Like many writers, I’ve always been an avid people-watcher. I idly speculate about fellow passengers on buses and trains, giving them personalities, life histories and even names. )You’d be surprised how many axe murderers use public transport.) I inspect the trolley ahead of me in the supermarket queue and wonder what is going to be […]
Category Archives: Author Life
There’s No Place Like Home Improvement
It’s odd, speaking as a writer who is well used to working from home, to say that I felt cabined, cribbed and confined (to steal Mr Shakespeare’s patter) by lockdown. But during the pandemic, as the restrictions have tightened, eased, and then tightened again, there have been times when I’d give a great deal for […]
Eat In to Stay Thin (I Wish!)
As you’ll know if you follow me on social media, or have read any of my previous food posts, I love to cook. One of the many great things about being a writer is that I don’t have to settle for a snatched sandwich for lunch, or get home too late to cook a proper […]
Living In a Material World
When we went into lockdown here in Scotland back in March, I rather naively believed it wouldn’t impact on me unduly (apart from securing adequate supplies of food – and wine of course!). As a writer I’m used to working at home, and I don’t do a lot of socialising, so I assumed at first […]
What I’ve Been Reading – Non-Fiction
I have had much more success with my non-fiction lockdown reading than my fiction. Immersing myself in history, whether it’s for research or just pleasure, I’ve relished being able to temporarily escape these dark times, though of course, one thing you can’t help but see is that history does have a habit of repeating itself. […]
What I’ve Been Reading – Fiction
I have endured very mixed results in my novel reading this year, especially since we first entered pandemic lockdown back in March, an experience I’m sure is familiar to many of you. I’ve DNF’d several highly-recommended books, which is unusual for me, I normally stick with books or at least flick through to the end, […]
The Woman in the Ironed Mask
Don’t panic, this is not going to be a feminist reworking of Alexander Dumas famous novel. It concerns a contemporary phenomenon – facemasks. Not the politics of wearing them either, rather the making of them. I have a bag of scraps left over from sewing projects dating so far back that some of them probably […]
What I’ve Been Reading – Fiction
I make no secret of the fact that I absolutely adore Kate Griffin’s Kitty Peck novels and I was looking forward to the last in the series, Kitty Peck and the Parliament of Shadows, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The novels are so dark that there was a very good chance Kitty would […]