Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images taken by me, Allison Symes, from the 2025 Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick. By the time this post goes out, I will have just returned from my big writing treat of the year - The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick.    I get to spend a few days immersed in the writing world. I also love catching up with friends I only see online for the rest of the year. I learn so much from the workshops and courses and the after dinner speakers.  The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire - home to The Writers' Summer School for over 70 years. I also find this break away reaffirms my belief in myself as a writer by helping me fight Imposter Syndrome. Real writers go to conferences, don’t they, whether said events are online or in person, day events, or longer. Also last month, I was involved with a friend’s online book launch. That went well, I’m glad to say, but what is lovely here is with this and Swanwick, there was plenty of writer engagement. For the online launch, that...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. Do you have favourite themes in writing, whether this is in your work or someone else’s? I’ve always wanted to see justice done in stories. This is one reason I still love the classic fairytales, as well as the more obvious home for this topic, crime fiction. Even as a child, in the fairytale world I knew the rotters wouldn’t get away with it. Pity that’s not more true in life! I will often use themes as my way into creating characters and stories. If I know my theme is going to be honesty, say, I will create a dishonest character and show them not getting away with it, or I will show a truthful creation being rewarded for their honesty (not necessarily in money).   I lead an online flash fiction group for a Christian writing organisation I’ve been a member of for years. It’s fun to do and this has led me to rediscover the joys (and otherwise) of PowerPoint after a break of many years from it.  But I’ve fou...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One positive thing to come from the pandemic was the increasing use of Zoom to enable people to still “meet”.   I use Zoom regularly to meet with distant family members and for workshops. One welcome thing I hadn’t expected was being able to run flash fiction workshops for writing groups all over the country. No travel fees and I’m paid. I like this - a lot! I now run a monthly flash fiction workshop, on different aspects of the craft, for a Christian writing organisation. The members could never meet in person - we live hundreds of miles apart - but Zoom comes to the rescue and it has made it possible for the organisation concerned to offer genre specific writing groups. I think it is a wonderful development. Zoom has also led to my rediscovering PowerPoint . I used it a lot in the 1990s, moved away, and then returned to it for Zoom workshops as these presentations are great (and easy) to share on s...

Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Many thanks to Julia Pattison for taking the photo of me at my editing workshop. Also thanks to Janet Williams for taking the image of me at a recent Book Fair. It was lovely taking part in a Book Fair in July. The last one I took part in was before the pandemic. It’s hard to imagine just how much that changed so much for so many so quickly. What was great was there was a good turn out for the fair (over 100 people). Like the authors present, everyone seemed pleased events like this are back.  In my part of the world, the nearest bookshops are miles away. I spread the word about the event as much as possible and my slogan for my marketing of the event was “bringing the books to you”. That is one of the great joys of a book fair.      Another is seeing a good range of books covering a wide range of ages and tastes. The organisers of the event also kept the writers well supplied with tea, coffee, a...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. The Hayes, Swanwick - photo taken by me, Allison Symes I was at the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School in August, my annual residential writing week at The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire. As well as learning a great deal, I catch up with friends I only see in person here. We stay in contact via social media otherwise. A lovely time is had by all. The Hayes, Swanwick, Derbyshire   I deliberately go to courses that are “left field” to my flash fiction and blogging. I learn more than I think I will from these and did so again here.   I went to the four part specialist course of Creative Non-Fiction by Simon Whaley. I found it enlightening as some of my blogs hover on this category of writing. (If you can go to his course, I highly recommend it. You will learn so much about observation and conveying the truth).   Creative non-fiction is factual work told using fictional techniques. Facts cannot be changed but i...

Scary stories read out loud late at night in a big old barn. Yorkshire, middle-of-nowhere, halfway down the valley at the end of a steep lane. It’s late November and the weather forecast is for high winds and snow tonight.  Sounds a bit of a cliché, doesn’t it?  Go to bed after a few glasses of wine. Get woken up by big bangs in the distance somewhere. It’s windy. Get up at 3am for a wee – light switch – nothing. No power. Okaaay…. A few hours later and even the security lighting has failed. Look out of the window and it’s snowing. Even more of a  cliché?  (c) Ariell Cacciola There's no power, no heat, no light. By the morning, I could at least see, so I wander downstairs, wondering which one of the 14 of us will be the first body to be found in this classic set-up for a murder-mystery! Still no power and no gas here either, so can’t even make coffee and we have to wait for somebody who knows about these things to lay and light a wood fire in the sitting room, so we ...

It’s rare that I’m ever in both at the same time. Usually I’m in the wrong place at the right time, or very occasionally the reverse. Once, I missed an entire day of appointments because I’d convinced myself it was yesterday. Or tomorrow. I can’t remember which to be honest, but I know I did a lot of apologising! But rarely do the planets align in my favour …   I received an email from a library in North East Manchester a month or so back. Completely out of the blue – would I be interested in running a science-fiction writing workshop?  Well, yes, of course , says I, never one to turn down an opportunity. I mean how hard can it be? I’ve done enough talks and readings and the odd panel about writing; I’m sure I can run a workshop. On science-fiction? OK, I’ve never written much sf – though I grew up in the genre writing world, I’ve always been more of a fantasy writer, but some of my short stories have veered into sf territory and as a teenager, my reading fodder from a...

I’m a member of Juno, a women’s theatre group based around Salisbury, with a brief to work at correcting the gender imbalance in theatre.           Juno’s reach is mostly in Wiltshire and Dorset and I’m in Hampshire, but I just sneak in under the ‘within 30 miles of Salisbury’ rule. We are mostly writers, but several members have performance and directing backgrounds too. We make a lively contribution to Salisbury Fringe Festival – somehow not quite part of the ‘official’ Fringe, but there all the same, putting on our own shows alongside it. ‘Little Red Ella and the FGM’ was one such production. Several of us are also working on projects celebrating women in WW1 at present. We run workshops on writing for the theatre: site-specific, non-natural, political, comedy, for example. I’ve learned a lot.           Our most recent venture has just been on at the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis – a love...

It’s a useful exercise for writers to stop now and then to think about how they practise the various skills of the trade. A few years ago, Richard Sutton, a writer friend, asked me to contribute a blog on writing the first draft of a novel. My answer then still applies to how I work. Prelude to romance or murder? And who's the victim? For me, first drafts are voyages of discovery. When I’ve done all the obvious research, I have a general idea of the destination and know the main events I’ll need to include as I go along. But it’s always possible that, on the way, an alternative route will present itself (or force itself upon me) and I’ll find myself going in an unexpected direction. So I hardly ever sketch out a detailed itinerary. For me, the important thing is to let the characters bubble away and develop until they’re ready to start interacting. Once I know vaguely who the main characters will be, I start thinking about them and ask the obvious questions. What would she/...

  RLF Consultant Fellows The  Royal Literary Fund Register of Consultant Fellows           Here we are, then.            This is the reason I've been pleading that I'm too busy, for the past year. I've been an RLF guinea-pig on their latest project, the Register of Consultant Fellows, the aim of which Dr Trevor Day was to turn twenty writers into people capable of 'operating with appropriate training and to high standards of professional and ethical practice, to facilitate writing-related activities with groups of students or staff.' This is a quote from Trevor Day , the highly qualified educator and writer (and marine-biologist who swims with sharks) who devised and led the training-course.  (Trevor has modestly asked me to add that the course wouldn't have been the same without the 'considerable input' of  Marina Benjamin and Tina Pepler who 'helped design ...