Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love reading and writing non-fiction but I came to the latter relatively recently. It was a result of discovering the joys of writing for an online magazine, Chandler’s Ford Today , I dipped my literary toes into the wonderful world of factual writing.  I’ve recently had the joy of being published in print for the first time in non-fiction with my chapter Why Write Flash Fiction and Short Stories in Creativity Matters: Find Your Passion for Writing , which has been compiled and edited by Wendy H Jones of this parish. So another reason to love non-fiction then. I hope to develop my non-fiction “string” to my writing “bow” further. My first love though is fiction (and especially humour, fairytales, fantasy etc) and it always will be. I also became a published author in that form long before anything of mine appeared in non-fiction. But is non-fiction still considered the poor relation to fiction? If it is, I ...

 Setting is one of those things that is really important, and it can be the starting point for a plot. I have found the photographs I have taken on my travels to be particularly important, as they evoke memories. Extreme landscapes are the best, and in this post I’ll concentrate on ones without people. Next month I’ll do cities. The emptiest landscapes – other than being at sea – are deserts. My first experience of desert was when I was eighteen, and I went to Morocco. In those days it was not a tourist destination at all, and I was captivated by the open spaces and the feeling of freedom it gave me. I grew up in North London, before we moved to Surrey when I was ten, and my earliest memories are grey; concrete, fog, smoke, post-war austerity. I hated it. Ever since, I have sought out landscapes with no obvious trace of human interference. I have experienced deserts in Tunisia, Egypt, Mongolia… and they have all been different.   Cold is as atmospheric as heat, and my hol...

As I write this, it is National Cozy Mystery Day, so social media is awash with Cozy Mysteries, which I have found a great deal of fun. As I was noodling over what to write for this months' blog post it got me thinking how we can use any National Day to market our books. There are a veritable fest of national days to choose from on any given day but I thought I would issue a fun challenge to you. Below, I have chosen two for each day of October. The challenge is to use one of them to market your book(s) for the 31 days of October. This is a follow on from last month's  blog post when I talked about a challenge that others had set up and why I felt they were a good idea. So, here is my challenge and my my thirty-one choices: 1st      World Smile Day     National Hair Day 2nd     National Name Your Car Day     National Custodial Workers Day 3rd     National Techies day     National Boyfriend Day 4th    ...

  I love listing to music when working in my kitchen. The music has to match my mood, so yesterday, I decided to pop a cd in that a friend in Ukraine gave us. They’re Russian hymns. My religious knowledge of Russian doesn’t go anywhere beyond the words for Heaven and Jesus. Not very helpful to understand songs, you might think, but I just love listening to them. I even have favourites, with one of them moving me every time I listen to it. Without knowing what it’s about... What kind of listener or reader are you? Do you need to understand it all to be moved by words? My husband does not like listening to songs in other languages. “I have no idea what it’s about, and the songs all sound the same,” he says. Maybe it’s because I used to read my brother’s books when I was little. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t understand those books, but it never spoilt my reading fun. I remember my first book in English, Anne of Green Gables. I was eleven, and I started by looking up all the unknow...

  Doody goes by many names: kaka, poo, poop, dog do or shite, to give just a few of the faves. And one thing we all have in common is that we come to fear it throughout our lives in different ways. When you’re trying to write a first novel, you’d damned well better fear going out to market it with doody all over your shoes: typos, grammos, hackneyed phrasing, slothful pacing, etc. Then, when it’s time to pitch the book, be sure: it’s frighteningly easy to send off a query that’s reeking of poop. But even later on, when we're somewhat established, we may feel threatened by the stink of many names. One day when we hear Duty call with what may be our big break we know we're right to tremble though we pray there's a chance that we'll end up with this:   Enough of generalities. Here’s my true scary story.    For over thirty years, I’ve had a thing for the ancient Roman and Greek classics. As I wrote in last month’s blog, I grew more and more intrigued by the study...

It’s not often that you’ll find me giving advice in a blog. Or indeed, anywhere. I know some stuff, but the longer I live, the more I realise that really, my sum of wisdom is as tiny as a grain of sparkling sand on a white, sun-drenched beach lapped by an azure ocean. (My goodness, you can tell I’m a writer. How about that for a poetic image?)   Anyway, today’s advice, such as it is, is this. Go to the library. As often as you can. And make sure you tell the librarians what a cracking job they’re doing. When eventually I ascend to the heavenly realms, I am reasonably sure that there will be a vast, well-stocked library somewhere about the place, with lots of cosy seating by sunny windows, good coffee, non-fattening cakes (it is heaven, after all) and perhaps some of the authors themselves ready for a nice long chat about their inspiration and their world view.   There are all kinds of libraries out there and last week I found out about one which I will probably never visit. ...

  The morning of 9/11 I was getting ready to go out to play Mah Jong at the deputy High Commissioner’s house in Kingston. Tuesdays were a regular date for a group of ex-pat wives to meet and, over a game or two, chat about how we were coping with life in Jamaica. As usual it was a hot and humid day. The apartment was shady, blinds drawn to keep out the sun and since it wasn’t quite time to leave, I switched on the TV. I can’t remember what was on, but the programme was interrupted by a news flash and a shot of a plane heading for a tall building in New York. At first I thought it was some kind of a hoax, then moments later there was another plane and it became obvious that this was for real.   The game of course was cancelled. Some of us did meet up and as news of the disaster continued to come in the atmosphere became more and more serious as people realised the world had changed for ever. For those who had lost friends and family members this was a truly horrific day. Fo...