Authors Electric

  Empty window reflects the age of change.. People fleeing Twitter in response to Elon Musk’s purchase, and in the same week, though not for the same apparent reason, a number of fellow writers warning their readers that they are quitting blogging.    Change. Not for the same reasons, though possibly change in one area of social media may influence some to think of changes they might make in another where they advertise their books? Mostly, it seems, either in order to develop some other aspect their writing, or because they feel their blog is making less impact on sales.   Meeting each other and joining this conversation in the group’s News Feed, these writers were agreed that ‘it’s time to move on’ from blogging, because, as everyone knows, nobody bothers to read blogs any more.   Whether that is true of ‘everyone’, I’m not totally convinced: but of course a blog post takes time to write, and if the readership is unknown, or if followers are few in number, t...

Sensitivity readers are the new thing. At least, it was new to me when I read an article by Lionel Shriver entitled We need to talk about sense and sensitivity . Apparently, US publishers are sending out manuscripts for review by sensitivity readers. Their job is to check for any misrepresentations, stereotypes, inauthentic dialogue or anything else that might conceivably offend “marginalised groups”, which include a host of racial, gender, and disability variants.  Shriver calls them the sensitivity police and warns of censorship coming to a bookshop near you.   critical theory Shriver likes a good fight. In 2016, she gave a speech at the Brisbane Literary Festival. It was so controversial that some of the audience walked out to write their own speeches. Shriver’s topic was cultural appropriation , in her eyes another form of censorship. Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, cl...