Diary of a First-Time Novelist

The problem with a blog is that, like keeping a diary, it’s harder to find time for it when you’re busy doing things about which it might subsequently be interesting to read. Consequently old journals are full of fascinating accounts of visits to the gym and coffee with the girls and it’s only when one [...]

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So how was World Book Night for you? I had a lovely time at Forest Hill Library, taking part in a celebratory event which involved various writers reading and talking about our work, free copies of Fingersmith and Case Histories, good food and interesting wine. One of the things I liked about it was the [...]

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Well, it’s been a while. Christmas and all that snow seems like a distant memory. There were no dead rodents among the decorations this year, and the fact that we went to the in-laws’ on Christmas Day and I didn’t have to cook was a bonus for everyone. I finished reading Wolf Hall on Christmas [...]

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I’ve finally returned from planet UCAS. In the past few months I’ve accompanied my daughter on a grand tour of English and Scottish universities and undergone a crash course in the art of selling yourself in 4,000 characters (including spaces) or 27 lines, whichever is the shorter. Her choices were whittled down to 5 and, [...]

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Finally got to see Enron on the last day, and was glad I did. I’d mentally filed it in that category of things I ought to see rather than want to see, so I didn’t make any effort to book tickets and would have missed it if my partner hadn’t noticed it was about to [...]

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I had a wonderful time at the Firestation book swap in Windsor last week. All I had to do was sit on a sofa, talking, drinking tea and eating cake, and those are three things I’m really quite good at. I didn’t even have to talk that much about my novel – which was a [...]

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I’ve just run the Race for Life, although here the word ‘run’ is employed loosely to mean ‘walked with a little light jogging’. I firmly believe that humans should only run towards things they need to catch – buses, trains, escaping small children – and away from things they’re trying to evade – bears, tigers, [...]

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I’ve just spent a day being trained in using the web to market myself and I came home full of enthusiasm and ideas. I was going to create a link from my blog to the paperback edition of my book on Amazon, do all sorts of wonderful things to improve the site, maybe even dip [...]

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Well, thanks to the volcano, the London Book Fair was a quiet affair; the focus was South Africa this year and of the 47 South African writers who were due to come over, only 12 made it. This left the British authors who’d been buddied up with them having to attend various functions alone, like [...]

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Just received some copies of the Large Print edition of Wilbur, so now I’ll still be able to read it when my eyes go, and – best of all – it has a handy wipe-clean cover, for those tricky spillages. It will be published in paperback next month, and the cover is being finalised at [...]

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