Authors Electric

It's all in a day's work for the average hack: recycling gore from old movies and books...without any sense of the real pain involved. I, on the other hand, was bitten by a Viper and stabbed over and over and over again while writing Caesar's Ghost. The book features some tactical weapons I'd researched online for months. Was that good enough for the Ghost? Not a chance. The Ghost wanted me to own them. How could the scenes be lifelike if I hadn't actually held these things? Could I even guess at their real power if I hadn't felt their heft and weight? I needed more of that verisimi-something. Well, before I knew it I'd shelled out a small fortune on a slew of lethal 'toys' illegal in many states. And I approached the action scenes with a little more strut in my stylistic walk. Example: Caesar's Ghost features a stun gun and I'd purchased three. Reviews, research and instincts told me that two of the three weren't right. One, desi...

It's final revision time on my latest novel, Life Form 3 . I've been living at the computer, desperate to spend every moment with it. And yesterday morning I woke up unable to move my right arm. To be truthful, I could move it, but it hurt so much I preferred not to. Reaching for my glasses left me a gasping wreck. Keeping still wasn't much better. I’d felt it nagging the previous day, but never thought it could turn into this. The repetitive strain injury was back. In a way this seems like divine retribution. In my first novel My Memories of a Future Life , I inflicted a cruel case of RSI on a concert pianist. I imagine some deity that sits on the interface between art and life has thought it would be very fine to dump the same fate on me - and right when I need my fingers most. In my defence, I haven’t used the RSI device glibly. Its details didn’t come from comfy googling, they were earned. My RSI journey began when I became a sub-editor in the 1990s, when desktop publis...