Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Mainly via Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One image from me. I remember years ago being at a Book Fair when someone walked past, looked at my table and said loudly to their friend, “I don’t like books”.  I so wanted to say “what are you doing here then” but judged it best not to! But it did throw up an attitude problem which worried me.  Why is it, in some circles, considered a good thing to boast about not reading? What are they hoping to achieve?    I know reading has never been “cool”. I was the typical girly swot at school. Always had my head in a book but I’ve never seen that as a problem. (I always associated myself with Velma from the cartoon series Scooby Doo rather than Daphne, and with Jo March from Little Women rather than, say, Meg March. I’ve always had a soft spot for the girls with glasses and the ones who love to write. Can’t imagine why that is - possibly the fact I am still a girl, albeit an older one now, with glasses who lo...

I recently spent an afternoon rootling around for an old remote hard drive and finally found it in an old box file full of letters! I plugged it in and scrolled through the contents, and was soon muttering dark imprecations about wasted time and useless computers. The data stored there only went back to 2000 and there were no other back-up files available. The floppy discs that had contained them originally were long since lost! Being the old biddy that I am it took a few moment to realise that this really is twenty years ago, and not last week... The items I wanted to find all predated the millennium by some years (even decades), and were doubtless produced on my trusty Amstrad PCW 8256 or its replacement 8512. For the younglings among you I should explain that my files would have been printed on a chattering dot matrix printer, using continuous paper, which required you to tear of the punched guide tapes on either side of the pages and separate each sheet along the dotted line...

In a way it seems like every introvert's dream life. Encouraged to stay at home for the common good, only venturing out occasionally for very specific reasons, and always able to use technological failures to explain away absence from meetings or even virtual coffee breaks. Yes, actually, I am fairly relaxed in many ways about life in lockdown. In my case it doesn't even have the nightmarish 'hell is other people' aspect that it does for some others, as I tend to see quite a lot more of the three family cats than I do of the two people I live with. Because there are three of us here (although six including the cats) the situation   reminds me of   the play 'In Camera', also known as 'No Exit', by Jean-Paul Sartre, which I remember viewing   on television years ago. Its three characters are trapped together in a room, apparently for eternity. Incidentally it was a memorable production, with Harold Pinter playing one of the parts. I must say I wou...

The telephone is a brilliant invention, of course, not to mention the infrastructure around it that has led to the development of various other means of communication such as the intranet. It's hard to imagine not being able to ring the doctor or the vet in case of emergency, or to use a mobile phone to establish where someone is in a crowded or strange place. As a family we have often used mobile technology at Alton Towers theme park to establish that someone is still in the queue for Nemesis or some other ride unsuitable for people with blood pressure of any kind. I try not to use the phone if I can avoid it these days, having had various bad experiences with it over the years. More bad news than good news has tended to arrive by phone, particularly as all the other members of my birth family have died unexpectedly and often in odd places. I can recall exactly where I was when the news of each of their deaths reached me: standing in the hallway of my shared flat in Swiss Co...

From Skin Wars - Life imitating art imitating life. Oscar Wilde, famously quoted as saying 'life imitates art far more than art imitates life', must be spinning in his grave about now. Certainly, one hundred and thirty years ago his statement was probably true. In fact, it was probably true twenty years ago. Now, however, life has once again taken the reins and is moving and changing at a pace too fast for even the most trendy hipsters to keep up with. Social landscapes are constantly changing. Now sex and gender mean different things and it's becoming more commonly accepted that there are dozens of the latter. Technology that seemed decades or even centuries away now looks plausible in the next few years. Fake news is so common, even from previously trusted sources, that the real trick is finding true news. The political landscape pushes the boundaries of even the most on-trend Tom Clancy or Bill Patterson novel (in fact, the latter has even joined forces with a ...

