Authors Electric

I was thinking about the weather the other day. That's something British people are famous for doing, of course, as well as for talking about it. My late father-in-law used to panic about weather extremes, especially gales, which everyone found quite harmless and even amusing until a hypnotherapist helped him to work out that it was caused by post-traumatic stress following his wartime experiences driving ammunition trucks in the desert during sandstorms. However without even noticing it, I seem to have suddenly reached the stage in my life where I don't mind too much what the weather throws at me -- within reason, that is. I am not keen on the kind of gales we get sometimes which literally throw things at you, from trees to trampolines. I am also slightly baffled by the fact that during the various named storms we now have during every season except summer, the trains stop running somewhere in Scotland because of trampolines on the tracks. When I was a child the wea...

I sometimes feel that I'm not very helpful in this blog. Some posts by other people are full of information and suggestions, more likely to be to do with how and what to write than baking scones. I don't know if I'm meant to dispense handy tips from whatever imagined reservoir of expertise I might be supposed to have (non-clumsy sentences being at the end of that list, judging from that one!) But a couple of nights ago I had a revelation, and I'm going to share it with you. Pin back your lug’oles! Trying to look serious for once I was sitting in my bed (one of my favourite writing stations) flipping through the Kindle notes I have made on a textbook I've been working from. I made the notes as they occurred to me, and they're all germane to a novel that I have in hand. I knew the novel had several specific points I needed to research more, or to polish up, and as I read the textbook over days and weeks I put in a Kindle bookmark at any point that struck ...