Authors Electric

It gets harder each month to contribute to a blog on writing. Mostly because I’m not doing any. Why is that?  I don’t know. The last ‘proper’ thing I wrote was a short story for an anthology that wasn’t accepted. No matter, I’ll place it somewhere – or at least I might if I actually subbed it anywhere. Apathy rules at the moment and I can’t blame everything on Covid, although not having the motivation of monthly writers’ group meetings doesn’t help. I can’t do Zoom; I mean I can , obviously – I have a laptop and I’ve used Zoom for work and other stuff – I just don’t connect mentally with online meetings. I don’t like the necessary enforced structure, the absence of body-language and being able to engage with everybody and not just with the image of whoever is speaking. And watching myself on screen is just horrible!  No, Covid and the resultant changes to the balance of life and society are horrific, but not the real reason. Nor is the fact that Andy cut down to 4 days a week ...

A few days ago, I joined in a very interesting online discussion started by a friend, about women becoming ‘invisible’ in various ways as they get older – and it got me thinking. This encroaching invisibility seems to be something that bothers a lot of my female contemporaries and I’m interested in the fact that it does not really seem to bother me. I suppose I have always felt invisible, pretty much – so my main feeling is ‘no change there’. On the rare occasions when I have ‘stood out’, it’s been for all the wrong reasons and I would have much preferred to retreat into my usual fly-on-the-wall-in-a-dark-corner position. I was never particularly good looking, even as a youngster (though looking back at old photos now, I’m not sure what I fretted about so much), so I suppose I never got the male attention that some do – and would not have felt comfortable with it if I had. I do remember a trip to Italy in my thirties where some Italian blokes called out ‘Bella!’ at me (I thin...