Authors Electric

  I recently watched an online clip of Robbie Williams making an acceptance speech for an award. He’d ‘like to thank drugs, alcohol, ADHD, anxiety, addiction, body dysmorphia’ – (and a whole host of other crippling conditions) ‘without which none of this would have been possible’, he tells us. Yes, it was funny, but as an author who is also a performer, I found myself relating to that strange dichotomy between self-deprecation and loud obnoxious drama-queen. You may think that we lie when we describe ourselves as socially awkward and shy – after all, we jump up to show off with the most massive egos at every opportunity. We can’t wait to grab the limelight in a blaze of ridiculous costumes and glitter – and in my case giant gold wings! But I’m here to tell you that underneath every mammoth motor-mouth is a quieter, sensible and often anxious human being. Just consider how many people in show-biz are addicts, alcoholics, reclusive, exercise junkies, dysfunctional, depressed – or use...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pleasures and pains of handing one’s work over to someone else. I’ve enjoyed writing for performance ever since I was a child. We lived in a cul-de-sac   then, and the blind end had a street lamp over it which made the perfect evening performance space.   I can’t remember much about the scripts, although one play involved costumes made of raffia knotted round string to make ‘hula hula skirts.’ I wrote and directed them and carried on doing that through school, devising my own versions of My Fair Lady, Snow White, and a something Shakespearean with someone playing a recorder, for which I wrote the music. I can’t write music. When the hapless player asked me what key it was in, I said, ‘C’ because it didn’t have sharps or flats (what?) She gave me a funny look. Maybe I had/have a control-freak streak, but I knew how I wanted the parts to be played, my words to be spoken. I've gone on doing it intermittently ever since. Writing f...

          Today is National Flash Fiction Day . It would be fairly criminal of me not to state that from the outset. First off, this is the first time ever we’ve celebrated this marvellous form as a nation – the Arts Council have even got behind it. Second, tonight, as part of the shindig, we’re holding a flash slam in Oxford , combining the worlds of poetry slam and flash fiction as twelve of the UK’s finest practitioners battle it out, reading their stuff in front of an audience and celeb judge, the short fiction legend Tania Hershman. If you’re anywhere near Oxford, do come along to what will be a truly wonderful evening. And if you’re not, please do check out what’s going on in your area. Third, to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day, my two short fiction collections are free for today and tomorrow:           (life:) razorblades included contains some award-winning short stories and poe...

Jan's frankly hilarious and utterly untoppable piece yesterday got me to thinking about the various things various authors say they're not so keen on in the modern age. And it struck me that one of the things that regularly tops such lists is the expectation that we do readings as part of the endless publicity mill. Now, I've been a 24 carat spotlight junkie since way before I decided to throw my writing into the public arena, spending several years with a borderline addiction to appearing on cheesy TV gameshows and regularly crossing the street at the sight of a local news camera or microphone in the hope of grabbing an interview about whatever rent-an-opinion they are interested in today. So I've never really understood the antipathy to the limelight. As with many others who suffer from depression, I think it probably comes down to the fact that behind a microphone, or in front of a camera, you can lose yourself entirely and immerse yourself in another world, the worl...