Authors Electric

What did you do while you were in lockdown?  I listened to a lot of audiobooks, I went for a walk every day, and I played board games with my boyfriend. We ate and drank too much. I tried and failed to master French. My boyfriend made model aeroplanes. And I wrote my first novel.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who wrote a novel during the pandemic. In fact, I know I’m not. It was an explosive time for creativity, as we all stared into the void and wondered what was coming next. For me, my self-employed, pre-child life, and the requirement to stay home all the time, plus the fact that I had just moved to a new country and didn’t have any friends yet, made the writing process nice and easy.  Proudly wearing my Winner t-shirt. Everyone who completes it wins! I did NaNoWriMo and I took it seriously. I knew that if I missed one day I would be toast, so I got up at 7am throughout November and wrote my words, then quite often got back into bed. I planned the first 25,000 words ...

Ritual -- what does this mean to you? Rituals can be traditional, religious, political: think of all the rituals we love (maybe the family time-honoured way to do Passover or Christmas -- those little add-ones which are especially ‘ours’ woven into or onto our religious or traditional festival practice. Our favourite way to celebrate family achievements such as anniversaries or graduations -- even publishing a first book.)   Rituals have honoured the arriving, mating, passing, process as far   back as -- well, as far back as human life can be traced. In ritual, we as humans find satisfaction, celebration, closure. In a known ritual, we find satisfaction or comfort. So when locked down by the pandemic, or even beyond that, for those of us who need to be a bit more careful as we move back into the ‘normal’ world again, ritual is much missed. We haven’t celebrated, or honoured, important life events of family and friends along with our circle of family and friends.   In the ...

Maybe it's a post-pandemic desire for escape from my own four walls, but I find myself increasingly drawn to TV series such as Kate Humble's Escape to the Farm,  and Ben Fogle's  New Lives in the Wild.  These series build on the formula of old favourites like Escape to the Country , where home buyers (with normally healthy budgets) seek an idyllic country pile as an antidote to urban living. But they go a step further, in that they feature a whole lifestyle change that ties in with a desire to protect the planet and its wildlife, and the people featured are not always those you would expect. I was particularly fascinated by a recent New Lives in the Wild episode, where presenter Ben Fogle stays with Lynx, who once lived alone with only Stone Age technology, and is currently setting up a community project to "rewild" humans called Lithica. https://lithica-rewilding-humans.org/ The aim of this project seems to be to secure large areas with natural resources where p...

A rather awkward question came up over Christmas lunch this year, which nobody in our family could answer: "What happens to all the face masks and test kits after use?" I expect you know the ones I'm talking about, since no doubt you've had similar conversations over the festive break. In our family, Dad alone uses four lateral flow kits every week since he's required to take one every time he visits Mum in her nursing home. I was surprised he took so many, as I always thought you had to pay for them and Dad is of the 'make do and mend' generation, but apparently these amazingly elaborate and well-packaged kits are totally free, and you just go and ask for one at a chemist if you need it... so who actually is paying for them all, I wonder? Brother uses fewer kits, but says he takes a voluntary test before visiting people or going to a party, since apparently that's the socially acceptable thing to do these days... always assuming you have any social li...

  The night is long and full of terrors (Game of Thrones fans, don't worry... we are not burning anyone here today). The day is short, especially if like me you have yet to brave the potentially plague-infested shops to do your Christmas shopping. But, never fear, this pan(dem)ic year is almost done... When unicorns rise In the wild winter wood Now shall we see The truth in their words Ever clearer as the sun Restores light to the earth. * Katherine Roberts writes fantasy and historical fiction for young readers. It's probably too late to order a paperback for Christmas, but all of her books are also available in digital format for both Kindle and epub. www.katherineroberts.co.uk

March 2020, two months after Authors Electric welcomed me, I wrote a blog called “Splendid Isolation.” It was named after Warren Zevon's song about the difference between being alone and being lonely. Feel free to hop over and read it if you haven't already. During that time, much of the world was trying to figure out how to combat the Corona virus. In Canada, we were doing the same. Even though there was a lot to deal with—closing borders, face coverings, shutting down businesses, our leaders worked together and appeared to be taking the right steps forward. There was so much to learn.  The pandemic also produced an explosion of neologisms. Phrases and words like: self-isolation; shelter in place; social distancing; flatten the curve; curb-side pickup became part of everyday news feeds and conversation. New acronyms cropped up too—PPE, WHO, Covid-19, HCQ. We were more digitally connected than ever before—in a way we weren’t during the SARS outbreak in 2002. I zoomed daily with...

