Authors Electric

Recently (20th Dec) the author and editor Diana Athill was interviewed on the Today programme for her 100 th birthday. Happy birthday! One of the things Ms Athill mentioned in her interview was her first memory, which was of falling into a puddle and being hauled out again. It set me musing on my own earliest memories. I can think of several, and because we moved house two weeks after my 4 th birthday I can accurately date them as being three or even two years old at the time. Most of those images involved getting into trouble with Mother. And most often came out of trying to keep up with two elder brothers (then aged seven and nine) who did not want their tiny little sister to tag along in the first place. Memory 1/ Throwing a monumental hissy fit because I could see my brothers building a snowman in the garden. I clearly recall standing in my cot and shaking the bars, whilst my mother stood at the sink washing up. (I was sick often and the kitchen was heated overnight ...

The digital age. Love it or hate it, the digital age is here to stay. Do you remember when you got your first home computer? Your first smart phone? In the past 25 years we have moved into a time when nearly all homes have at least one computer, and cellphones are a fixture in our world. Correspondence, business, entertainment and nearly all aspects of our lives are input into our digital files.                                                         T o me, as an artist, the digital age is a double-edged sword. I first encountered this creative shift as a singer-songwriter and recording artist in the mid 1990 ’s. Music went from being recorded on magnetic tape to being stored in a digital computer file. MP3’s, a compact (and poorer) version of the original recording, made distribution, copying – and eventually pirating – very easy. I could cre...

Personally, I love the snow, but I know not everyone feels like that. Something that can transform the world overnight into a fairyland (as long as you’re not in the middle of a city) is just simply magical. But I think part of it is a childhood memory of my first time ever trip abroad. It was with my father in 1964, when I was fifteen. We went for a month, over Christmas and New Year, and the Cold War was in full swing. I stared open-mouthed at soldiers with submachine guns, at bullet holes in windows, at streets filled with trams and lorries and horses and carts, and hardly a car in sight other than those driven by party officials. It was my father’s first visit back to the Poland he’d left during the war, and it was a dramatic experience. I was lucky in that my relatives lived in Krakow, a beautiful historic city – but better still, for me, was that it was within reach of Zakopane, in the Tatra mountains. We took the train, which zig-zagged uphill for four hours (it’s two hours ...

We are writers and yet we each have lives. Maybe we have families, spouses, jobs. Our bodies require fuelling and sometime we even have to get up from our computers or we'll literally bottom out. All that is understood. But what else do you do that fuels your passions besides write? And I'm not talking about hobbies. I've always rebelled against that word. The term "hobby" can't be applied to activities which are so necessary to one's being that they are placed in priority slightly to the left of breathing. I'm speaking of activities which require full-frontal commitment, something so important to your well-being that you can't imagine going without. I knit. So, are you thinking socks, patterns, long pokey needles, or scratchy things you mom used to make? Fair enough, but that's not what I get up to these days. I prefer something more off-grid, something unpredictable, unfettered, even wild. Just like writing, I knit as a way...

I’ve been into this writin’ malarkey for a while now.  In my time I’ve been on writing courses, good and bad, and I've read at least a dozen books on how to write (the best actually being How NOT to write a Novel by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittlemark) - b ut as a consequence of crossing over to the dark side quite a few things I've held to be truisms over my 'writing' years have been thrown into a new light now that I'm on the other side of the fence. So here are three Golden Rules of Writing that I now think new writers should treat with extreme caution... 1.   Read More It’s easy for new writers to translate this to mean: ‘Read more books by historical literary greats, because if you could learn to write like them, you will become, de facto, a great writer.’ Once, on a diploma writing course, our class was asked to pick over that famous opening scene of Bleak House… the one with London in the fog.   For our little writing group,...

How are your New Year’s resolutions going? Fell by the wayside already? Mine have. Eat more healthily, do more exercise… yes, well!  But I will start eating more healthily soon. Nearly all the Christmas chocolates, cake and biscuits have been eaten up. And as the weather starts to improve, I’ll be more inspired to go out for walks and get to the gym... honestly! Writing aspirations and resolutions are always top of my list. And it helps when you can share with writing buddies. My Monday night writing class has been going for quite a few years now. The photo here shows our core members enjoying a post-Christmas/New Year party last Monday. In between eating and drinking, we shared our plans and aspirations for 2018. And while lots of people poo-poo the idea of making promises to yourself you never keep, I honestly think it’s a good idea to set yourself new challenges at the beginning of the year. Only don’t beat yourself up if you fail to keep them. ...

It's never easy, putting an old love to pasture in order to romp with a new one. In fact, it's often ill-advised and sure to bring on a hailstorm of disapproval and contempt. We may be left with nothing when the new love walks or we wish that s/he would. I knew all this. But, even so, when the Muse whistled to me 'Time to change!' I said so long to my old love: I'd used Moleskine notebooks for many years, in love with their various  thoses :  those durable, finely bound covers...those handy back-end pouches...those premium quality pages... I loved way the Moleskines fit in my coat pocket. And I loved the sense of belonging to a club of writers and artists who'd all been Moleskine lovers. In the course of writing a novel, I'd use one notebook for research and notes, then others for various parts of draft 1. I had no way of knowing my love would ever end. And yet it did on 12/23 when I read Lev Butts' AE blog on last-minute Christmas gift ide...