Authors Electric

Last Thursday, while Britain was busy voting on its EU divorce, I managed to indulge two of my passions - writing and martial arts - with a fundraising launch of the Zombies v. Ninjas series in Stonehouse Books, Kilkenny, Ireland. Coach Gary (left) and author Ruby (right) at the launch of Zombies v. Ninjas It was a great event, well-attended and raising a good few euros for the club, Evolution Martial Arts Academy . The whole thing turned into a signing fest when we came up with the idea of club members wearing their outfits. Readers were encouraged to ask anyone in karate regalia to sign their newly purchased books as the trilogy features all the club members. It was a unique experience for everyone. Members of EMAA as featured in Zombies v. Ninjas The launch had been greatly anticipated. My ZvN trilogy was a rapid project, first chapters being penned in February 2015 and the final edit of the third book completed in May 2016 (they're only 40k words each). This proj...

Since last month's blog post I haven't written a thing. The priorities have been elsewhere - reading the unpublished manuscript of a colleague and getting beaten up at karate. The manuscript reading went well and more will follow from Marble City Publishing on that account later this year. As for the karate beatings, that's the subject of this post. Our club, Evolution Martial Arts Academy in Kilkenny, competes in a variety of competitions. We do all kinds of stuff, ranging from traditional karate to demonstrations that are best described as a series of stunts you might see in a martial arts film. We also do creative forms, with or without weapons, to pieces of music that we choose ourselves. Another category we compete in is sparring, or fighting, and that's where the oldest ninja in town (yours truly) wheels himself out to do battle. Mr Incredible is me, of course (this is non-traditional garb, it was Halloween training). Over the past two or three years...

A very brief post from me this month, and a shameless plug for my new release. I have two main interests - writing and karate - and recently found a way to combine them. The novels I have so far punished the world with include an odd mix of drama, tragedy, human failure, sex and violence. It takes me one to two years to complete a book. This year I wanted to try and write something light and fast, giving myself a daily target of at least a thousand words, but I was lacking a subject. While ruminating on a topic for a new writing project, I threw myself into the world of karate which I have inhabited over the past four years. The club I'm a member of has an interesting mix of disciplines - sport karate (fairly traditional but without all the Japanese words), semi-contact sparring with full protective gear, weapons, self-defence, something for everyone who wants to work up a sweat and get rid of some day job aggression. My weapon of choice is the katana or sword. Samurai sword sor...

So, tell me what you want, what you really, really want. As a reader of electric books and the like, what do you really, really want? Why am I asking? Because me and my little publishing house, we give things away. Why would Marble City Publishing do that? To maximise readership for our authors and to reward readers for staying with us. This is nothing new, of course. Mail lists have been a mainstay of marketing ever since Baldrick started pushing Mrs Miggins' pies through letterboxes (ref. Blackadder for non-cognoscenti). Staying in touch with people is essential for a new book release. The virtual cafés of the writing world are abuzz with methods to successfully build a mail list. Independent authors with prodigious output are presenting subscribers with such offerings as starter libraries of free novels. Phrases such as Reader Magnets abound. Online courses are being sold for hundreds of bucks to share the secret sauce of building an author's list. In this mod...

The last couple of Fridays have been very eventful. Two weeks ago we had a book launch in Stone House Books, Kilkenny, of Marble City Publishing’s latest collection By the Light of the Moon . It was the culmination of a lot of work by fourteen Kilkenny writers who had continued to meet up since completing the NUI Creative Writing for Publication course, and the follow-up Two Roads course, a good few moons ago. There was wine, there were readings, smiley faces and happy memories. Our book was dedicated to one of us who had left this Earth for the great creative writing workshop in the sky – Jane Avril de Montmorency-Wright 1936 – 2014. Jane was a power to behold, loved by all (and coincidentally had been Barack Obama’s oldest living Irish relative although she kept that light under a bushel and simply said, ‘He’s more than welcome to come here for some tea.’) The following Friday, when the dust had settled, I returned to Stone House Books to hoover up the spondoolicks from t...

