Authors Electric

I vaguely remember a time, itself now quite a lot of years in the past, when I briefly considered the idea of taking up history as a career. It was soon after I had acquired a degree in the subject, and I couldn’t imagine taking much interest in anything else, although neither could I identify many realistic career opportunities for a history graduate. I did attempt to become a history teacher just after that, but fortunately I realised in time that trying to teach history to teenagers would involve quite a bit of crowd control and not very much actual history. So, after a few desultory attempts to get a job at the Imperial War Museum – I had specialised in modern European history – I went into computer programming instead. You could do that in those days. Even after all this time there is something that lures me back to history. This is the same siren call that makes me spend hours in a fruitless quest for ancestors who are lost in the mists of time and who, if I could ask the...

I've recently been enjoying carrying out a lot of research for a non-fiction work in progress and my latest collection of short stories. Now once upon a time I used to go to the library to do my research. Searching shelves for those elusive books and ordering books from other libraries. That's no longer the case. Over the last few weeks I haven't left my desk but have visited libraries all over the world and found everything I've needed. So in the spirit of sharing I've decided to share my top five online digital libraries. They are in no particular order: Perseus Digital Library This easy to use online library contains primary and secondary sources for the study of ancient Greece and Rome. Perseus is a non-profit located in the Department of the Classic, Tufts University - Medford, Massachusetts. Archive This non-profit library contains millions of free books, movies, software, music, website and more. It is easy to use and to support the great wo...

I have written horror and crime for some years now and I do have a reasonable library of books to fall back on but sometimes those little details need to be checked, and it is so easy to do that online.  It occurred to me this week, however, that the browsing history of the average writer must ring bells somewhere on some watcher-server in some secret place.   It goes as no surprise to those who know me that I own up to being a compulsive researcher, spending hours looking into small details that are a sentence – nay half a sentence.  Now on occasion that could be classed as classic displacement activity  -  but then again it never hurts to check. In a recent read the female protagonist catches her skirt on the mistletoe. That sentence pulled me up sharp. Was she tiptoeing through the tree tops? Not that I could see.  A quick search confirmed that mistletoe varieties native to the UK are to be found growing on trees.  A minor p...

  In last month’s blog, I said I was spring cleaning my office and, specifically, tidying my book shelves, which meant I had to throw some books away to make room for new ones.  As other bookworms will know, what this really means is to make enough room to stand all my books upright with spines to attention, instead of slotting them in higgledy-piggledly, to lounge languidly about, horizontally, on top of the others. Ha! I’ve tried this before and I know exactly what happens. I pick up a lounging book and it infects and entrances me, so that a while later I come to and find myself lounging about too, in my armchair, half way through its pages..  You know it’s true. To be fair, you have to give a book on death row a chance. In order to find those I can safely discard, I’ve decided that a book worth keeping has to have taught me something, ie it’s one of the ‘great’, or it has entertained me, in which case it’s one of the ‘good’. All keepers have to be some...