Authors Electric

                                                                      I consider the ups and downs of being a freelance businesswoman and creative, and why it is sometimes a battle to be taken seriously. It’s a stormy day in what promises to be a sweltering summer, and am I relaxing with my feet up on this ‘day of rest’? Don’t be silly, I’m self-employed! Time off? You must be joking! Whilst you nine-to-fivers can make plans for the weekends and evenings, every time I do something other than my actual job, I lose money. So, I work seven days a week, every evening and a bit of Saturday and Sunday morning. Yes, I love what I do, and you know what they say – if you love what you do you never work a day in your life. Well, it sure feels like hard work sometimes, I can tell you. ...

  It was a rainy and cold day in Roxborough when my future husband, Dave, and I went to see a new movie at our local movie theater,   Rushmore,   the first film to be in wide release from director Wes Anderson. I was already pretty loaded in on our relationship because my husband wore Doc Martens, wrote and drew satirical comics, and liked some cool music. When we came out of the movie I felt even more in love, with my husband, with life, with the world in general. I was vibrating. So, there was no question of what I was going to do last weekend: I was going to go see Anderson's newest movie,   The Phoenician Scheme . It was everything I could have hoped for, weird, hopeful, sad, funny, well-acted, well-written, and the set was amazing, as were all the props, details, etc. The postcards were absolutely gorgeous, and how many films have you been to where there are postcards? I will say this, having seen  The Phoenician Scheme,  I do think Wes Anderson is mak...

 Whisper it quietly but I don’t really belong here! I think everyone else on the Authors Electric blog team are proper published writers – me? – well I dabble a bit here and there but I’m NOT a proper Writer with a capital double U. I have everything I need to be a writer I’ve heard Joanne Harris, best-selling author of Chocolat and so many other wonderful novels, say “if you write, you are a writer.” But there’s always more than a smidge of doubt that creeps in telling me this is not really my world, my place is on the outside looking in, reading rather than writing. I may never write a best seller – some days I wonder if I’ll ever publish a full book! That does require actually writing it first and the longer I stick at it I realise just what a huge mountain I have to climb. Can I really do this or am I an imposter? My husband told me I didn’t know the “right sort of people” to be a writer. A friend told me when I started a writing class, “the first novel you write wi...

  No. no, Austin Powers! I don't mean shake your booty, I mean move your butt--as in relocate from coast to coast, state to state, possibly country to country. Lord knows, I've done them all for a grand total of some 30 moves. So you can imagine my consternation, as an expert on the subject, when I found myself hamstrung and befuddled in the middle of  a move: from Seattle to Tucson, Arizona.  With just three months to go before D-Day in August, and with a strong foundation already in place, my head had started spinning from thoughts of the puzzles I couldn't complete:   --How, on a limited budget, could I afford a professional mover and a junk remover?   --How could I adapt to the changes since 2014, when I moved to Seattle with only a steamer trunk and four boxes? Amtrak will no longer handle a trunk--or allow checked luggage for relocation. Plus, in the past eight years, I've acquired a slew of possessions I value--not the least of them being new books. ...

When I was a little girl, the answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was always the same. “I’m going to be a writer.” As I’ve written about elsewhere, life got in the way and it’s only now, in my mid-fifties, that I am a proper author, with a book or two what I wrote.   I took the plunge and at the end of last year, we did our last catering function and hung up our aprons forever. “What joy!”, thought I to myself. “No more distractions like quotes for weddings, working out how many champagne flutes a client needs, planning a menu which will suit a party which contains two coeliacs, five vegans, two dairy-frees and a person who can’t abide peppers. Surely, I will be as light-hearted as a swallow, swooping ‘ere closer to the earth.”   Sitting at my laptop, with all the time in the world, the words didn’t flow. Not even a bit. I wrote several paragraphs then edited them heavily, sighing as I did so. Where had my creative spark gone? Why wasn’t I raci...

  I have a habit of seeing stages of my life in terms of books or films that seemed to reflect everything I was experiencing or feeling at the time. Is this, I wonder, how we make sense of our lives, attempting to give the chaos and serendipities of reality a narrative arc where none really exists? My early years were pure Christopher Robin, an only child in the countryside, whose best friends were pets and toys, entirely unaware that I had arrived at the end of a long line of privilege; white, male, middle class and British. The idylls of “Hundred Acre Wood”, (and “Never-Never Land” for that matter), were then replaced with a mixture of “Jennings Goes to School” and “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” – culminating in the cathartic anarchy of Lindsay Anderson’s film, “If”, which was released just as I was reaching the end of my patience with educational institutions. “Down and Out in Paris and London”, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” and “Of Human Bondage” reflected the struggle to surviv...

