Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. There are few books which have flopped for me. There are some I won’t read due to personal taste, my faith etc., but everyone has likes and dislikes. What I dislike is finding a book that looks promising, I read, and it falls flat. Life is too short for wasted reads! In these thankfully rare cases, I realise fairly early this will be a dud and I stop reading it.  The books and stories which work take me to other worlds, show me things about this one I hadn’t considered before, inform me, entertain me, and remind me of why I love reading. I adore books and stories like that. My tastes include non-fiction, historical, crime, as well as flash fiction and short story collections, novels, novellas etc.  Those which don’t work turn an interesting subject matter, such as history, into a dull list and too much academic jargon for non-fiction. For fiction, characters which fail to engage me means I’m unlikely to rea...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I sometimes write all dialogue flash fiction. It’s an interesting challenge. It works best kept short. I usually come in at 300 words or under for this kind of writing. I have a soft spot for writing dialogue so this is fun to do. I have to watch myself for conversational ping-pong as I could get my characters talking and talking and talking! But for this kind of story I can do that and get away with it by keeping it to the point. These stories are often ones where I know what the last line will be first. This is sometimes a humorous punchline or a twist ending but I then work out my story backwards to get a to a logical starting point. What led to this conversation finishing with this ending? These tales are best limited to two characters (though I sometimes get either or both to refer to others who are “off stage” but are clearly contributing to the story in their absence). I name my characters early and repeat na...

  This post is brought to you courtesy of profanity. Or perhaps the lack of it, and some thoughts on when, or indeed, if it is appropriate when writing. This train of thought was started the other day by my elder daughter. She's fourteen, and my alpha reader for my YA books. (And boy, does she tell me if she thinks something doesn't work, but that's a story for another time.) She's been an avid reader for as long as she's been able to read, and has recently caught the 'fan-fiction' craze. We were talking about this – genuine interest on her part as I don't really understand the allure of it myself – and she told me she'd started writing some, based on her favourite Marvel characters. We had a good chat about it, as she seems to be serious about writing (even asking what the difference was between a rewrite and an edit) until her younger sister, who's her test reader, let slip that she'd used swearing in her writing. Her response was s...

Put it away you bad boy! Filth! Profanity and filth. There’s a lot of it in books these days, and some people want none of it. In which case, may I have their share please? Yes I’m nailing my mucky colours (scarlet and blue, natch) to the mast right here, right now. The recent furore over the recent ‘Clean Reader’ App reminds me of my July 2014 AE blog post ( A Cock and Balls Story) in which I found rudeness in old books that the authors probably didn’t intend. Pop back and look if you want a cheap laugh. So anyway I’m clearly well qualified to blog about this here today. 'We like a good time as much as anybody.' 'Hester! you said b-o-d-y!' Mainly in the US, and mainly evangelical Christian, readers have for some time now been wielding their mighty Amazonian Swords of Review to cut the dirty bits off us authors (ouch!). You know, the ‘I’d have given this four stars but…’  or 'I'm giving this one star because someone said a rude word' syndrome. ...

Authos Electric Debbie Bennett It’s interesting to see how polarised people become over swearing in fiction – authors and readers alike. In books or on television, in stories, films and dramas. There’s the camp which advocates against swearing of any kind: on the grounds that it isn’t necessary, may offend people and rips a hole in the moral fabric of society. Then there’s the opposing camp, north versus south, which believes in freedom of speech, in allowing characters in books and on screen to be themselves and if people don’t like it, well they are free to switch off their device and/or close the book. There are always two sides to every coin (there are two sides to most things – except, of course, to a Mobius strip …). Why swear unnecessarily when writing, when you know you risk alienating some of your readers? Having said that, dear reader, swearing is as old as the hills – it’s not some new device intended to corrupt the youth of today. Our medieval ancestors were...

'I SAID, NO PINK BITS, NO SWEARING, NO VIOLENCE, NO AMERICANISMS, NO LANGUAGE!' Last month, I blogged about swearing. It was mostly funny, though I was making a serious point about customers/readers being ‘gatekeepers’ now in Ebookworld (good), and some of them using their reviews as weapons of moral warfare to make authors toe the line (not so good). If you’ve not read the post, pop over and check it out HERE . Welcome back! Well this month I’m blogging about a related phenomenon. Readers pointing out and punishing author errors - or are they errors? I’ve a tootsie in both camps here, in the sense that I’m a right cleverclogs and tend to spot errors of fact, grammar, plot and procedure in other peoples’ books, although I write my own. I can’t help it. Because I do tend to notice errors, I try really really hard to avoid them in my books, especially my crime fiction. I do a lot of research and a lot of checking. My new crime novel THE OPERATOR (BRUCE AND BENNETT ...

Naffing heck, smegheads! Today I’m considering swearing in books, so take a break from pinning crinolines round your piano legs or uttering paint-peeling oaths as you quote Pulp Fiction: whichever end of the sweary spectrum you inhabit. Recently, I gave an hour’s author talk/reading to an audience of 160 delightful people. They were very appreciative, and at the end, a queue of book buyers formed (a beautiful sight). One man waited patiently until it was his turn. But he wasn’t buying. He was waiting to tell me that he’d bought my crime novel, THE ROTTING SPOT, previously. He told me it’s a very good book, BUT there’s some swearing in it. (Very little, in fact.) And he wanted me to know that he didn’t think there was any need for it. I was fascinated that he’d felt the need to say it. It reminded me of another town, a group of mostly older women who listened to my pathology poetry from ALL THAT LIVES with great attention and interest. At the end, at question time, one woman st...