Authors Electric

          Happy New Year everyone. It's nice to be back. Feeling a bit rusty, so if I repeat myself or talk about something someone has already covered, then I apologise upfront! But I'll do my best. Been an eventful last twelve months while I've been absent with leave. My amazing musician partner has beaten cancer again for the second time in three years and I've got super new eye sight thanks to a successful operation. So at least I can see to drive in the dark again and street lamps no longer look like giant orange chrysanthemums, looming out of the shadows and waiting to leap across the road in front of the car.      Sad start to the New Year with the loss of two well-loved famous names. The wonderful, one-half of The Everly Brothers, Phil Everly, and brilliant actor, Roger Lloyd Pack, who will be forever Trigger in my mind. I'm loath to use the word celebrities as it conjures up images of Katy Price a...

The trouble with February is it's too short and means my blog turn has come around quicker than ever On the other hand it means less time between last payday and this one! Thank goodness the sales last longer than a month these days. But what's that got to do with getting older? Well nothing actually, but we’ve got another year stretching ahead of us, fresh, clean and hopeful. A year that can be filled with activities, memories and ambition. A year to maybe take a break from the usual and do something different. But how many of us will? I made a list at the beginning of January of things to do, things to finish, and things to start and how many have I done so far? Not that many, although I've almost completed my next novel, but I'm sure I'll get to December and the list will still be pretty much intact and all that will have happened for sure is I'll be another year older. Life just vanishes in a blink these days. It never went this fast a few years ago. ...

Sorry I missed my January 2nd slot. Christmas and The New Year swamped me and I can only blame it on a senior moment, of which I have many as the years go by. So a belated Happy New Year to one and all. Let's hope it's healthy and successful for everyone. The main thing on my mind at the time of writing is the ongoing discussion on many Facebook writer groups about the use of social networking, mainly Twitter, to promote our work. You may already have had people cover this subject so I'm not going to bore you with too many details, however I'd like some thoughts, please. Personally I have no objections whatsoever to seeing authors promoting their work. And why shouldn't they? They spend years slaving over their story, getting it just right, editing, choosing a cover design and then publishing via KDP and Smashwords. They are proud and want to tell the world. It's their baby, their blood, sweat and tears. Why the heck shouldn't they announce the long awai...

Hello there and thank you to Debbie Bennett for the kind invitation to write a guest post for your lovely website. I've taken a while to read the various and interesting posts from many of the authors involved with the site. I came up with several ideas and then scrapped them after seeing similar. Dan Holloway's where you write and what does it say about you, Andrew Croft's computer crisis and vanishing files, Rosalie Warren's idea of allowing her characters to have their own twitter accounts and blogs. All similar ideas to the ones I had. So now I'm stumped. Or maybe not. I've got a few thoughts up my sleeve. One of my regular characters, Roy Cantello, is sitting on my shoulder right now, bending my ear and wanting in on the action. He's itching to get his guitar out of the case to start rocking again. I've foolishly promised him a fourth novel. He was only ever meant to be in a single book, not a series. But due to his attraction (that's...