Authors Electric

At the time of writing this, “isolation” is gradually morphing from “voluntary” to “compulsory” around the world because the human race is under attack from a clever new virus.  It has set me thinking about the whole business of being a loner in life. Like many people who choose to write for a living, I have always been a solitary soul, a watcher of life rather than an active participant. If I hadn’t had the good fortune to marry someone gregarious and have a great many children I would probably be living up a mountain in a cave by now, (that’s the romantic version, I would more likely have spent my life locked in a bedsit in Brighton, eating ready-made soup amongst stacks of old newspapers).  Maybe it stems from being an only child who was very much left to his own devices most of the time, (always good to make the parents responsible for everything that isn’t quite as glitteringly wonderful about one’s personality as one would like), or maybe I’m just a...

Writing on an ipad in bed at dawn against the light of the electric heater—the writing life demands that you write wherever you are. I’m supposed to be on vacation, but here I am, typing away.  I’ve written on moving buses, trains. Not boats. Definitely airplanes. I remember tearing apart (physically) an entire manuscript while on a train in Scotland, as stunning views or slow-moving sheep reflected on enormous glass windows.  An entire short story was once written on a flight to the UK from Singapore. I was tired, grumpy, could not sleep, so I thought writing would help me. It did not. I inhaled copious amounts of caffeine, furiously typed a draft that only made half-sense, and alighted a cranky woman—perhaps the only time that finishing a piece gave me a fit of rage and a crick in the neck, instead of the sense of accomplishment that usually follows. I like having written, more often than not. A friend wrote yesterda...

I think about motivation a lot, perhaps more than I should do. I would consider myself a fairly motivated person and yet, there are days where my get up and go fancies a wee holiday. The difficulty with giving your get up and go a holiday, is the danger of it shoving off permanently. I firmly believe that Motivation Matters and that we should do everything in our power to keep our motivation going.  One of the ways we can do this is by joining in with NaNoWriMo or national Novel Writing Month, to give it its full name. For those of you who haven't heard of it, you pledge to write 50,000 words in the month of November, which works out at 1,677 words a day. Trust me that is doable. NaNoWriMo works in many different ways. Firstly, it gets you into a daily writing habit. Secondly, it encourages you just to write with no stops and starts. Thirdly, it helps with accountability. The site, itself, rewards you for writing streaks and gives badges at set times. There are also writi...

In the last two months, I haven't had an entire night's sleep. I'm lucky if I have five hours. No weekends. No evenings out. Almost no cooking or gardening. The worst thing? No creative writing, and almost no reading. I'm on a hamster wheel and the faster I run, the faster it spins--the book tour gig is not for sissies. I'm traveling to various cities in India with You Beneath Your Skin , attending panels and discussions and lit-fests and all throughout an inner voice that remains calm and detached keeps asking me when I plan to get back to my current WIP again. I'm fundraising for two charities I've volunteered with for a while: Project WHY and Stop Acid Attacks : all my proceeds go to them. This adds an impetus--I'm pretty sure if this was a normal book, with no causes attached to it, I would have bolted into a hidey-hole a long time ago. To de-stress and keep myself functional, I've turned to meditation--just learning to breathe and rem...

If you want to get ahead, get a hat - I mean, a blog We're all so used to reading and writing blogs now that it's easy to forget that they are a relatively recent phenomenon.  Jane Perrone, writing on The Guardian's blog just 14 years ago , felt the need to explain what they were for the sake of the uninitiated: A weblog is, literally, a "log" of the web - a diary-style site, in which the author (a "blogger") links to other web pages he or she finds interesting using entries posted in reverse chronological order. We Sing, We Dance, We Blog... I'd almost forgotten that blogs used to be called weblogs . When I see that word now, my instinct is to read it as "we blog" rather than "web log", as if it's part of the declension of the verb "to blog". (Iblog, youblog, heblogs, weblog ...) Interesting, too, that Perrone defines the main purpose of a weblog as being to link to other web pages rather than...

