Category: Author Life

  • Peace and Goodwill

    I have been very quiet of late, but if you follow me over on Instagram you’ll know it’s because I’ve been very busy. My first ever writing retreat with five other authors in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales helped me to finish my last book of 2023. Uncovering the Governess’s Secrets is a dark, Gothic Victorian…

  • What I’m Writing – #EdinburghGothic

    After a substantial and very enjoyable break from writing, I’m back. And because I like to challenge myself I’m writing two books in parallel. Both are set in Edinburgh in the 1870s, and both have a Gothic theme, but there the similarity ends. Because I’m an arch procrastinator, and one of the books has no…

  • Snippets from a Writer’s Life

    It’s a cliché because it’s true, the older you get, the faster life whirls you by, and since the pandemic changed the world, I feel like we are travelling at warp speed. I had barely touched down from my fabulous trip to Barcelona with my mum and sisters, and I was off on another trip…

  • What I’ve Been Reading

    I can’t believe I haven’t done a reading update since July! I have been reading, I just haven’t had time to talk much about it. As usual, I have put reviews of everything I’ve read on Goodreads, but here is a small selection of the best. First up, two books that I decided to read…

  • Barcelona Birthday Trip

    When my mum turned eighty it was during the pandemic, forcing us to postpone our planned girly trip to celebrate with my three sisters. We re-planned to combine the celebration with my ‘big’ pending sixtieth birthday, and had intended heading to the East Neuk of Fife. But though one of the sisters who lives ‘down…

  • Snippets from a Writer’s Life

    Since I was last here, I’ve been buried deep in writing (and re-writing, and re-writing) my latest historical romance for Mills & Boon. After nearly sixty books of all shapes and sizes for my publisher, you’d think it would get easier. Wrong! Every single time, it seems to get more difficult. I tell myself I…

  • Snippets from a Writer’s Life

    I am six weeks into my Slick at Sixty fitness campaign, and though I am seeing some positive results, progress is so painfully slow that I’m on the verge of saying, stuff it, forget it, I don’t care. I’m not exactly going hungry but I’m sick of hearing myself say, ‘I’m starving’ about twenty times…

  • What I’ve Been Reading

    I’ve been methodically working my way through the Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy L Sayers with varying degrees of satisfaction. I’ve commented before on the dated nature of the language and views in several, and in particular the racist attitudes that really jump out of the page to a modern reader. In The Nine…

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