Authors Electric

With a title like that, I know I really should start off with a bang. A pulp flourish or note of high drama. Shutters flapping. Lightning flashing. Thunder booming. That and more. And yet, I beg your forgiveness, I must start with a single word. And not even one in English:                                         Ardalio That's the final word in an eight-line Latin poem I was trying to translate. Martial, the poet, spent six lines telling us how Atticus could do anything in the nicest or prettiest, effortless way. The word 'belle' or 'bellus' appears thirteen times in those first six lines. And each repetition seems a bit more mocking. Then, suddenly, Martial springs his trademark stinger: at the tail end, a raucous quip or dazzling bit of word  play. Here, he wonders: 'Since you do nothing well and everything not badly/What would you have me say of you?' The answer in Latin: Magnus ...

First the sour, then the sweet. You know that thing, particularly prevalent in children’s picture books, when you have a great idea and write it and then find that someone else has already published something very similar? Well here it is: about ten years ago I wrote a story about a misfit dragon child. I called it Bubble-blowing Brian: - Deep inside the volcano, dragon eggs were hatching, One, Two, Three.    One and Two snuggled down in the red-hot rocks. Three flapped his wings to make a breeze. 'Phew!’ he said, ‘it’s hot in here!’ Every day, One and Two practised breathing fire and roaring.   Three fanned his wings in a quiet corner by himself. On Midsummer Eve, the little dragons chose their special names.   The Dragon King came to hear them.   ‘Fearsome Firesnake!’ Shouted One. He blew a plume of scarlet flames. All the dragons clapped. ‘Ferocious Flamebreath!’ roared Two. He snorted green fire.   The dragons cheered. Three said, ‘Hello, ...

These days, we can all update our online books, and customers will get the newest version free of charge. However, when do you do it? Those writing for young people probably have the hardest job, as slang changes year on year, and you can sound like the fustiest old has-been very quickly and a laughing-stock amongst the super-trendy. Do people still use the word trendy anyway? The other big issues are contemporary settings (remember when mobile phones looked like bricks?) and scientific discoveries. When I was a kid, no one thought for a moment that dinosaurs had feathers, or that women guards on the Underground should be paid the same as men.    Climate change is going to present even more problems, I suspect. I haven’t actually updated any of my books, as I’ve always been very careful to make the date in which they’re set a bit ambiguous. This means stating that something costs the same as a four bedroom house in Surrey, rather than the £60,000 it would have cost thir...

It's all in a day's work for the average hack: recycling gore from old movies and books...without any sense of the real pain involved. I, on the other hand, was bitten by a Viper and stabbed over and over and over again while writing Caesar's Ghost. The book features some tactical weapons I'd researched online for months. Was that good enough for the Ghost? Not a chance. The Ghost wanted me to own them. How could the scenes be lifelike if I hadn't actually held these things? Could I even guess at their real power if I hadn't felt their heft and weight? I needed more of that verisimi-something. Well, before I knew it I'd shelled out a small fortune on a slew of lethal 'toys' illegal in many states. And I approached the action scenes with a little more strut in my stylistic walk. Example: Caesar's Ghost features a stun gun and I'd purchased three. Reviews, research and instincts told me that two of the three weren't right. One, desi...

Italy is one of those countries you just have to love. It has some of the best countryside and most interesting towns and cities in the world; it’s the country of the Renaissance, of glorious art and architecture. Its wine, fashion and food are widely considered to be second to none. Besides, how can you not love a country shaped like a boot? Yes, there’s no doubt about it: Italy gets rave reviews all round. What of Italian literature, though? Ah, this is where things begin to go quiet – at least outside Italy. Italian literature has something of an identity crisis in the English-speaking world. Italy, at a fleeting glance, just doesn’t appear to have a literary tradition to rival those of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, or the United States. Mention ‘Russian Literature’, and vast numbers of writers will spring to mind: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, Pushkin, Turgenev, Bulgakov. If someone mentions ‘Italian literature’, what or who do you think of? Well, ...

That's my boy there: Ovid. The dullest of all Roman writers, I thought. Two pages of The Metamorphoses could put me to sleep for two nights--and the terrible Penguin translation could knock me out for a week. Samples of my torment: J.J. Howard, 1807: From bodies various form'd, mutative shapes My Muse would sing:--Celestial powers give aid! A.D. Melville, 2009 Of bodies changed to other forms I tell; You Gods who have yourselves wrought every change... Arthur Golding, 1567: Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate, Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)... Iambic pentameters, rhymed and unrhymed...blank verse...prose--I never could get past the opening account of Creation--because I could not feel the once-living presence behind it. And because I had no sense of Latin as a once-living language. What the heck was the fuss about Ovid? Well, one day at Atlanta's Oxford Books, I chanced on a new translation by...