This is my first post of 2021 here, so I'd like to wish a Happy New Year to readers!  When I was thinking of a topic to write, I came across a post on a friend’s Facebook page that made me laugh.  The caption read: For the next time you think the 80s were cool.  Yeah, it was the decade of big hair and outlandish fashion.  The reason I found it funny was because I used to be a slave to fashion. My jeans had to sit above the waist, not below it. They couldn’t be too faded or too dark. They had to conform nicely around my butt and not cut off the circulation in my legs. I preferred the skinny fit over a baggy, loose pair, and if there were holes in them, they had to look as if they'd been ripped accidentally, not deliberately. The pressure of buying a pair of pants!  I wanted "the look" with Jordache jeans. Didn't we all? Looking back now, I pity my younger, insecure self. I was pretty shy in the eighties, and fashion gave me a sense of belonging. The eclectic styl...

Back in 2015, somebody made a clever joke that I wished -   a) I’d thought of myself (naturally)   b) the person had made it five years before, giving us so much longer to enjoy it.   It went something like this:   Prospective employer : So, Ms ------, where do you see yourself in five years’ time?    Interview candidate : I don’t know. I don’t have 2020 vision.   No 2020 vision here Photo by  Ksenia Chernaya  from  Pexels With 2020 behind us, that joke has taken on a kind of tragic grandeur, of Socratic irony even. Nobody had 2020 vision. E xcept for a few far-sighted scientists and medical experts who knew we were in for a pandemic but couldn’t say when. And if they had pointed to 2020, who’d have believed them? Yes, yes, we’d have said. Don’t worry, we’re used to flu. We’ll be fine.  A wonderful thing, hindsight. By the time you read this, we’ll all have 2020 vision. Just, er, backwards.  Spectacular sour...

The last month has been an odd one for me. I'm not sure it's writer's block, at least not in the traditional sense, as I've still been writing, but the problem is making progress. Like, I suspect, a lot of writers, when lockdown first started, I thought it would be a boon to productivity - after all, I'm no longer spending an hour or more commuting, time which could be better spent writing. I quickly discovered the opposite - I was writing more slowly. I put a large part of this down to screen fatigue - now I'm working from home, I spend most of the day either staring at a screen or delivering training virtually, using Teams as a platform. By the end of the day, I've been finding the thought of staring at a screen for another couple of hours less than thrilling. Some evenings, I've not bothered at all and resorted to pen and paper. I now have quite a lot of potential material for future stories (assuming I can decipher my own handwriting) and have id...

2020. Perfect vision and all that. What a joke. 2020 was the year it all started; the year of the pandemic; the year of lockdown. The year the economy nose-dived into oblivion and life as we’d known it changed forever.  If we’d known how it would end, would we have done things any differently? I don’t know. I suspect society would have collapsed sooner rather than later. I don’t think we’d have spent a year and more sleep-walking into a political and cultural nightmare – with shops and businesses closing daily, neighbour tattling on neighbour and the surge in sales of black shower curtains, furtive comings-and-goings at all hours, and the police too busy arresting people who mostly didn’t have a clue whether today was rule-of-six or two-household (not including children) meeting outdoors in a private place that wasn’t a park and didn’t sell alcohol except as part of a substantial meal, which had to be eaten in two hours. Although you could go to the gym with whoever you liked. An...

At the start of December 2019, I gave myself a gift of learning. I'd seen numerous ads for MasterClass while searching for interesting gifts for the holiday season.  If you're unfamiliar with MasterClass, it's a streaming platform of online courses that started in 2015 with a simple pitch: Famous people teach you about the thing that made them famous. At the time, the courses that interested me most were from writers: Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Gladwell, Joyce Carol Oates, just to name a few. MasterClass, however, includes instructors from all walks of life—from Dr. Jane Goodall who teaches Conservation to Helen Mirren who teaches Acting to Annie Leibovitz who teaches Photography.  You can either purchase a specific course along with its instructional videos and workbooks, or buy an annual membership which gives you unlimited access to all the classes, including new ones that are added during the year.  I decided to pick up an annual subscription and a second ...

Ask me what I've been doing lately and chances are I'll rattle off bullet points like a Ted Talker. I recognize that the questioner is only making conversation, but I feel compelled to provide you with at least a semblance of substance - without overdoing it I hope. In turn, I may ask: "How about you? Any pancakes on the griddle?" But what if I respond: "Nothing! Nada! Zilch! Bupkis!"? Honest, perhaps, but sounds rude. A brush off. What a curmudgeon, that Tosi guy, a prima donna ! Worse yet, it comes off as feigned humility. Shrug. Gee. Little me? He's so humble, that Tosi guy.  Still worse: Instead of bullet points, I give you a full accounting, a quarterly report on my works-in-progress, launches and lunches, with recipes.  God forbid, you should think that I am really doing nothing. You should find me out as an idler, a time-waster, an Internet triva-addict, a gamer, a social media gabber.  You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one t...