When you work alone most of the time, and when you need the outside world to buy your products or bring you interesting commissions, you have to depend on some sort of communications lifeline. The question is; when does “dependency” tip into “addiction”? It used to be the post. Every day I would be waiting eagerly for a precious letter of acceptance from a publisher, or an enquiry letter or – most crucially – a cheque. Most days there was that inevitable moment of disappointment when the postman was walking away leaving nothing of interest on the doormat or, far worse, a manuscript thumped in with a rejection letter. Then I got a telephone line of my own and that became my lifeline. I hardly dared move out of earshot of its ring, (phones were still tethered to the wall). I dreamed of the day when someone would invent a cordless phone so I could at least go out into the garden while waiting for the wonderful calls that came so sporadically. Before someone got round to ...

Not too long after my last grumble about combining writing and staying sane,  I came across a newspaper  article which I thought provided a useful model for day-to-day living, one that sounded sensible, achievable, and isn’t attached to one particular philosophy (or perish the thought, product). The main tenets of this are: Connect, Learn, be Active, take Notice, Give back – with the handy acronym of CLANG. Even better, if you add Eat Well, Relax and Sleep it becomes CLANGERS. What’s not to like about that? I’ve since found the same ideas on a number of NHS websites so it looks like a well-known combination. But how easy is it to put into practice? On a recent Friday (which for me starts with an exercise class so A is taken care of) I decided to see how many I could manage.   It's good to talk - face to face C is for Connect with people. Well you could say that connection online is all to easy and although it can prevent loneliness it can have other bad ef...

Cover illo for the 25th Anny edition of The Suiting 8/2013. I had a date with a model last night. I can’t talk about her, but I can tell you this: the road to hell is truly paved with the best dimensions. Then again, years ago, I found the road to heaven’s gate in a cross-country move. Act 1             Time: the middle-Eighties, when we still sent letters.             I set out from San Francisco, where a strayed loin is the quickest way to get from Pant A to Pant B. Destination: New York City, the heart of the publishing action.  I arrived with fire in the belly—and more in need of a fresh start than any hundred writers.              Why? In the previous decade I’d sent out thousands of queries. Though I now had something wild and fresh, a query recognized as mine would call to mind yesterday’s...

Most w riters are advised to start blogging as a career move. But in 2009 I’d never heard of ‘platform’. I started a writing blog because I felt like it. Like many writers with a traditional publishing background, I networked one to one - meetings, parties and email discussions. My writer friends had websites, but I didn’t because I had no books out under my name. Even though my agent was out crusading with my first novel as me ( My M emories of a Future Life ) we never discussed ‘platform’. One day a web-savvy friend in the games industry was telling me about blogging, and set me up with a Wordpress ID. I wrote a few posts. It was fun; my own writers’ observatory - looking at real life with a storyteller’s eye. Writerly friends enjoyed my posts. Non-writerlies were spared a lot of abstruse conversations. When I didn’t post for two weeks, the teenage son of some friends - who I thought would have cooler pastimes - told me I was overdue for a post. Since that day, I have tak...

It’s a funny thing, releasing a novel. You think you’ve made everything up, then someone informs you that it’s not as fictional as you’d hoped. And moreover, you got it wrong. Th e other day I had an email to say that the fusty village where I’d set the action in My Me mories of a Future Life was not spelled Vellonoweth but Vellanoweth. ‘No it’s not,’ I replied, thinking my correspondent had a cheek. ‘I made it up.’ ‘It’s near Penzance,’ he said. Oh dear. It was. I honestly had no idea the place existed. My Vellonoweth, with an o, was inspired by a stand-out surname I spotted in a magazine. It embodied everything I needed for my setting - a fusty, sleepy hell full of dreary people. If I used a real town I couldn’t take it to the stifling depths I needed. But it turns out there is a real Vellanoweth. So I may have some apologisi ng to do. Here it is. 1 I’m sorry I gave you a terrible amateur dramatics society, which was performing a musical they’d written themselves abo...