Authors Electric

I thought of calling this blog ‘Unusual sexual encounters’ to try to attract a few more punters, but on reflection…  It’s really about trying to capture a time in a particular place/ landscape. The idea was triggered by a recent challenge from the Hedgehog Press. They send out one a month and I usually manage a response, although I’ve never even been shortlisted for publication. Heigh ho. It just helps to have a nudge to my post-covid brain. I’ve written before about being inspired by landscapes, but the challenge gave me a different perspective – not so much inspiration as need to capture something   of the essence of that place, that time. Something to look back on, to invoke the same feelings as were felt then. If I had an ounce of artistic talent, I might have made a sketch – livelier and more personal than a photograph and from my own hand, but I have only words. The image from the Hedgehog Press’s challenge is of a dreary, grubby corridor reminiscent of a disused psych...

Image Credits:- Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Photos of The Hayes, Swanwick were taken by me, Allison Symes.   I will still be at the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School when this goes live. This event is my big writing event of the year. It is a joy to get together with other writers, enjoy a range of workshops, and convivial company. I come back inspired, refreshed, and tired! All that creative energy takes it out of me  but in a good way.  That made me wonder about holiday reading and writing. Do you read and/or write more or less during the summer? That answer may depend I suspect on whether you have school age children or other commitments. For me, the writing dips as I take much needed time off but the blessings of being a flash fiction writer is if I only write a couple of hundred words a day, I’ve probably completed a story in that word count. I also prepare and schedule blogs in advance including this one. I love scheduling! It means I can take ...

The further from reality something is, the less scary it becomes. Daleks are so obviously a creation of an effects department that physically they are not terribly frightening – it’s when they speak that all this changes. Although their voices are mechanical and emotionless the fact that they have voices at all suggests thought processes equally different from our own, but not so alien that they are beyond our comprehension. This may be why extra-terrestrials have so frequently been depicted as having an adapted human form – Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars , and the Vogons in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy both have vaguely human body plans, so that we can imagine their emotions from the expressions on their toad-like faces. The closer something is to something we know, the more disturbing slight changes become. In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline , Coraline’s mother has been replaced by a mother with boot-button eyes, but she is otherwise the same, although her character is very different. Fi...

The brain is an amazing organ - it literally works twenty-four hours a day, whether we are asleep or awake, making sure our bodies continue to work to their optimum capacity. As writers we use our brains continually, taking in stimulus from all our senses and storing them as ideas we can use in books. Even when we are asleep we often dream of plots that can be used in a book. I don't know about you but I find ideas zinging into my brain almost every second of the day and bouncing around in there like an acrobatic troop on steroids. Yet, I am sure you will agree, these ideas don't stay there for long as they are usually booted out by the next brilliant idea that claims squatter's rights. This constant stimulation can be draining and exhausting but we creative types struggle to switch it off. So, what can we do to organise things better? Quite a bit it turns out.  1. We all know this one but write things down. I'm putting it here as it is possibly the number one way we ca...