Authors Electric

This month,  I take a look at Alexander Waugh's 1999 discussion of Time as we know it (or as we think we know it). This book begins at the beginning and works fairly logically through our accepted periods of time from smallest to largest, starting with a chapter on seconds  and progressing through  minutes, hours, days, weeks,  to eras and  aeons . It ends with a discussion of simple and complex time, followed by a final chapter tantalisingly entitled 'End' - which, as I read through the earlier chapters, I imagined to be a mind-blowing comment on the end of days but actually involves a discussion of death and the afterlife according to different religions. (If you're wondering about the words in bold, I thought it might be fun to highlight our attempts to divide and control time - just consider how his post might read without those useful labels!) Time by Alexander Waugh While it's tempting to compare this book to Stephen Hawking's book ' A Brief His...

Musings on the Nature of Time The last few months have been manic for me and seem to have passed by in a blur. The daytime job has been full-on, and my old laptop decided to die (top tip – have a decent backup strategy; when the hard drive failed I only lost a few hundred words due to multiple backups. I got my fingers burned many years ago when I lost work due to not having backups). It also took quite a while to source laptop – admittedly because I have slightly unusual requirements, chief of which is an unlocked bootloader to load my preferred operating system. I’ve been a Linux user since 2003, and my workflows have evolved around it; trying to use Windows is jarring for me (and TBH, I’m not a fan of Windows 11, or the latest version of Office that comes with it – it also doesn’t play nicely with my home server setup). To cut a long story short, I eventually found a reasonable spec Dell that’s only a few years old. Twenty minutes after powering it up, I was up and...

 Do you remember a time when we believed that all the new-fangled modern devices would save us time? We seem to be busier than ever – especially as writers. We have become slaves to our phones, with algorithms that suck us into rabbit holes. It’s research we protest – who are we kidding? If we’ve actually reached the dizzy heights of publishing a book, we have to promote it, find ways to market it and of course sell it – these days being an author demands we wear so many other hats – publicist, bookseller, inspirational speaker. This is the stage I am at. My first book, my memoir, was out in January. “You can’t be a one hit wonder!” said my brother at the time – Cue Chesney Hawkes singing “The One and Only” – if you are of a certain vintage you will understand. But when do I find time to write? What better plan that to take a retreat and carve out some dedicated writing time. No dishes to wash, no meals to plan, no distractions. I’ve taken a retreat in November befo...

Pushing all imposter syndrome thoughts away this month I have made the decision to properly invest in my writing future. No understanding of stock options, bonds, interest rates are needed for this endeavour although MONEY is a key part of the equation. First I picked up a light box from the charity shop for the bargain price of £3. Ruth Leigh uses one of these for her promotional events, lit up with the message Meet the Author or Me the Author, when the letters go awry. Can you spot the  Lightbox  in her latest Authors Electric blog post? I wanted to put Writer at Work on mine but settled for I Am A Writer, both to banish the imposter blues and because there are only 2 Rs in my set of letters – the joys of buying preloved! On the same day as I bagged my bargain, I splashed out on a luxurious writing retreat at the end of November with one of my favourite authors Cathy Rentzenbrink. I’ve done a few online courses with her but now I get the chance to meet her and shar...

The world is finally united.   I just wish it was for something good instead of the deadly Covid19 virus.   Being isolated at home with my husband is not a hardship. We’ve worked from home for years, but now, I’m cooking a hell of a lot more! We don’t go out for dinner like we used to. We did, however, venture out of the house over a week ago, but that was for essentials.   Okay, I lie.   Wine really isn’t an essential, but it makes life a bit easier.  Physical isolation from the outside world has thrown off my sleep patterns, even more so than usual. The days of the week, normally a marker of tasks and events, are now cluttered in my mind.   Does Monday feel different from Thursday or Friday? Does it even matter? Certainly, the precision of time is now less important. There are fewer (no) appointments or meetings I need to keep. I don’t have to check my schedule because … well, there’s no urgency to be anywhere. Instead, mundane tasks ...

For the first time ever, this year, we forgot to change the clocks. Now, most of them self-adjust anyway, but our watches and the big old striker on the wall don’t. I think we forgot because, in these days of lockdown, it didn’t matter. Time drifts. I rather like it. I have occasional rants about watches and clocks, especially now that they are electronic and can measure this ‘time’ in umpteenths of a second. A runner breaking a record by nought-point something of a second makes me shout expletives at the television – anyway, where do they measure it? It strikes me that a big bust, nose or foot could make all the difference in reality. Where was I? Oh yes, while admiring the brilliant range of mental and physical skills and the extraordinary imagination that led to the conception and implementation of gadgets to measure time – and the traditional ones are often miracles of delicate and beautiful engineering - they are also responsible for shaping our lives powerfull...

In our modern hustle and bustle world I would venture to say that one of our most precious commodities is time. The more labour saving devices we acquire, the more we seem to fill our days and the minutes just slip by. As the picture suggests our time just slips away.  My last post on this blog was Motivation Matters and this post takes that theme further  Whilst the principles are the same for everyone, this is a writing blog so I am going to focus on time and our writing. By using even just a few of these you will find your writing time expands and your word count will rise. 1. Schedule important tasks - while this might seem like a no brainer, how many of us actually do this. My regular contribution to this blog is a perfect example. I know I am scheduled for the 16th of each month and yet the date sneaks up on me and can often slip by unnoticed. This should have been out at 00:30 and here I am at 09.40, still writing it. So, taking my own advice, there is...

I sometimes swear I'm caught up in some kind of bizarre Dr Who -style time-bending experiment. I don't know what's happened to the space-time continuum, but it just doesn't seem to be functioning as it once did. I can remember a time when the temporal gap between one Christmas and the next lasted for about - well, about twelve months, actually: twelve long, glorious months that were stuffed full of exciting possibilities. Now I sometimes wonder if it's even worth packing away the festive decorations; before I know it, it'll be time to put them all back up again. Time is a peculiarly elastic thing. When you're miserable, or trapped at a particularly dreary social event, or waiting for a delayed flight, it hardly moves at all. When you're actually doing something enjoyable and/or worthwhile, like writing, it zips by. Hardly seems fair, does it? This problem becomes even more striking when you're trying to forge a career (I use the term loosel...