Authors Electric

Only the super-organised, the serious prevaricator, or those spending the festivities alone will have time to read much today. And so I'm offering nothing more than a passing thought for anyone who might drop by here. For none of us can escape the reality that the western world is shutting down for a few days. The razzmatazz of shopping and visits to Santa will die down and we have time to eat and drink and play with those we love. Sometimes, as we settle to our feasting, we can almost believe that this is the most important festival in the world. But hold on a minute. What about Diwali? What about Ramadan and Eid? What about Hanukkah? All over the world, we celebrate by eating together. We tell different stories, have different gods, but we all find reasons, regularly, to spend festive time with those we love, and to share food. Those stories, those gods - they help us to make sense of ourselves and why we are here, and why we need each other. They seek to explain the crea...

As I write this, my ebook about Cuba, entitled Vultures Overhead, is with the copy editor. But by the time this post is published on the Authors Electric blog, I'll have the manuscript back and know the worst - or the best. The first time I let a copy editor loose on anything I bit my nails and wept into my pillow as I waited for it to come back. Would she like it? Not like it? Would it be so covered with alterations my words would be unrecognisable? (All those days waiting for exam results came flooding back.) I think I'm a little more sanguine now. For it doesn't matter whether the copy editor likes it or not - as long as she does her job. I know I can be a bit dash-happy, and she'll sort some of those. She'll find any mis-spelled place names (I'm ashamed how many of those I send her). She'll stumble over clunkiness because she'll see what I've actually written and not what I think I've written. Even so, these are waiting days. I'v...