Authors Electric

I've just spent a few days in Madrid. It's one of my favourite cities - and I've spent this morning trying to work out just what I love about it. I can highlight things like way people sit about in cafes for hours, as if they have no work or homes to go to. I can highlight the magnificent art galleries - I could happily drown in art here. I can even wax lyrical about the traffic, which often crawl sat snails' pace but without the cacophony of hooting that besets many other European cities. But it's more than that. Somehow the city gets under my skin, far deeper than the place where words hide. I simply feel at home there. Nevertheless, with this blog post to write, I felt I ought to try to be a bit more specific. And so I looked at my photos - I took very few on this trip, and so maybe this selection can tell me something about why I love this city. I'll begin in Plaza Mayor: The Plaza is vast, with plenty of street cafes and street entertainers and to...

If you’re no longer in the first flush of youth but still hanker after picking up that old tennis racket, I can heartily recommend it.  But as you step onto the court for the first time, you may well have a sense of foreboding, especially if, like me, you’ve spent the years in between trying to hit a smaller and harder (but crucially stationary) ball on the boundless fairways of a golf course.  You will discover your legs still work - but not at any speed. You do have a degree of hand-eye coordination - but everything around you happens too fast. When you eventually make contact the ball can go anywhere - but never where you need it to go (a bit like golf, then!) That vital connection between thought and action has gone, leaving you looking very sheepish as you lumber forward when the ball has already bounced twice, or optimistically shouting ‘great shot’ for something cruising past you at moderate speed. Suburban tennis - bliss! However, you’ve had the luc...

You've probably come across the parable of the blind men and the elephant, which is thought to have originated in India although there are several different versions. Basically, a group of blind men come across an elephant, of which they have no previous knowledge, and each one encounters a different part of the creature. The blind man who feels a sharp tusk forms a completely different view of an elephant from the man who feels one of its legs, and since none of them can agree what it looks like they eventually come to blows. After my last month's post about Wi-Fi , I was going to blind you with more figures about 5G and the radiation levels in my town, but since my creativity has happily returned after disabling my home Wi-Fi and staying out of high-intensity signal areas as much as possible, here's a bang-up-to-date 5G version of the elephant parable, which I'm calling 'The Blind Girls and the Unicorn'. (No sexism intended - just balancing out the men of t...

Considerably to my surprise, I’ve just reached my ¾ century. How did I get here, I ask myself, and so fast? What about all that stuff that happened in between my arrival in Melksham towards the end of WW2 and now? Looking back at the in-between is like coming across a patchwork of bits and pieces, with holes in. A ragbag. Here are some verses from the early bits of it: First: I am learning to knit on my Great-gran’s knee In the cushions of her lap. Needles click, wool spools, ‘In, round, through, jump him off!’ she croons. With a twitch of her hand, a twitch of her knee, The stitch and I take flight. The stitch drops into the knitted wool, I fall into her downy warmth. And then:  Hop-picking time; we all turned out Bar those that were ailing and the working men. Smallest of all, I had a special bin; I picked the papery flowers into Great-grandad’s hat. Long years had shaped it to his head; it was brimful of him, Seasoned by weather, time and...

A writing friend was bemoaning the fact that, being a fairly prolific writer of short fiction, she often loses track of the markets where she has submitted work, and the fact that many of those short fiction markets fail to notify unsuccessful writers does not help – and I feel her pain. With editor’s hats on at Alchemy Press we make a point of always notifying both successful and unsuccessful writers when we have made our selection as a matter of common courtesy; which can be quite a task when those submissions have numbered anything up to four hundred per anthology. However, I can see how larger markets who have thousands of stories sent in would draw a line at individual emails and many have a line in their guidelines giving a time limit after which writers can assume they have been unsuccessful.   Elsewhere technology has reached a point where most of those use automated replies. That may seem impersonal when you have slogged over a story and sent it out with high hopes...