Authors Electric

In Her Defence : Bunch Courtney Investigation #2  has hit the stores at last! There is only so much one can say about a book launch.  We have all been there with the drinks and cakes - in this case it was tea and homemade cakes. We went with the alcohol free a s the launch was in the City Central Library, Hanley on a Saturday lunchtime, plus tea and cakes rather fitted the WW2 ethos of a tea party. Books were bought and signed and much chatter occurs. I gave a short reading and then a Q&A session, which was interesting in that many of the questions revolved around my research - how much did I do, was it online or in hard copy etc.   The reading was a little over ten minutes but the questions and answers went on for almost half an hour. But it was great fun. The blog tour on the other hand was more tiring in many ways.   Fielding contacts across various platforms every day was a full time occupation! So here it is – In Her Defenc...

I sometimes feel that I'm not very helpful in this blog. Some posts by other people are full of information and suggestions, more likely to be to do with how and what to write than baking scones. I don't know if I'm meant to dispense handy tips from whatever imagined reservoir of expertise I might be supposed to have (non-clumsy sentences being at the end of that list, judging from that one!) But a couple of nights ago I had a revelation, and I'm going to share it with you. Pin back your lug’oles! Trying to look serious for once I was sitting in my bed (one of my favourite writing stations) flipping through the Kindle notes I have made on a textbook I've been working from. I made the notes as they occurred to me, and they're all germane to a novel that I have in hand. I knew the novel had several specific points I needed to research more, or to polish up, and as I read the textbook over days and weeks I put in a Kindle bookmark at any point that struck ...

Somebody asked on a facebook forum what else writers were doing with their lives besides writing (and day jobs for many of us). What fires us up away from the keyboard or notebook? What happens in the rest of our lives that inspires us? I took a 2 year interior design course at the local college a while back. One evening (3 hours) per week with a lot of course work to be done in our own time. It wasn't cheap, but it gave me proper "student" status with a student card which came in handy for all the art materials I had to buy. From about two dozen starters, I think 5 of us finished the course and got a proper qualification. I've made all my own soft furnishings ever since I've had my own house. Years later, we bought a Victorian cottage to renovate (thinking we weren't able to have kids - there's nothing like country air, a bit of DIY and a fairy ring for fertility...), so I took the course to find out how to do things properly. I learned a lot, made...