Authors Electric

A week ago, I woke in pitch dark from of a whirl of troubled dreams, spawned no doubt by my dread of 2024, a year swaddled in doomsday prognostications . Freezing rain pelted my bedroom window. The glowing deco clock on my night-stand blinked 5:30. I'm accustomed to wee-hour awakenings. Might as well forget about going back to sleep.  An hour later, after my ablutions, when I switched on the TV over coffee, it dawned on me, quite literally, that it was evening not dawn. I had overslept from an afternoon nap. No wonder all the wrong newscasters were on and it wasn't getting light outside. T'was a scifi-moment, not a senior one, I reassured myself. I've been wrestling with time paradoxes in a story I'm writing. I had jumped to the next morning for a few hours. Ho ho ho. That, I'd wandered into the fog of winter solstice blues. Time travel speculation is an exercise in what-ifs. So is New Years Eve when we celebrate change knowing that the coming year probably will...

   L.A. Times Newroom 1963, the day JFK was shot Once again, I dwell in the alternate history of a work to which I keep returning. Maybe it's a novel, maybe a novella, maybe a string of stories I'm trying to unravel. Meanwhile, what we call reality looks more and more like science fiction or a Borges reality. Indulging fatalism and its first cousin cynicism might be easier at my advanced age but for family. My concerns are both abstract — for humankind and our furry friends and real for the younger hopeful members of the mixed heritage and gender choice clan to which I belong. As I write this we await the momentary arrival of little Nora, who will be my fourth great grandchild, expected baby of my granddaughter Fiona Reynolds in San Francisco.  Granddaughter Fiona & mom Alicia    More than ever, I see us handing a shabby future to little Nora when we could have done — nay, we have to do — so much better. I always took the works of Margaret Atwood, William...

Actually, the real reason the postman never visits is  because we ate him. Very nice he was too. Although we passed on the Chianti. And the fava beans. And here's another thing - where's my post gone? I love my computer, I really do. It makes writing books and articles so much quicker and easier - no more cutting out sections of text and taping them together again, no more blotty scribblings in margins never quite wide enough, and no more carbon paper, usually inserted the wrong way round and only discovered at the end of the page. My partner once gave me a present of a box of Sellotape, scissors, Pritt Stick and Tipp-Ex: he meant it as a joke, but I got good use out of it. But my computer and the internet has robbed me of my post- most of it nowadays seems to arrive via my email inbox. Gone is the pleasure of receiving letters: proper letters, not just brief communiques usually written in haste. Oh, email has its place - but as brief ...

'Now' is where it's at (or rather when it's at). 'Now' is the moving blade that chops our lives, over and over again, into past, future and that infinitesimal but overwhelmingly significant instant we call 'now'. Prague Astronomical Clock OK, so I was lying in bed musing on what to blog about this month, trying to force myself to think about e-books. Nothing wrong with e-books, of course, but my brain sometimes refuses to think about them to order. Now if I was the kind of organised person who posts my blogs up here months in advance (respect, to those of you who do), I might find it easier to 'focus', as my English teacher used to say. But I don't, and instead of being organised, I sense one of Douglas Adams's infamous deadlines about to whoosh up behind me, whirl me round in a storm of panic and then hurl me onto the jagged rocks of midnight on the 25/26th, with no time left to write this month's post (see below for a disc...