Authors Electric

Following a temporary planning meltdown towards the end of last year, New Year’s Eve found me hard at work on my 2023 writing plan. I’ve long given up making New Year resolutions, but if you are looking for one that sometimes works, you could do worse than use an old one of mine: ‘I won't say I can’t be bothered’. I think it’s the specificity of this that makes it work, as it’s much easier to stick to not saying it than it is not to feel it. So instead of resolutions I always make a writing plan for the year. Last year’s was oddly regimented, with a page of notes about what kind of things I would write, and then a second page listing the months of the year with a sentence or two about the project I’d be working on during each month. It was this second page that turned out to be fatally flawed, perhaps not surprisingly, so this year I’m starting with just the general outline, now with only vague ranges of months pencilled in against the writing tasks, which in any case are more or...

Resolutions. Don’t we all just hate them? It’s like we deliberately set ourselves up to fail. Start the diet. Do the exercise thing. Give up alcohol. And we start out from such an overindulged, lazy and alcoholic place that we convince ourselves it must get better and it can’t be that hard just to get clean, can it? But then we set impossible targets and beat ourselves up when we consistently fail to achieve them. January is too dark and cold and miserable to do much more than scoff all the Christmas leftovers while watching the latest must-see series on Netflix. Add to that the ever-gloomy news of pandemics and plan Bs, face-masks and lateral flow testing and it’s no wonder we’re all so bloody miserable, is it?  I don’t do dry January. I like my weekly pub quiz nights accompanied by wine. I don’t feel the need to prove to everybody that I’m not an alcoholic – I know I’m not, and I don’t actually care what other people think. Diet and exercise? Hmm. Not a resolution, no, but I do...

Happy New Year 2019 I think it was about this time last year, or maybe it was the year before as this is a perennial thing for me, that I made a resolution not to write as much as I had the previous year. This does seem rather a contrary resolution for a writer to make, but it was a response to a kind of pressure I was feeling to rush the next book out instead of taking my time and perhaps producing something better. Assuming it's an either/or choice, that is. Sadly, if it was indeed my 2018 resolution I have driven a coach and horses through it over the past year, at one point even completing and publishing two novels within a couple of weeks of each other. Being over-excited about the impending birth of my first grandchild was really no excuse, I told myself sternly. Actually I had several additional excuses lined up, including the fact that I wanted to enter one of them into the Kindle Storyteller competition which, with a typical lack of forward planning, I had only fou...

I have an uneasy relationship with New Year resolutions - and in fact, with New Year in general,  since I can't bring myself to enter into the spirit of it as I feel most Scots are expected to these days, particularly in Edinburgh, the Hogmanay capital of the world. Also, over the years, I've developed a strong feeling that  instead of both Christmas and New Year we should celebrate the solstice, representing as it does the start of the return of daylight to the northern hemisphere. Still, I don't think it's too late to wish anyone reading this a very Happy New Year. It has taken me a while to think of a suitable resolution for this coming year. My most successful resolution of the past was not to say 'I can't be bothered' and in fact this was such a resounding success that even now, years later, I usually catch myself in time to avoid actually speaking the words, although sometimes I can't help thinking them. So there is no point in making that...

January Blues in my 'rich and famous' author days. January always seems the wrong time of the year for making resolutions, let alone keeping them. It's dark, it's cold, it's usually wet. Christmas has been and gone, and drained the bank account on its way out. The pretty lights and baubles have been packed away in the loft. All I really want to do is curl up in bed under the duvet with the cat and emerge sometime around April, when the spring flowers are in bloom, or perhaps take off skiing in the Alps like I used to do back in the heady days when my books were in the shops, before Brexit fears messed with the exchange rates. But since this is my posting day, and I'm only dreaming of the Alps this year, I've emerged from hibernation for a few hours to tell you about my 2017 resolutions. Or three of them, anyway. Resolution One I 'closed' my personal blog  Reclusive Muse  at the end of December (you can still read the posts, but you can't...

"' Begin at the beginning. ' the king said gravely, ' and go on until you come to the end. Then stop .'" I'm thinking a lot about beginnings right now. This is not so much because it's January, though that's natural. I've never been much for New Year's rituals and resolutions. The universe gives not a rat's patootie that we don party hats and make noise at an arbitrary point in our orbit around second-rate Sol on the seedy outskirts of the Milky Way. Jorge Luis Borges pointed out that "time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day - perhaps every hour - is different." Indeed, this January seems very different from the last. It feels more like an end - maybe the end - than a beginning. We've had our cup of kindness for auld lang syne, yet can't forget the blood orange orb rising over Amerca. It's not a new day, but a brutish one ...

I hate New Year resolutions. It always seems to me that you’re setting yourself up to fail. And why January? After the excesses of Christmas, it’s always kind of nice to clear everything away and start with a clean and uncluttered approach to life. So what am I going to do this year? For some reason, I seem to put a new book out roughly every 12 months and usually towards the end of the year. I then spend a month or so in a panic, wondering if the muse will ever return from her Christmas/New Year break, but she generally comes back in the spring, refreshed and ready to perch on my shoulder again. I hope. I’m already starting to twitch, but I have faith in her return, though what she will bring with her in the form of inspiration, I have no idea right now … This year I need to be more creative in other ways. I’m hopeful I’ve got my stalled audio projects up and running again, thanks to talented narrator Chris Barnes , although I don’t think he’s  read the book all the wa...