Category: Author Musings

If you go to see your doctor and need a prescription, you will see his or her fingers flying over the keyboard and in seconds a prescription form will slip out of the printer. Very different from the old days when your GP scribbled something illegible on a pad of prescription forms. But it occurred to me that…

Reading For Free  Most writers may hope, but do not expect, to be properly remunerated for their hard work or to make a living out of it. The explosion of e-books and Kindle self publishing, with books selling far more cheaply than paper books on the shelves of a bookshop, has increased the fear that…

Yesterday evening I went to a seminar (don’t ask). As I arrived, the sun was shining, the leaves rustling in the breeze. Three hours later, as I stepped outside the building, the roads glistened with rainwater and the scent of spring hung in the air. We paused, four of us who happened to be exiting…

As we strolled along the Thames one day I wondered where musicians, writers, filmmakers and artists would be without rivers and bridges. We walked from Waterloo Station along the South Bank to Tate Modern, stopping to enjoy the views from Waterloo Bridge. Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks, Waterloo Bridge, a 1930 play that became films in 1931 and 1940…

It was a night like no other, a night that would go down in literary legend. To be precise, three days in June 1816, the Year Without a Summer. Severe climate abnormalities were caused by a combination of an historic low in solar activity and major volcanic eruptions, capped by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the…

…here’s a wee reflective piece, targeted mainly for my Author pals, but many of our dear and invaluable readerships will no doubt understand it, too… one of the weirdest things to grasp as a new scribbler is the sum’time-elusive ‘Author’s Voice’… that quality which seeps into and exudes from yer writing… identifying the Writer by…

There’s no time like the present, especially for authors. How long does the present last; a year, a week, a day, a second? My novel ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’ was set in the present; that was where I intended it to remain. I did not want to name a year; the characters lived in London and…

Just got back off my holidays. Lovely time. Devon, then home. Scotland, then home. Maybe not the most adventurous of choices, but it was fun, and that’s the most important thing. It’s when you go away, and then come back, that you realise what kind of person you are. There are people who can get…