Authors Electric

We moved house a year ago. It doesn’t feel that long and yet it does.  People have stopped asking if we are ‘settled in yet’, and after twelve months I think we can probably say we feel comfortable here now.  Certainly I feel able to write here - which took a while. It is not just the change in house but the uncertainty of having things to hand. That unpacking of your world - Virginia Woolf's  room of one's own where you can feel sure of creative flow with interruption. Okay - there are still spouses and telephones and door bells to deal with, but that scrabbling about for simple things like pens and research materials is no longer an issue. There is an old adage that you have never truly moved house until you have unpacked the last box.  Now I suspect on that score we have ‘unpacked’ most things in that we have opened all boxes and inspected the contents. But what about the boxes that were repacked and migrated to the attic? Or the shed? Do they count? I ...

Next month the people of Scotland will take part in a referendum to decide whether or not Scotland will become an independent country, or whether it will stay in the UK… Good Luck to all concerned! Two years ago, I published my short story collection, Storm Damage, and the collection opens with a story called Unicorn One. To quote from the book’s blurb – “Mission Control in Edinburgh has made a strange choice of astronaut for Scotland’s first ever Independent Space Program” Or to quote from Unicorn One itself: “…it is all the weirder to know that, within ten years of standing on that hill with Tommy, I would be selected as Scotland’s first astronaut. Not the first Scot to go into space of course, but the first one to be chosen for Scotland’s Independent Space Program. The world’s media had regarded our endeavour as a joke. Too long had we been seen as England’s or America’s poodle. The German press had shown photographs of our most delapidated, forsaken housing es...