Authors Electric

  Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One image of The Hayes, Swanwick was taken by me, Allison Symes. I read short and long form fiction and non-fiction. I mix up reading in print books or on Kindle. I often try works by authors new to me on the latter. If I like the ebooks, I often buy said authors’ paperbacks later. The Kindle is especially useful for non-fiction. I also write in short and longer format, fiction and non-fiction. It keeps my reading and writing life interesting. My writing life has been an upside down one. I started by writing novels.Talk about running before I could walk. I then went into short stories. From there I went into flash fiction. During the short form time, I branched out into non-fiction by blogging, writing articles etc. It is all fun. Almost certainly I’ve done everything the wrong way around! Having said that, this means when I go to a writing event, I have a wide range of topics to interest me. It is a rare day...

  As I may have mentioned, on 1 st January this year I took a leap into the abyss and became a Full Time Writer. This was at once terrifying and thrilling. Yes, I had my well-established freelance writing career, but just as I laid down my other source of income for good, one of my biggest clients changed things around and I haven’t had any work from them since. I got writer’s block for the first time ever while trying to write my third novel. My elderly parents needed even more care and attention which sapped my mental strength and even though I’m a fairly brave and optimistic person, I sat in my Palace of Creativity in the cold, dark days of January thinking to myself, “Ruth, how on earth are you going to make any money?”   A fellow writer, the magnificent Sheila Robinson, had mentioned years before that she booked herself a space on local craft and book fairs and sold her books directly to the public. This seemed like a splendid idea. Having spent twenty years running my...

Zadie Smith: Intimations on culture and COVID COVID-19 has rearranged our metaphors, especially for those of my advanced years, and co-morbidities that require lying low. Hunter-gatherer/adventure-hero idioms have taken a back seat to quieter images of fishing (online) and burrowing, surviving on deliveries from FedEx, Instacart, and Amazon. No longer able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, I am a hermit crab in a conch shell, a trapdoor spider awaiting victuals via Grubhub. I thought about how the pandemic affects me creatively beyond material circumstances while reading Intimations , a powerful collection of six, "shape-shifting," intimate essays about the COVID-related experiences of Zadie Smith . In this slim volume, the British born, NYU literary professor, essayist, and novelist crosses the Atlantic on the high wire of writing with grace and insight about unfolding tragedy whose conclusion remains uncertain. The brilliance with which she succeeds flas...

Life in rural England... I am a fan of The Archers… the Archers potters along, but I find myself these days hoping that something might have a successful outcome — why must the Archers mirror society, and more relevantly, does it?   The Rob and Helen storyline was exciting, moving, and telling, a warning about coercive control… now the Emma and Ed one informs about the desperate plight of a rural population struggling to make a home and living… but, if that crash lands in total failure, doesn’t it, somehow, also teach that there can be no escape, none at all, and leave listeners depressed and hopeless? I don’t know. I don’t believe in offering my readers  total ‘happy endings’ in terms of ‘getting what we want’, but I hunt for a bit of balance. I watch Call the Midwife for relaxation, fully realising that any   happiness achieved is not, of course, always an outcome in real life, but at least I am relaxed and entertained. I have friends who can’t  wa...

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...

Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja poses for Matthew Bremner's recent Guardian profile. An article in the Guardian  knocked me on my backside the other day. The feature, How to Be Human  by Matthew Bremner, examined the life of Marcos  Rodríguez  Pantoja, an elderly Spaniard had been abandoned as a child and had survived fifteen years in the Andalusian mountains with wolves as his only companions. L ike a real-life  Romulus and Remus , he owes his life to a she-wolf, who accepted the small boy as part of her litter, sharing food, after he crawled into their den seeking shelter from the cold on the first night or second night of his long ordeal. Deja vu:   My Dog's Name , the novella I've been revising for inclusion in Sometimes Ridiculous , my forthcoming softcover story collection, has a similar, archetypal plot. A boy,  presumed buried by a mudslide, roams  the Hollywood Hills with a family of coyotes.  I wrote it back  2013, havin...