Authors Electric

I’ve spent the last year or more waiting for heart surgery, and the last couple of months of this time have been particularly frustrating. This is because I got as far as having a pre-operation assessment at the end of May, and felt fairly confident that I would find myself on the operating table within a few weeks of it. Other family members even made their holiday arrangements around that date prediction, and I’m not really getting any better as I wait either! Still, I’ve managed to finish and publish two (or is it three? I’m starting to lose count) novels in the time since I first saw the cardiac surgeon, and I’m working on two more at this very moment, so it isn’t as if I’ve completely wasted the time, though anyone who sees the state of our house might imagine I have. In some ways this reminds me of the wait I had before giving birth to my first child. I was supposed to be resting in bed during the eight weeks before the due date because of raised blood pressure, but the problem...

I’m in a delicate place. My new novel is finished, professionally edited, proofread and ready to be published. Yet, I’m undecided which route to go in terms of publishing (self or hybrid) so I’m in a season of waiting.  I don’t like this place so much, I don’t do well in silence. I’m not a very patient person when it comes to achieving my goals. It feels like I’m staring at a new baby that I want to bathe, dress up in cute outfits and show the world how beautiful she is, but I’m not allowed to touch her, she's not quite ready yet - It’s frustrating. Can anyone relate? I hear it can take many weeks and sometimes months to hear back from an agent or a publishing house and beyond that, several months or even years before the book is actually published. The thought makes me break out in a sweat. Literally! I’ve self published all the books, devotionals and journals I’ve written to date. I find the process exciting and over the years some what easy that I have started to help other new ...

Every Monday morning I go to a class at my local Health club. The class is called Chi-Balls, and is a very satisfying combination of T'ai Chi, Yoga and Pilates. It's performed against a background mix of someone's idea of other-worldly and meditative music, which certainly works for me. One of the pieces it uses is the very-well-known "Gymnopedie No 1" by Erik Satie. If that sounds a bit obscure, google it and listen - the chances are slim that you won't know it, as it's used - over-used - in so many TV dramas, especially the mystical, atmospheric, and deeply psychological kind. We used to have an Erik Satie CD, but I seem to have lost it, so I thought I'd try looking for him in my local libraries and music shop with - astonishingly - no luck. I turned to the Web, where there is, of course, masses of information about him. I was grabbed by a performance of the ballet "PARADE" - a collaboration between Satie and Picasso. I knew nothing at ...