Authors Electric

A few days ago, the first meeting of my writers’ group of the new year took place here. Coffee and biscuits were served, tulips were given as a token of the approaching Spring. As ever, it was a great morning of shared writing – a fledgling 6th novel; the second of a trilogy set in Hong Kong in the time of Raffles; the beginnings of a murder mystery set in the New Forest, a sample of book 3 of a set of YA novels ; a poem.   As I saw the last guest away home, we reflected on the fact that we had been meeting now for over 30 years. She and I are now the only two original members left; we lost two to death and two moved away to pursue other ways of writing. Of late, others who bring so much to the group have joined us; one teaches creative writing in a secondary school, two are alumni of an associate member who now   runs excellent courses in writing, one was discovered via SCBWI.   They are all such lively and interesting people who can both give and take constructive cri...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One of the ways I fire up my imagination is to use random generators.   I’ve used the following to good effect. Random Noun/Adjective/Verb generators. Random Question generators (good for giving ideas for themes, sometimes titles). Random Number generators (I’ve used a number as a countdown in a story. I’ve also used it as part of an address where the action happened). Random Name generators (where you can generate a first name, surname, or both). Random Picture generator. If I select a landscape I come up with who might live there and what happens to them in this landscape. If I select a picture of a person, I prefer those where they are doing something, such as walking away from the camera at the time the shot was taken. I can rough out a story around that. Who is this person? What or whom are they walking away from? Could they be walking towards something instead? A successful generator makes me ask que...

Rain, heavy cloud, mud, Omicron... So this is a picture post of happy memories connected with writing. This one is of my wonderful agent, Carolyn Whitaker, on the balcony of her house in Turkey, which I visited many times. We also went to Iceland together. She died in 2016, and I miss her more than I can say. A generous, funny, adventurous woman with the most incisive and down-to-earth mind I have ever encountered when it came to editing a manuscript. "Let's start with the first f--- on page thirteen." She had a speedboat at her place in Netley, and piloted it at terrifying speeds. She also owned racehorses, and I was there when she had a winner at Epsom. A total original, who was an enormous influence on me. I was very touched when she left me some money; I realised it was exactly the same amount she had earned off me in the previous twenty-five years.    This is a humming bird from the garden in Monteverde, Costa Rica, which was the initial setting for my fantasy The Di...

  I'm sure there are few who cannot have heard of TikTok but for those who have not, it is a video centric social media platform. WIth over a billion users worldwide it is racketing up the charts and is either fifth or seventh in the charts on whether you count messenger and WhatsApp as social media apps. So, why am I talking about TikTok here today? Join me on my TikTok adventure. In a fit of enthusiasm I joined TikTok about seven or eight months ago in a slow period during lockdown. Then, I saw all those youngsters dancing and lip synching and nearly lost the will to live. I literally had no clue what I was doing, or why I was doing it. I did a small video of my writing space, chucked on the hashtag #booktok and left it to fall as it would. I followed one person, had one follower, got a number of views and likes but nothing more. It was like astronauts drifting in space with no clue what space actually was, where they were supposed to be heading and hadn't even heard of the m...

My kids couldn’t believe it. It was literally a few days after Christmas, and the shop was selling Easter Eggs! Is it me, or are they even earlier this year than normal? They’re all mixed on the shelves with Valentine merch. At least, it means as a writer, your timeline doesn’t have to be too precise. That’s my excuse, anyway. It’s a nice detail to include in your story, something like a poisoned cream egg, for example. Your time frame is from the start of January, all the way through to Easter. You can describe the victim, walking through the supermarket, tutting at the fact that Easter Eggs and Valentine's hearts are right next to one another. Maybe she dislikes the passing of the seasons, feels it’s like wishing your life away. She might hesitate between cream eggs and valentine hearts, with the killer peeking between the shelves to see if his dastardly plan will succeed. It could confuse your readers, I suppose. It makes the timeline less precise. Writing about seasonal s...

I’m naturally anxious to remind the august membership of Authors Electric that I’m still a keen follower of the group’s comings and goings so I’ve decided to use one of my occasional guest visits to help prolong the relentless gaiety of the Christmas and New Year observations by offering a little light-hearted challenge designed specifically for members' tastes and talents. In fact, it’s a variation on one I published several years ago by way of response to a Facebook posting. Facebook is a strange place for all sorts of reasons – some good, some less so. Just by answering a few questions, one can, for example, find out really useful things, such as which 18th century politician, Renaissance painter, Jane Austen character, or medieval landlord one most resembles in terms of one’s susceptibility to certain medical conditions. Other queries help one decide whether, temperamentally, one is closer to a porcupine, a swallow-tailed butterfly, or a haddock. Or there’s the simple process...

  Oh, They have a long list of reasons why the book that's your baby belongs in the casket they've already made. It's too short/long/purple/plain/commercial/literary/off-the-wall/common...or to put it simply: I've spent the past year on a project that had Too-Too all over it before I'd even started. And yet I continued with some trepidation. But, as I continued, I grew more defiant. I also grew more confident that there was a market for my project: seven radical renditions of poems by one lesser-known Roman poet--'inspired-by covers ' instead of conventional translations. I envisioned a book totaling maybe 50 pages, including commentaries that I hoped would be half of the fun. Since nothing like this book exists, it might have a fighting chance if I remembered E. Lynne Harris.   Harris was a bisexual black author who self-published this first book in 1991. Like other authors in those pre-Web days, Harris drove around in a car loaded with copies. But unlike o...