Authors Electric

 I am the husband of Elizabeth Kay, of this parish. Her blog post the other day was about an attempt to scam her with promises of a film adaptation of one of her books. That book was, incidentally, a fairly unlikely choice from among her oeuvre, though admittedly it had the distinction that it was the only one to have been translated into Irish!   Elizabeth promised a follow-up post from me, focusing on the AI aspects, so here we are.   Before we get on to the AI, a couple of other related matters. First, the email address used by the supposed bigshot film producer, who we are calling Sheldon, didn’t look right. It was an ordinary AOL address, and we would have expected a major film producer like him to have been using something more corporate-looking. And the name of the account began with “official_” – which was perhaps protesting a little too much? He also gave us the URL for the website of his production company, which was superficially impressive – convincingly sw...

When does using traditional, or well-known and loved stories such as those by Hans Christian Andersen (one of my all-time favourite writers) and the like, become plagiarism? There must be a HCA estate of some kind, yet versions of these stories appear everywhere - in film, theatre, books and whatever. It's said that there's no copyright on ideas, that ideas are universal, and we all know where Shakespeare got a lot of his from. Might there be, as in Salman Rushdie's children's novel, a "Sea of Stories" into which we dip? I'm mentioning this, because I've recently spent some time re-structuring and shortening one of the stories from the John Bauer illustrated collection of Swedish tales, all of which, I think, must be re-interpretations of much older ones. If you're not familiar with John Bauer's work, here's an   idea of it on the left - magical! Most traditional folk and fairy tales seem to centre on fairness and honesty. The one I'...

My exhibition at Newcastle Central Library, Part the First.  Not another double entendre from me, you cry! To which I reply, I insist on getting it out as often as possible with as many different people as possible. Yes, getting our work out there, it's the perennial question to which there are many answers, all of them sadly requiring time away from writing, watching NCIS and messing about online. I’ve just returned from overseeing the installation of one such, ‘Will Power’, a solo exhibition opening today, which I was offered by the central library in my nearest city, of my poems inspired by Shakespeare. Exhibition Part Two: My 'Ophelia's Sista' Hamlet rap, some of my play posters, and Will S. I’m better known for death, sex and pathology poetry lately but occasionally I’ve bashed out a sonnet, sometimes based on one of Will’s but on a modern subject. As I’ve found with my science-poetry art installations, from very untechie (beachballs, sheep, swimming pool...

'What's yours is mine, bwahahaha!' I’ve been embroiled in a plagiarism scandal for weeks now and it’s still going on. Someone I’ve known for years, been to their launches, bought their books, has plagiarised friends and colleagues as well as famous writers, and it’s been going on for years under our very noses. At first mainly poetry, now as more and more of it emerges, it includes prose as well and cheating on a PhD thesis, and getting huge amounts of funding from various public bodies on the basis of track record as a writer. I got embroiled when two friends, co-publishees (and as they discovered after a book launch, plag’d poets) and our mutual publisher failed to get any satisfaction over several weeks of private back and forth. I started looking at other poems in the new book and discovered to my dismay that many of them were others’ poems with tweaks and synonyms inserted. We then brought in the ‘poetry sleuth’ Dr Ira Lightman, who’s also a friend, and who has ...

Hey, where’s the illustration ? Chill.     You all know me by now as a serious guy, with no passion whatsoever for pranks, jokes, hoaxes or even harmless word play. Not the man that some call Reb Babe. Nooooo. And to reinforce your sense of how deadly earnest I am, I’ve done the thing that isn’t done: published this post with no illo. Think of this as a horror film without an accompanying score or F/X. No creepy little  ooo-eeee-oooo ’s to spook or weird you out. We don’t need that, as you’ll now see. For the horror itself is so low-down, so downright big-time dirty, so caked with slime and gook and mold, that anything extra would give so much less.     You’re on the money if you’ve guessed:     Literary thievery.     But you’re off the money if you’ve guessed:     Plagiarism. C’mon, how’s about an illustration? Hush.     I've been ripped off, as have many of you. And I'd rather die than romantici...