Authors Electric

  I've been thinking recently about trying something new from a writing perspective. I mainly write novels, with some short stories thrown in. I enjoy writing the shorts (although I seem to have less and less time to do them nowadays) as it allows me to approach writing in a different way, kind of like a mental version of cross-training. Anyway, back in 2018 I wrote short story (by hand, as I was on holiday) which I quite liked at the time. It started in the usual way for me – sitting in the coffee shop enjoying the view over the firth to the Isle of Bute, I spied an older gentleman, sitting on his own, nursing a drink. The waitress seemed quite attentive of him, and it piqued my curiosity – why was he there? What was his story? Over the rest of the week, I drafted the story, setting it mainly in the fifties and using the old man telling his story to the waitress as a framing device to tie it all together. After a couple of rewrites to tighten it up, it was done. I was please...

If you’ve been reading my posts over the years, you’ll have seen all the radio stuff I’ve been involved in. From local community radio play  Littlewich Ways , its spectacular implosion towards the end of 2017 and then onto  Bus Stop Tales . But then we discovered that us scriptwriters owned the copyright to our scripts, and it seemed such a shame to abandon several years and over 150 scenes of our darkly comic story based loosely in a small Cheshire village not unlike the one most of us live in … So  Eastwich   was born. With a few tweaks here and there, we’ve re-named and revamped our fictional village and have a real shot at proper radio – you know, one you get twiddling knobs on a dial (oops … showing my age here), or however real radio is broadcast these days.  Eighteen months had gone by. Actors and writers had moved on with their lives. But some were eager to carry on – or rather start again. With a proper radio slot, we’re having to expand many...