Authors Electric

  Chapter One   “My God, what is that stink?” Puppy merely nodded in the direction of the figure slumped in his favourite armchair, allowing a reverberation from deep in the feather cushions to answer for him. “Oh,” Ding said, “him. It smells like he’s rotting from the inside.” “Was it not always thus?” Puppy asked, forcing open the nearest sash window, allowing the traffic sounds from the Square into the stuffy room. “Has he been drinking?” Ding gestured to the half full glass precariously gripped in Teddy’s huge fist. “Wouldn’t you? It’s been a hell of a few days.” Ding sank into a tall sofa, the sides of which were held up with what looked like the dressing gown cords of giants, and Puppy gave their slumbering friend a vicious kick on the shins. “Wake up Teddy! Ding’s here.” “Yarooooh”, the newly defenestrated prime minister protested as he was jerked back to consciousness, rubbing his ankle ruefully, and slopping the remains of the scotch onto the faded...

Taking out the garbage the other day, I noticed that our condo building's back-alley trash bin was nearly full. That was unusual for a Thursday afternoon. Our city sanitation crews - AKA, essential COVID-19 frontline workers - pick up punctually every Thursday morning. Oh well, I thought. Another dislocation of the Great 2020 Pandemic Shutdown. Imagine my surprise the following morning when checked the weather forecast online and saw that it was Wednesday! I had either overslept through five days or - as proved the case - I had zoned-out all of Tuesday thinking that it was Thursday! "I've just gained two days," I told my inamorata, Eleanor , who just rolled her eyes. "Another quarantine silver lining!" I declared. "Now I have an extra 48 hours to procrastinate on writing my AE blog post!" Am I being sarcastic? Rod Serling could have turned my experience into a Twilight Zone episode. But you could do that with almost anything nowadays. ( ...

What happened , the title of Hilary Clinton’s recent book, was not a question. Had it been, I’d have offered the following answer, based on evidence from an article I read quite a long time ago in my newspaper. First, though, when I write the word ‘Neanderthal’ what springs to mind? I know that readers of the AE blog are cultured sophisticates whose only prejudices concern grammatical issues and linguistic niceties but, for at least some of you, I’d guess that, despite your determination to avoid it, there might be some speciesism in your reaction. You’ll see creatures of indeterminate gender with no foreheads who sit in caves grunting monosyllables and tearing raw meat from bones with their prognathous jaws. Perhaps now and then, one will stand, rise to his (this one’s a male) full height of 4 feet 10, club a neighbouring creature (this one will be a female), and drag her off to procreate. The more enlightened among you will probably envision noble savages sitting around a fir...

Nicholas Gemini. Wikimedia Commons The intention of this blog is to help, if only momentarily, set aside despair. Recent events in the Disunited Kingdom leave little room for hope, laughter or any of the positives that normally make life so enjoyable. The Theatre of the Absurd has taken over but, unfortunately, only its tragic aspects have prevailed. We have been comprehensively shafted by feckless, inadequate ‘leaders’ whose influence has been extended far beyond their capabilities. From the security of their moneyed interiors, their perceptions of reality were and are shaped by preconceptions of social ‘truths’ which called for the intervention of people like themselves to protect our colonial legacy and perpetuate our insularity. They wanted to ensure that scenes such as that which follows would be eliminated from our lives, along with jobs, welfare, social security and a national health service. DENISE:         Dad, this is Grdsyyx. DAD:   ...

          A few weeks ago I was giving a two hour talk in a local library on the wonders of e-publishing.           'So, there's no quality control?' one of the still-conscious attendees asked.           'That's right. Some restrictions on cover and content, but even those might not prevent initial publishing,' I said.           Another person woke, caught the thread of conversation and asked, 'How about title and author name? Any copyright or that sort of thing?'           'No. You can't copyright a title and you can call yourself whatever you want, within reason. If you use J.K. Rowling you might get into trouble. Let's take a look.'           I opened the Kindle Direct Publishing web page and proceeded to create ...

by Bill Kirton (I know I used this book cover on last month's blog but it's relevant this time, too. Anyway, I've also messed around with the image and added the official accolades it's gathered - spoiling Sessha Batto's lovely cover design in the process. Sorry Sessha. It's another of my feeble attempts at marketing.) Sometimes, in workshops or talks to writing groups, I remind people that you don’t ‘write a novel’, you write some words, then some more words, then some more – and eventually there’s a substantial pile of paper on the desk and you realise you actually have written something that’s a lot longer than a short story. I then add that, although that makes it sound easy and unstructured, it’s not, and I have great respect for the form and conventions of novel-writing. But it was a realisation that dawned on me as I was writing my first novel, which, after several years and many rewrites, became The Sparrow Conundrum . It’s also a reminder of th...