Being connected to all things digital is such an integral part of our world that we barely notice it anymore. Be it computers, phones or any other method we merrily log onto this or that and take it for granted that the entire world will be there at the touch of a screen. I am not an IT illiterate but neither am I any kind of expert so the fixing these things often boils down to trial and error. Generally I flounder about trying this and that until it works again with little idea of how I reached a solution. Added to all of that is – as those who know me will attest - my unfortunate effect on anything electrical. Specifically anything that contains batteries but on occasion things of  more general technology. Every laptop I have ever owned has required at least one new battery whilst in my clutches and I can’t begin to count the watches that have died on my wrist. Though even I was surprised when, on a longish car trip, stopped the watch of a friend sitting next to me! It r...

The future is here and it's everything, and nothing, like what we expected. It's taken a while longer to get here than I thought it would back while watching the Jetsons as a kid, but the future I dreamed of is finally arriving. And now that it is, it's much more exciting and more frightening than I ever considered it might be. The ever-present connectedness and constant surveillance combined with rapid scientific and technological progress means this is both a thrilling and a frustrating time to be a science fiction writer (but it's a great time to be alive!). Fifteen years ago, back before I began writing seriously, I started a far future story. Set one thousand years in the future, it featured technology such as cerebral-embedded computers, technology-based cyberpathic control, automated waste reclamation drones, clothing that could change colours based on the user's desires, tattoos with patterns linked to the owner's mood, and genetically engineere...

Spoken into a mobile phone by a young woman pushing a baby in a pushchair. No idea what the 'it' was that he wouldn't let her have. Or where she got this strange idea that 'he' could stop her from having it, whatever it was. But she let everyone within earshot know about it as she passed. There's the start of a story here.      I love technology. It's technology that allows me to bring you this blog and it's technology that now allows me to overhear the snippets of other people's private lives on a regular basis.      I offer them here as a public service to writers who're looking for something to, perhaps, kick-start a story. I overheard this in a pub. No surprises there. The speaker stood nearby, trying to hide his phone in his jacket and mutter into it, but growing louder and more impassioned as he went on. I may not have all of the conversation word for word but I have the gist - and he really did say, 'You Jezebel....

Authors Electric. The clue is in the name. We are a collective of writers who embrace technology and the electronic world. We are not a bunch of luddites who turn our backs on anything electronic. Nor are we the kind of people who would not give house room to a computer, who shudders at any mention of the internet, and who would never deign to read an electronic book on an ereader. As the resident techno-geek who builds computers in her spare time, there is nothing I like better than exploring all kinds of software, although I will reserve my discussion today to writers’ software. Was that a collective groan I heard? It wouldn’t surprise me, because it became apparent from the comments on my last post , that not everyone is enamoured with writing software. In fact, the feeling is stronger than that, and the impression given is that you cannot be creative if you use said writing software. This was despite the fact that the post reviewed editing software, and editing is the pro...

I have been thinking a lot about technology recently. In today's society we spend a lot of time using technology. This can be even more true as writers. Even if the entire book is written by hand, at some stage it will need to be transferred into a document which can be sent to agents or editors. Technology can transform our lives in so many ways. It is ingrained in our lives in aspects we could never have imagined in the past. The ways we us technology are too numerous but the main ones which I, and many others use, are: Writing  Blogging Social Media Research As writers we may all have different computers, be they PC or Mac. I am certain we all have one product in common - Microsoft Office. This is one of the most versatile software programmes around. If you don't use this this you may use one of the equivalents such as Apple's suite of office apps. These not only provide a platform to write books, but also allow us to do presentations or keep our accoun...

A keeper I’ve never been one of those who ‘can’t bear to throw away a book.’ At one time it did go against the grain, because in my childhood books were treasures per se . We had lots at home, none were ever discarded, and quite a few of them have graduated to family heirlooms. But these days I keep a new book for a while, then, unless I’ve formed a particular attachment to it (a not unusual occurrence!) or think I might reread it or recommend it to a friend, out it goes. I think this pragmatic approach stems from my career in university and college libraries, where weeding outdated material was a vital part of making room for new stock and the sight of an eager student or parent arriving with an armful of donations they couldn’t bear to chuck out was rarely a matter for rejoicing. (I also had feverish teachers noticing books in the skip and bringing them back to m e. And yes, we had looked at every possible option for passing them on elsewhere, but really who needs an out of ...