Authors Electric

Fairlight Moderns Ask anyone to name a famous literary novella and odds on they’ll pick something written before the middle of the twentieth century: Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea? 1952. Animal Farm? 1945.  He art of Darkness? Back… back… way back to 1899….   And yet a quick scan of Amazon (other ebook platforms are available) shows how, in contrast, genre fiction today comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You want your sci-fi hit as a short story? a novella? a six-book box set? No problem. Literary fiction? Nope, novel-length only please.   Discussing this strange situation with some writer friends, it’s easy to see how this has come about.     Send a great manuscript in to a literary agent these days that has less than 80,000 words and you’ll be advised to go home, get your pen out and not come back until you’ve managed a respectable 90,000.   And pitch up with something less than 60,000? You won’t even get out the slush pile. As a wr...

Ever since discovering a copy of Stephen King's On Writing  in my goodie bag at a British Fantasy Convention way back in the 1990s, I've admired the man for his no-nonsense approach to writing. I'm not especially a horror fan - those familiar with my work will know I'm more into fantasy and legends with a bit of science fiction mixed in. But I enjoyed the screen adaptations of King's books, such as writer's nightmare Misery , where the author of a popular series finds himself incapacitated at the mercy of his No. 1 fan, who forces him to write another book in that series. Having someone smash your ankles with a sledgehammer must concentrate the mind, I suppose, and makes me wonder how autobiographical that book was when he wrote it. After all, Stephen King's No 1 tip in his tips for writers published recently in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/30/ten-things-i-learned-about-writing-from-stephen-king  is "Write whatever the hell yo...

How long should a short story be? How short can a long story be? At what point does a long short story  - or a short long one -  become a novella? And what about short shorts? Never mind flash fiction ... All of which vexed my brain as I tried to work out how big to make  the current novel in progress,  and to decide on suitable lengths for the contents of  my second book of short stories. The Five Pound Pony   (It's out now. Available on Amazon HERE  if you live in the UK, or HERE if in the US)