Authors Electric

Back in July, I did an author get-together at our local book shop Cover2Cover in Northwich. The weather was beautiful and it was artisan market day so good footfall in town and we had a great day. Didn't set the world on fire - although fantasy author Danny Williams did well. But we had a great time and it was good to meet other local authors. Cover2Cover has been great at getting us all together. I know many local writers and I go to a writing group, but these are mostly people I've never met before and I honestly didn't realise there were so many of us! The shop is also fantastic at promoting our books - we don't have shelf-space, we have an entire bookcase for us all! And there are frequent talks too. Pretty sure I posted a while back about the one I did. The old ... But one of the things I did get out of a Saturday morning sitting outside a bookshop was inspiration! It was refreshing that - for once - we were dealing with physical tangible paperbacks and not eboo...

  The search for tools to make my writing easier continues. I’ve put the idea of a custom built word processor built around a Raspberry Pi to one side for the time being, partly due to time (or, more accurately, my lack of it) and partly due to practicalities – realistically, I’d need a 3D printer to design a case for the hardware, and some way of connecting a screen and keyboard. It’s doable, but I don’t have the time or money to invest in the equipment, or learning how to use it. Instead, I’ve gone in a slightly different direction. My wife recently changed her phone – she went to the dark side, as I call it, and now has an iPhone. Of course, this doesn’t play nicely with any of the existing kit so the Garmin is going to be replaced by an Apple Watch, and she’s already got an iPad. This is often something we joke about – I used to teach on Macs, many years ago, and tried an iPhone once – their stuff is not for me, as I like to tinker and do things my way; but I’ve ...

  As I understand it, the point of any art is that it's based on, and grew from, real human experience. What happened to you, and how you felt about it-- whether it was good or bad. What you learned from it. Or failed to learn, as failing to learn is a very common human experience. These experiences involve an immense laboratory of bio-chemicals and hormones, acting on actual 'vital' organs -- that is, living organs vital for living. The ones that hurt when you're disappointed, or embarrassed. It involves organic memory, which is bio-chemical, and involves vision, forgetfulness, imagination... Human experience involves dreams, both in the sense of ambitions and day-dreams, and the mysterious, little-understood visions created by our brains while we sleep -- and these visions can involve all our sleeping senses, and be as vivid -- that is, alive -- as anything we experience while awake. So much so that some cultures have maintained that we actually enter another world wh...

The Scattered Authors Society is a fine, upstanding body of writers scribbling away all over Britain. I'm a member -- one of the founder members, in fact, along with Authors Electric's own Katherine Roberts. But I'm also a member of a smaller group (and very exclusive group, I'm telling you) within the SAS.  This very exclusive writing group of ours had a problem. None of us were doing much writing. Which, I understand, is not all that unusual with writing groups. Personally, I was bereft of all ideas. Just flat out. But the problem most of the others had was that they had deadlines and  ought to be writing, and wanted to write-- but somehow, the writing just wasn't getting done. We meet up reguarly on Zoom, it being a bit difficult to meet up in person, scattered as we are from the West Country to Scotland. The meetings were full of complaints about the failure to actually get any writing done, beset as we were by distractions. Now there are a few tricks to con you...

When I speak to people about my writing, if they haven't felt the urge to write themselves they usually express either blank disbelief - 'why do you do it?' - or mild interest in how I've managed to think of so many ideas. Some of the stories have their roots in real life incidents or situations, though I have only rarely attempted anything that actually depicts real people, so I doubt if I will be bothered by any libel suits in the near future. Actually the only example I can think of is a short story called 'Murder at the Drama Group' that I dashed off in a fury after someone annoyed me at a drama group for young people that I was involved in ages ago. I definitely won't be publishing it as it started with a (real) local council employee being found stabbed in the costume cupboard. I recently found myself using something that had happened in real life quite some time ago as the basis for a mystery novel. This isn't unusual, of course, though in this ca...

These past few months have been, for me, a good example of the consequences of Failing to Plan, but as a result I now have one almost-completed novel and one half-written one, so I suppose I haven't completely wasted my time. I didn't realise until the other day, by which time it was too late, because it was almost the end of National Novel Wiritng Month, a festival I still observe despite it now being obsolete, that I hadn't written anything in my planning notebook since my hospital stay. In a sense my life is now divided into before and after surgery, though I'm still hoping the division will somehow heal once I've healed up physically. I've now been signed off by the surgical team so I am taking that as progress, and the fact that I've opened the notebook again tends to corroborate this. The impressive cover of my current writing notebook My planning notebook has been an essential tool for me for some years now, although the actual notebook in use has cha...

'Allo, 'allo, 'allo I was scrolling through cat videos on Facebook... And there popped up this short clip from a tv series. I'd heard of the series. I'd heard it was good. But I'd never watched it because, well, I didn't feel like learning a whole new set of characters and their setting and the whole malarkey. The clip showed a woman police officer asking a tetchy male householder about the domestic violence call from his house. He kept trying to brush the whole thing aside and get her to leave. She kept on insistently repeating her question, to his obviously growing annoyance. Some readers may recognise the scene. It was very brief-- it was a Facebook clip-- but in that short time, the writing, the acting and the editing established themselves as way above the usual standard. The series was Blue Lights . The next time I was near a tv-set, I went to BBC iplayer and started from series one, part one. (I haven't caught up with the scene mentioned above a...