I was away for more than a month on book tour for You Beneath Your Skin . Back home I thought the plants were drying up, but clearly not. The better half had been taking care of them. Other than, well, pruning. Result: three pumpkin vines running riot playing tag in my tiny balcony, throwing out incandescent yellow blossoms as they climb up other shrubs, railings, pots. (I come from a part of India that has figured out the art of not letting any part of an edible plant go to waste, so of course we eat flowers. Pumpkin flowers, to be exact. We eat the leaves too, but that's a story for another time.) I'd returned grimy and exhausted from an overnight flight, but these pieces of yellow light brought back too much nostalgia. I washed my hands, and then out came a packet of chickpea flour. I mixed it in with salt, water, and a pinch of baking soda for a super-quick batter. Harvested the blossoms, tore out their egg-yolk-orange stamens, dipped them in batter and let the...

It's not looking good for your latest submission... OW. It hurts. Someone, some stupid, bigoted, illiterate, stuck-up barsteward, has rejected your writing. HOW VERY DARE THEY! Quick, get onto facebook, get some lurve from fellow-writers who will understand your agony. ‘Just had a rejection from ‘Crappy Ezine’, so upset! Doubting my entire life’s work. About to set fire to my pile of typescripts. ☹’ Friends zoom in with verbal chicken soup for your infected soul. ‘Ignore them, they are jealous of your genius!’ ‘Never heard of it!’ ‘Editor probs only publishes their mates! Sod them!’ ‘I think you’re brilliant, strong, talented, you don’t need them!’ All hoping you'll not have to say the same to them. Yeah, right.  Yes it does hurt to have the outpourings of your inner being, carefully crafted into art by hours of self-scarification, sent back, regardless of how many famous authors we are told were also rejected numerous times . In fact it’s harder to be rejected now ...

A writer, yesterday All jobs have their good points and bad points, and writing is no exception. You just have to learn to live with the frustrations. However, there are some things that, try as I might, I just can't muster the good grace or inner calm to let slide, but about which I can do n-o-t-h-i-n-g... For instance: Brain Donor Book Reviews. I don't mean internet trolls, exactly, I mean stuff that's just plain thoughtless and pointless. We all like, and need (even crave!) people to comment on our work, but not when they say "I loved this book" and then give it one star. 'Cos it's the star people notice. Or when they say how much they hated every word of every sentence, because you gave one of the characters a green jumper on page 139. Or when a middle aged person gets sniffy about a children's book being childish. It's! A! Children's! Book! The worst of it is that these things are indelible. Even if you, very nicely and very pol...

When I started to research for my first collection of Anansi stories I listened to and borrowed books from a friend (who listened to Anansi stories as a child in Ghana) and borrowed books from my local libraries. Since publishing this title as an eBook last year it has sold well. So in January 2012 I decided to write a follow on title. Knowing I'd exhausted the local avenues of research I had available to me I decided to discover if I could source old versions of the stories. By old I mean stories in books that were published at least 100 years ago. By using old books I felt I was getting nearer to the original story. It also meant I would be using material that was in the public domain (the copyright had expired). This was extremely important to me as I didn't want to infringe on another writers copyright. I was already aware of the Gutenberg Project , so that was my first port of call. This website contains 38,000 free eBooks on a huge variety of subjects, most of which ar...

Here's a true story. A couple of years ago, it had been arranged for me to do a talk and a signing session at a bookshop situated in the middle of a very large and very busy shopping mall (I can tell this story now 'cos the shop - and indeed the mall - are no longer there). A pretty big deal for me - I'd never done a bookshop signing before. Some classes from nearby schools were going to be bussed in, and the local press would be there. The day of the event dawned after a night in which I was sleepless with excitement. To cut a very long story short, I arrived at the bookshop with seconds to spare (the train was late, and my station-to-shop map was rubbish), and dripping wet (the rain had started belting down seconds after I left home). Holy moley, I thought, what a journey, at least I got here in one piece, and I am at least on time. Phew. I went into the bookshop. Hello, I'm Simon Cheshire. The staff gave me a funny look. Who? Umm... I'm Simon Cheshire? The ...

"WHSmith, why hast thou forsaken me?" There is a truth universally acknowledged: s uccess in the arts has nothing to do with your actual work, or its quality, or how many hours a day you spend networking, but is neatly expressed via the formula Sales =  f + b 2 where 'f' is Your Fame and 'b' is Blind Luck. This is, as I'm sure you know, a law so entrenched it makes gravity look optional. And, of course, it isn't news. There are ancient scrolls discovered in underwater caves beneath jurassic sediment which contain fresher information.  So why bring it up now, and make writers everywhere weep quietly into their el cheapo wine? Because this is the time of year when I always read a number of blogs and articles expressing this truth as if it was some kind of sudden, horrific revelation. I blame Christmas. Writers everywhere watch the bills pile up, and their bank balance empty faster than the Greek economy, and then they switch on Radio 4 as a ...