Authors Electric

So, every now and then, I take down one of my paintings I’ve been looking critically at for a while, and start making changes. The concept ‘finished’ doesn’t seem to apply to paintings… always something will express itself (unless, unusually, someone’s bought something, or the work was a commission…) Daze was definitely awaiting more insight for makeover. Daze - Daisy to her parents on her birth-day - a character in my Mullins Family novels - rapidly found her way into being the third most important of the main characters: probably unknowingly destined from the get-go, since on page one (of first draft) we find Daze and Jenny (whose career-and-love story this was back then) as nine year olds. The girls, schoolbags thrown aside on the grass, are lying naughtily on their bellies in the garden of a doctor’s surgery, looking down into what used to be called ‘the area’ of a large converted house, and peeking through a semi-basement window as Jenny’s mother examines a patient… From the resu...

The picture prompt for 'January'. Earlier this year, in May, I wrote a blog about collaborative writing , recommending it as an exercise for writers of all sorts. At the time, I was looking at the topic only from the point of view of the writer. The blog drew only one (anonymous) response from a writer who claimed she/he would be incapable of such collaboration and made the very valid point (which I’d omitted) that ‘it must come down to being in sympathy with your fellow writer and having trust in them’. I think both my collaborator, Eden Baylee , and I had taken for granted that that was the case and it was only the anonymous comment that made me recognise its truth and how necessary such trust is. (So thank you, Anon.) More recently, though, thanks to an email from a writer friend here in Scotland, I’ve been reflecting again on the process and how a different aspect of it might affect not the writer, but the reader. The collaboration was for a monthly podcast ...