I am nothing if not modest. In fact, modesty is the greatest amongst my many talents. I lay claim to an average level of proficiency in most physical pursuits, with the exception of gymnastics, ice-skating and throwing a ball, all of which I'm pretty crap at. But I can twirl several martial arts weapons with a worrying degree of almost efficiency. When it comes to tastes in music, I like a bit of everything – the latest tunes on the pop transistor radio station, classical pieces by people in suits, bluegrass by folks with no teeth, heavy rock by hairy ones. Stick a label on it and I've probably got examples in my music collection. I myself can play fairly averagely well on several musical instruments – guitar, piano, trumpet, anything that plucks or blows. Regarding TV, films – I'll watch Downton Abbey , Dr Who , Lillehammer , The Middle , almost anything. Reading – contemporary fiction, classics, crime, thrillers, science fiction, misery lit, I lap it all up. Not a big f...

The Chernobyl disaster of 26 April 1986 is imprinted on the memory of everyone who lived through that time and continues to be known as one of the World's worst nuclear accidents. The Cold War had long threatened the planet with a nuclear cataclysm but Chernobyl surprised and appalled the population of Earth. An author with a knack for prophesy had written a novel based around a nuclear power accident in Russia several months before the Chernobyl disaster occurred. Farewell to Russia by Richard Hugo (a.k.a. Jim Williams) described a technically very different scenario to Chernobyl, with an even more disastrous potential outcome. But the point Williams made was poignant:   "...there remains a fundamental similarity in that both disasters have their origins in the way that the communist system operated. The Soviet Union was a rickety slovenly place behind its sinister façade and the circumstances of the imaginary disaster at Sokolskoye and the real disaster at Chernobyl s...

My twitterprofile claims I am the oldest ninja in town. There’s an element of truth to this. I’m currently three years into my fourth attempt this half-century to master karate. I’m not getting any faster, I’m not getting any more flexible, but I am getting stronger and more determined. After a year of practise with the katana (a two-handed sword beastie of the samurai variety) I did a solo performance at the club’s recent fundraising show in front of an audience of 300+. A lot of attacking imaginary opponents with three feet of polished nastiness, all to the tune of Prokofiev’s Montagues and Capulets (go to 1:39 and it’s from there) . It was a two hour programme and my mad frenzied attack was scheduled just before the interval. So how did it go? Almost immediately I was inexplicably out of my expected timing sequence with the music and the ponderous thump of that Montagues and Capulets section required me to strike, thrust, push imaginary dead bodies off the bla...

Social media fads come and go. Step back in time ... remember MySpace? There are kids now who never heard of MySpace. Google+ was going to be the next big thing and the predicted demise of Facebook had people scrabbling for footholds on Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon and goodness knows where else. Now everything is becoming a bit blurred in a whirl of social networks, blogs, photo collections, discussion forums, online chat and update feeds. Isn't this all too much? So, why bother with Twitter? What is the point of a 140 character message which might not get read by anyone before it sinks into the 500 million daily tweets? On the face of it, unless you are looking for personal interaction or are a microblogging wizard and manage to get your tweet to go viral through retweeting or on TV shows, Twitter doesn't seem to offer much. Unless you are a blogger. Content is the key to good blogging. Some folk blog about their daily life, others   about ...

About five years ago the depressing odds of mainstream publication were clearly explained to me (the following “facts and figures” are plucked from memory and this was just before the real advent of e-publishing). If your submission letter to a literary agent is one of the handful picked out of several thousand they receive each year, if your manuscript is considered worth taking on, if the agent manages to secure a publishing deal, then any advance you will receive from the publisher will be unlikely to run to more than a few grand (unless you’re the Next Big Thing!) Writing novels isn’t a get rich quick scheme. Don’t give up the day job (so say people who’ve read my books). When a new title hits the shelves it has a few weeks to make an impact and a share of the sales proceeds will be offset against your advance. If the book stops selling before the advance is paid off then it will have failed to earn out and that’s the end of the road for that book. Bookshops will...