Authors Electric

It's August 22nd - or at least it should be if the blogger.com scheduling has done its thing properly and put this up on time.  I'm on holiday - hence the need for the scheduling - and I suspect I'm not alone. In fact, I definitely won't be alone as this is my honeymoon - assuming, once again, that everything has gone to plan. So it seems like a lousy time for another blog on the business aspects of electric books, or even another one on the creative side of novel writing - it's the holiday and we're all reading, aren't we? But if you're not and it's because you're stuck for ideas, then I'm your white knight: here's a quick tour of some of the summer reading lists - I defy you not to find something here to your taste. The Richard and Judy Summer Book Club is a good place to start with ten titles. I'm a thriller writer, so the one that jumps out at me is the new Robert Harris novel, The Fear Index - I'm definitely going t...

This post has been published in S parks, A Year In E-Publishing - An Authors Electric Anthology 2011-2012 . It has therefore been temporarily reverted to draft status to comply with amazon KDP Select's requirements.

This post has been published in S parks, A Year In E-Publishing - An Authors Electric Anthology 2011-2012 . It has therefore been temporarily reverted to draft status to comply with amazon KDP Select's requirements.

This post has been published in S parks, A Year In E-Publishing - An Authors Electric Anthology 2011-2012 . It has therefore been temporarily reverted to draft status to comply with amazon KDP Select's requirements.

I'm currently busy on the final draft of a new novel called Line Dancing, set in a small Scottish village, of the kind I have lived in for many years. I've been working my way steadily through a print-out of Line Dancing, correcting and rewriting as I go. I always like to do these late corrections on paper and then type them up afterwards, even though I write the first draft straight onto the computer, and follow that up with a great number of on-screen rewrites. While I've been doing this, I've been thinking about a previous novel, Bird of Passage . I suppose there are vague similarities, although Bird of Passage is much more of a family saga; a twentieth century historical novel  spanning some 50 years. On the other hand, if I had to place Line Dancing into any category, it would be 'contemporary women's fiction, romance with a literary twist'. It's a love story which tackles serious issues in a rural setting. And perhaps that's one reason why...

This post has been published in S parks, A Year In E-Publishing - An Authors Electric Anthology 2011-2012 . It has therefore been temporarily reverted to draft status to comply with amazon KDP Select's requirements.

Who am I? How do I define myself? Of all the seething morass of components that make up my life, which ones survive every sifting through the filters of experience and introspection to become the things by which and in relation to which I think of myself – however much I may be right or wrong in such thinking, if it is possibly to be mistaken about who one is – as me? I’m not going to enter (too much) into that minefield of defining what constitutes the psychological core of the novel, or try to make comparisons across the arts by saying the novel is the literary symphony, a unified, Hegelian, progressive, developmental narrative. Though the fact that people *do* have such discussions is a good enough segue into the observation that for me as a writer the novel, or longform fiction, offers a way of exploring characters’ sense of identity, the choices they make or rather the process by which they come to decide how they decide who they are. In order to capture what it is ...