Authors Electric

I have the urge to write about adaptations today, because some of the various meanings of this word have been on my mind lately. The fact that football, general elections and Glastonbury have been taking up a lot of airtime has caused me to abandon live tv for now and to watch too much Netflix in the evenings instead, and that in turn has caused me to announce to my son, the only one who would listen, that in the extremely unlikely event that Netflix offered me a million pounds for the screen rights for my novels, I would turn them down. My son didn't think I'd be able to resist an offer like that, but I hope I would stand firm. There have been cases where I've been pleasantly surprised by adaptations, particularly the classier BBC ones which stick fairly closely to the original material - the iconic 1995 Pride and Prejudice, for instance, or the Joan Hickson Miss Marple series. I also very much enjoyed a new version of Agatha Christie's Murder Is Easy. On the other han...

I might still be trapped in a Groundhog Day loop as you read this post on February 3, but at least I will have gotten out a message. Lately, I keep rewriting the same passages over and over, only to find myself back at the beginning like a monk on an M.C. Escher staircase . My inamorata says I'm probably rushing the process. By her – and any other sane person's – reckoning, I've only been at this particular work for a few months, but I'm convinced it has been years, maybe eons. She reminds me that I've complained about being looped before. Maybe it's a nice way to tell me I'm loopy, but it kind of makes my point. “It happens with my paintings too,” she says. “You'll break through. You always do.” I'm not so sure. You never know what's going to work until it does. The late Harold Ramis who produced and directed Groundhog Day, was all over the place about how many years Phil Connors, the hapless cynical weatherman played by Bill M...

When my friend muddled the cinema times and we failed to make The Danish Girl , I wasn’t too disappointed because we plumped for Joy instead. I'd heard good reports of it and was interested to see what Jennifer Lawrence (known to me only through Hunger Games ) would make of the role of a beleaguered mother with an entrepreneurial streak. In the end I did enjoy the film but in some respects was disappointed. The opening depended too much on clips from a TV soap opera  to set out the theme of ‘strong woman’. Nor did I feel we needed so much back story of how Joy met her live-in ex and the previous run-ins with her father and half-sister. But then I never was keen on back-story-dump, however engaging the back story might be. As soon as Joy invented her miracle mop, the pace picked up and the plot had its own momentum, but there were still sticking points for me  - what did the grandmother add apart from a voice-over? (No I don’t like voice-overs either!) and motifs from Joy...