Authors Electric

It’s been a funny few weeks for me. After my week off last month, I managed to catch a rather unpleasant bug and ended up in bed for a week. On the plus side, this gave me a lot of time to read (as I couldn’t do much more than that). It kept me sane (I get rather grumpy when unwell, as I don’t like to be inactive, and I knew I had a fair few jobs planned for the garden), and at least allowed me to make inroads into the huge TBR pile we have – last count had over 500 books still to be read… I also jumped about genres and styles, from horror, to crime fiction, with drama and science fiction in the mix somewhere. But one of the books I most enjoyed was a work of non-fiction, by John Nichol (the navigator from the Tornado shot down during the first Gulf War), called Eject! Eject! . Pauline, my wife, picked this up for my birthday, thinking it would interest me as I used to work on ejection seats. It’s a fascinating read, charting the development of egress systems from the ...

 We finally got there! Later than planned, REWIND published on Amazon on Thursday 11th July. It's still not on IngramSpark though. Sigh. Hopefully it will be in the next few days. I think relief was my main emotion rather than excitement. There was barely time to think about it all before going off to Harrogate for the Theakston Crime Writing Festival. And then when I came back, it was straight into preparing for my book launch. As my other books came out during the Covid years, I didn't have launches for them. So, it was lovely to finally share the celebration with friends and family. I have to admit that at first, I wanted a Waterstones launch because that's what authors have. It wasn't possible though so I booked an evening at West Barnes Library. It's become my second home over the last six years with our author events happening there. It was definitely the right place for the REWIND launch! We had a wonderful evening and I don't think it could have gone any...

So I’m browsing around on Facebook – as you do – looking for something more interesting than writing a blog post for this month. As usual, time has run away with me and somehow we are already at the start of a new month. And I come across this post:   www.facebook.com/groups/20Booksto50k/posts/7481634218609644/   Now this is 20BooksTo50K® – a group dedicated to the business of self-publishing and I expect many of you have heard of it and/or are already members. Posts in this group are usually fact-checked, accurate and relevant. I say usually , because nothing is infallible and there’s no point encouraging people who just want to argue, and there are gazillions of other wannabe writers’ groups on Facebook that are probably not worth the screentime.  Anyway, this post struck me as something of a watershed for indie writers using KDP. To summarise – it appears that Amazon is going down the route of Identity Verification. Like I said, I generally trust posts in this group an...

I wrote something here about my work in progress, a kind of alternate history mystery, a few months ago, and it is still in progress today.  This is not because it's ridiculously long - nothing I write will ever exceed about 80,000 words, and ideally I like to wrap everything up way before that - but because in more or less every chapter there is something I need to research, and the things I imagine I need to research have now descended to a level of fine detail that is actually anathema to someone like me. When I studied history, some years ago now, I realised I didn't want to know any of the detail, as I was very much more interested in broad generalities - the great sweeping movements of history, not where the Duke of Wellington had his hair trimmed (I leave that kind of thing to Georgette Heyer). Of course there is no escape from some of the fine detail when you're writing a novel, and when researching almost anything it's often by building up the layers of detail ...

Who can put a value on a star? stars with numbers for a quiz You can buy a star from the internet – the standard star package is just £19.99. It doesn’t take much googling to find it. But I’m not talking about celestial beings but rather star ratings given freely, which especially delight an indie author. I’m fortunate to have picked up quite a few for my memoir and I love how they twinkle but for some reason I find it harder to give them away. star stickers from a writing workshop “You’ve never left me a review?” said a writing friend at the weekend. She was quite shocked when I told her. “Um no! I don’t mind writing about a book explaining what I enjoyed but I find the star rating difficult.” I probably tied myself in knots trying to explain my reasoning, so I thought I’d write a blog about it and see if I can untangle my thoughts and see what is going on in my head. Firstly, I HATE filling in any forms that require rating something – so often I plump for the middle answe...

" The more things change, the more they stay the same," French journalist  Alphonse Karr wrote in an 1849 column.  Change is a constant of life, usually by increments in culture and politics, occasionally accelerated. This is one of those times. Like most Americans, this past week my inamorata, the noted artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris , and I watched seemingly earthshaking events unfold daily. July 2024 shifted .  It feels like 1968, a year of assassinations and upheaval that shaped our personal lives along with politics. Inspired by Don Delill o's masterful novel  Underworld  mingling characters' inner lives with the Cold War, I made the first six months of 1968 a protagonist in my memoirist novella, " Our Own Kind , " featured in my 2018 collection: " Sometimes Ridiculous ."     Eleanor and I are old enough to remember moments when we experienced political change as personal, not just as a spectator sport in Washington.  Karr's cynical quote...

 An Introduction to Romantic Poetry This month I was completely out of ideas but then I remembered Elizabeth Kay's excellent piece about poetry on AuthorsElectric last month. I looked back on the subject in my files and there I found A n Introduction to Romantic Poetry, relating to a course I taught in Northampton not so very long ago. I was also reminded of a fantastic group of poetry students, some of whom I still meet up with on Zoom. We read through this introduction together at the beginning of the course, breaking off to discuss various points, such as my visit to Christchurch Priory below in 1970, so here goes... Christchurch Priory   ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven’, so wrote Wordsworth in his 13 book poem,  The Prelude , which was subtitled,  Growth of a Poet’s   Mind , and which wasn’t published in its entirety until after his death in 1850. The lines are about the French Revolution and in 1791 Wordswor...