Authors Electric

As we enter May, the sun is shining and some of us are looking forward to our summer holidays. No doubt some of us booked it months ago, although some of us favour spontaneity and book ‘last minute.com’! As someone who works a lot of the time at hours which some would find unsavoury – evenings, weekends and stepping off stage at 10 pm, I thought about how much I enjoy work. In fact, I feel a bit lost without it. However, I still need a break. So, what do holidays mean to us, and how can we make the most of them?   Sometimes you just have to stop. In our hectic world, we must find a way to genuinely switch off the noise, as tempting as it may be to find the hotel with the fastest internet connection. For me, it’s difficult to separate home and work life because I mostly work at home. There’s always the ironing pile looming like an undiscovered mountain range, or the depths of the dishwasher to dive into; housework often squats at the back of my mind threatening to de-rail the writin...

 A Scottish hero is celebrating his 20th anniversary of appearing in print this year. He has hunted for lost princes, skirmished at Stirling, and joined a clan gathering, driving himself there in his Whirry-Bang. He doesn't travel alone. He has his English friend, Rupert...     His rather posh looking lady friend, Jeannie...          And his young friend, Angus...     Off they go to Skye, and the Falkirk Wheel. They visit the great Scottish capital, Edinburgh, of course, and also the second city, Glasgow. At Glamis they meet a ghost, or think they do -- and what Scottish hero could fail to hunt for the Loch Ness Monster?  Hamish is, in fact, a haggis, his full name being Hamish McHaggis. We all know that haggisses really roam wild and free throughout the Highlands, only caught by the most  skilled of Highland trackers. I confess to a shameless plug here, because Hamish was created by my good friend, Linda Strachan, working in ...

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman "3 million copies sold" boasts the cover of this book, which makes me wonder why I've taken so long to read it, considering it was first published in 2017 and comes with a glowing collection of positive reviews. Well, I confess I have  come across a few of those reviews over the years, and for some unknown reason formed the opinion that it's a Young Adult (YA) issues title, which as a fantasy/historical fan I don't normally enjoy. That's partly why I am doing this year of reading at Authors Electric, allowing different types of books to cross my path and sampling authors and genres more widely than I used to, in the hope I'll discover a new author and/or genre to enjoy. Within a few pages, I was rooting for the heroine. Eleanor Oliphant (not her real name - she has grown up in care) has an office job in accounts that she seems to be good at, lives alone in a small flat, runs her life to a strict routine ...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I didn’t start out writing in the short fiction forms. I began by seeing if I could write a novel. I did. It went through numerous rewrites, had professional editing twice, and was longlisted in a Debut Novel competition. It remains unpublished. I became tired of the rejections  so I turned my attention to the shorter fiction forms.  It took a long time for my stories to become publishable but I wasn’t surprised. I’d been reading plenty of sensible writing advice and still do. You are warned learning to get your work up to publication standard does take time. I saw this as fair game (and again still do). I did find quickly one advantage to writing short stories was I could get far more written in the time it took me to write my novel, edited, reworked, edited again etc. I was also able to get feedback on the short stories which I used to help me improve.  That eventually led to my first story in...

  So last month I wrote about extreme cold, when the temperature in Finland was -34.5⁰. Last week I went to the Gambia, where it was over 40⁰. I am sitting here in Surrey writing this covered with insect bites, and really feeling the cold even though it isn’t cold at all. It’s just the contrast. Contrast is so important when you’re writing. When you shift from one setting to another you have to think about all the senses that make it come alive, and how things differ from your previous location. Visually: bright or dull? Busy or quiet? Sound: Voices? Traffic? Birdsong? Music? Silence? Smell: Foliage, flowers, cooking, wet dogs, drains? Taste: bland or exotic? Sweet or savoury? Familiar or unfamiliar? And finally, touch. That’s when you really notice the heat. Can you walk across a tiled floor by a swimming pool without burning your feet? Does picking up a glass of cold beer/Coke/Wonjo juice feel like heaven? Are you just as hot as night? What do you wear, and how well do you sleep?...

  One way or another, all writers must solve one great challenge: tracking and pacing the flow of their work and timing the release of essential information. Fiction or nonfiction, mystery or history, hack work or high art...All afford plenty of room for writers to bring their singular talents to bear. Tell a tale in reverse or jump cut back and forth from the present to the past. Interweave philosophy with a gripping narrative as in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  The sky's the limit, baby. But know this when starting out:  Timing is still everything. And no matter how many chapters you have, the book's structure must be solid and efficient. The release of clues or key insights must be impeccably timed. And, ultimately, your work should have its own symmetry. I'm in trouble if my book has three distinctive parts, but the opening movement runs for 150 pages, while the middle runs for 90 and the ending stops short at 50. Just as bad, I doomed if I give the book...