 'excitement' a kind of electric blue, and if you just said 'velvet' to me without qualifying the noun I'd hear a rich medieval red. The ul...