Authors Electric

I write this in greater haste than usual, having forgotten what day it was for all sorts of reasons, some of them more convincing than others! We had an extremely busy July, which was also very frustrating in some ways, involving as it did some chaos in the garden and a series of phone calls to and from the bank because they had decided someone was trying to do something fraudulent with my current account when actually it was only that I had to pay a small fortune to tree surgeons to get rid of a tree that had well outgrown the space in our garden. You will see from the stump that remains how big it must have been. RIP the big tree The only thing that kept me (relatively) sane during July was writing. Despite all the upheaval, I stuck to my regular writing slot almost every day, between 11 am and 1 pm. Incidentally this coincides with the timing for letting the cats out, although of course I couldn't do that while the tree work was going on. Our current cats are rather wary about b...

 Short stories seem to multiply on my computers as well as in notebooks, though I often forget having written them. I embarked on an effort to tidy them up and do something useful with them some time ago, but the only visible result of these efforts was that I succeeded in unpublishing two very short collections of stories entitled Five Short Stories and Five More Short Stories. With hindsight, I think I could have made more effort with the titles! I realised only the other week, during another phase of our horrendous decluttering project, that in addition to the ones I vaguely remembered, I had a whole notebook full of hand-written short stories I had completely forgotten about. I have a feeling that forgetting them was probably the best option, and I’ve been putting off looking at them in case of embarrassment. Oddly the declutterers responsible for unearthing it, although they kept trying to talk me into getting rid of some things I definitely didn’t even want to consider gett...

I had planned to write about the actual writing situation that led me to ask the above question, but instead I found myself wondering if ‘trilemma’ is a real word or not, as I imagined I had probably coined it myself. During my investigations in various online dictionaries, however, I’ve discovered that not only is it a real word but that the word has existed for a few centuries and the concept for a good deal longer. In the middle of my trilemma search, I realised that ‘quandary’ was a more accurate term for my state of mind, as it would not restrict me to two or three options but was much more vague and open-ended than that - though looking at the structure of the word carefully I very much wanted it to mean a problem with exactly four possible solutions. In any case, it seems that a trilemma is often used in a very exact way, to refer to problems in economics or computing, so it would be quite unsuited to solving the less quantifiable question of what to do next. Anyway, I will leav...