Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love reading and writing non-fiction but I came to the latter relatively recently. It was a result of discovering the joys of writing for an online magazine, Chandler’s Ford Today , I dipped my literary toes into the wonderful world of factual writing.  I’ve recently had the joy of being published in print for the first time in non-fiction with my chapter Why Write Flash Fiction and Short Stories in Creativity Matters: Find Your Passion for Writing , which has been compiled and edited by Wendy H Jones of this parish. So another reason to love non-fiction then. I hope to develop my non-fiction “string” to my writing “bow” further. My first love though is fiction (and especially humour, fairytales, fantasy etc) and it always will be. I also became a published author in that form long before anything of mine appeared in non-fiction. But is non-fiction still considered the poor relation to fiction? If it is, I ...

I used to think of writing as a lonely pursuit. Were it a sport it would be like golf - better yet, like fly fishing in high country. Lately, however, I've realized, not so much. My author-in-the-attic time notwithstanding, I find that I must depend on the kindness of friends and colleagues - even strangers - in the process of bringing my work to fruition, not to mention contract copy editors and designers. I'm talking only about solo works. I'm not counting staff-produced works - magazines, journals, and so forth, or even blogs. Neither am I counting High Treason - the cold war biography I coauthored with the late, CIA-KGB double agent Vladimir Sakharov in the 1980s. Nor either of my other coauthored books that were outright collaborations. I try my best to thank all of the above on in my acknowledgements - including those who generously provided forewords and blurbs, but the list falls short. My inamorata, Eleanor , vets all of my final drafts. Besides being a no...

I can't quite believe I'm writing this - it's one of those situations that 'happen to someone else'. Well, buying and selling property is something many of us have to do from time to time. We don't have to like it, but sometimes we do have to do it. It is, we are told, one of the most stressful processes - but mostly we just get on with it, with the help of a whinge or two to friends and family. Last year I tried to sell my house and buy a flat. It was time to downsize. Buying the flat - that was the easy bit. I found somewhere lovely, the offer was accepted ... so all I had to do was sell the house. Maybe I should have been better prepared for the house to not sell. But, after a few sleepless nights counting pennies, I boxed and coxed money, bought the flat and found a tenant for the house. That, at least, gave me breathing space. And all was hunky dory. My lovely tenant renewed her contract, I had an income and a lovely new flat. But - out of the blue -...