Authors Electric

I’ve finally made the jump from what was formally Twitter to Threads. I do feel it is putting all my eggs in one big Meta basket, but I quite like the way it cross posts between platforms. We could debate the merits or downsides of social media all day, but as writers it is one of the best ways to build and connect with potential readers, which in turn hopefully leads to some sales, maybe reviews and thereby more sales… this writing lark is such a merry-go-round, when does anyone find time to write? I’ll address that one next month. I have tried to fill my threads timeline with mostly writers and creatives, I’m not following so many pollical accounts. All is calm and soothing – ish. You get the odd thread of how do you pronounce a certain word and how it freaks Americans out the way we say some things in the UK. I confess I tumble down a few of those rabbit holes, but somehow, they go in small circles. I get that sense of déjà vu and remind myself this is immaterial in the grand scheme...

I've just been whizzing round my local shops and have come home with a small treasure - two reels of Gutermann thread. We have at least six hairdressers, four shoe shops and a nail bar, but nowhere to buy threads, needles, fabrics etc (and I speak as a fabric junkie) so when someone told me that a tiny dry cleaners had bought in a range of Gutermann to fill the gap, I was there in a trice. Which makes me wonder - do shopping centres create people, or do people create shopping centres? Are all our prospective young dress designers and our knitting aunties and grannies now queuing up in the nail bar? This morning I read with great amusement a blog about the problems of using swear words when writing for children and Young Adults. It seems that at least one library in America refused to stock a book containing the word 'damn'. A way around this is to invent words that stand in for the real thing, but how offensive is the real thing? Most of our current swear words have lost...