Authors Electric

The Baby Group (pen & ink with pastel) The Baby Group I have for a while belonged to a group of artists who occasionally exhibit together in North Wales. For Easter Saturday, the group was invited to produce an exhibition of work illustrating the concept of ‘Liminality’ — the in-between space between one life experience, career, or similar, and another. The artwork was to accompany an afternoon of readings and meditation on Easter Saturday — those who are familiar with the Christian faith will recognise this as the day between Jesus’s crucifixion and death and his rising from the tomb on Easter morning. As we act out the events of the Passion, God, in a sense, is now dead, and the Saturday before Easter Sunday is a holy and breathless day as we await celebrating his Resurrection. Thinking about Liminality, I knew I wanted to create something positive to illustrate a time of suspended life and ‘waiting’, and sifting through my thoughts I remembered something from many years ago. Som...

  Funny old business, this writing lark. I never know when and how it’s going to take me. If only I could be one of those admirable people who have their writing days organised and keep office hours. I expect their workplaces are tidy too. Sigh. I saw a slogan on a t-shirt once – something about how necessary chaos is if one is to be the dancing star. Great-sounding rubbish. I sometimes wonder how productive I might have been if I’d had the capacity for organisation, or even tidiness. Idle speculation. Lost cause. The writing I’ve been most pleased with has come, not from study but chance. A place, an event, a passing thought, a memory, and something drops into my brain from somewhere and a story or poem or play begins. As for writing to order – a brief, a theme for a submission, sometimes it sets off a spark and sometimes it’s a dead loss even when the topic seems appealing. I do struggle with it, I try, but can only produce dross which no amount of effort will make better. I’...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I plan an outline of any story or blog I write and find doing this reveals shapes I use. For a blog, my writing usually has a linear shape. I want to make certain points. I start at A and finish at Z. Stories have more variety. I have used circular tales where I start with an opening line and close the story with it. All the action happens in the “middle”. I like the use of repetition for the opening and closing lines here. It gives good “echoes”. I use linear for stories a lot but vary the format. For example, I’ve written A to B stories as “normal” prose, as diaries, as letters, as monologues etc.  Even when I use twist endings and know how a tale will finish first, it is still a linear shape. The line is working “backwards” when I do this. Do I decide the shape of the story in advance? Generally, no. A character occurs to me. A situation occurs to me. Sometimes just from that I can tell this situation would w...

In the UK we tend to be very preoccupied with the weather. Which may seem strange, when we are not a country of great extremes. A few snowflakes are a talking point, and rain is a disaster when a cricket match is in jeopardy. The old joke about what to do in a drought; a lot of men in white walk onto a field, the shaman tosses a coin, and it starts to rain. We did have a real heatwave last summer, but we weren’t prepared for it and few houses have air conditioning. It’s just not needed normally – open the window for a bit. Of course, you may well need the central heating on instead for a day or two in August. We get fog, but not that often, we get ice, but not that often either. Which is why it is such a shock when we travel abroad and find out how well they cope with such disasters as a couple of centimetres of snow, or a bit of wind. The public transport elsewhere always seems to function. If a bus is two minutes late in Tromsø , up in the Arctic, people look at their watches, shake ...

  For the past three years I have been an editor for an online magazine for women; for the last six months I have been the Editor in Chief and Publisher. I enjoyed every minute of that experience but increasingly my passion for helping other writers grew and I knew it was time for pastures new. Therefore I retired the previous magazine (the last issue was published today) and a brand new magazine will emerge blazing on to the scene in August this year; that's 2023 in case you are reading this in the future. I am excited about my new venture and thought I would point out a few things I have learned along the way.  Choose a Title Choosing a title is a lot harder than you think. Seriously, every single thing we came up with was already taken in some format - company, instagram handle, twitter handle, Facebook page - you name it, every single name was gone. Four stressful days and hundreds of names later and, rather than turning to the bottle, I turned to AI. Whatever you think of...

Get this: over the course of a couple of days two handfuls of distinctive words soared above my news feed like wildings of fireflies. The first one took me by surprise. It had nothing to do with writing. And it was  almost buried in comments on an ad for a pricey cardio test. But, at a glance, the author's personality stood out...she took a stance against the medical establishment...and ended with a war cry: I don't need this. I eat fruit and vegetables. So stuff your test. I came across these words  in the lobby of a Tucson cardio medical mill, where scores of us were processed, billed in advance, and then herded to assorted rooms for exam--then scheduled for further batteries of tests when some of us at least were feeling reasonably well. While I thought about this, I reflected on how these 13 words had led me to seek out the author's FB page, where I filed a Friend request quickly. The next day I chanced on a quote from a poet mourning 'a San Francisco that sadly is...

 If you click the above image you'll hear one of my favorite songs of all time, from the master, Dexter Gordon, who starred in the movie 'Round Midnight Which, if you haven't seen, and you even remotely like jazz, you oughtta. OMGosh it's a great film. Where I am these days we're heading into what they have dubbed June-Gloom. It's the last cool respite before summer hits Los Angeles. When I lived on the East Coast I was seldom a fan of rain, but in Los Angeles, rain, gloom, it's sort of for pretend, not real, like so many other things, and you can put on your role for the day, whether it be like Singing in the Rain , or Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon, another favorite jazz album of mine. When I began writing, I was probably in third grade, and started writing skits along the lines of my two skit heroes at the time, Lilly Tomlin and Flip Wilson. My skits starred either a Charlie Chaplin like character, or a crotchety old lady years ahead of Momma from Carol Burne...