Tomorrow my latest novel, Closer to Home, will be published.  It’s been available to order for just over a week and I’ve been watching its Amazon sales rank with a slight sense of disbelief as the number keeps going down (that’s a good thing).  It looks like people are...

It’s raining.  It’s been raining for most of the summer.  May was okay and there were some dry spells in July but mostly it’s been raining.  I know this sounds like a whinge, a complaint about something unavoidable and I suppose it is.  But the rain has also had a posi...

As it’s Mental Health Awareness Week this week I thought I’d write something a bit different for my blog.  A few years ago I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety.  This didn’t come as a huge surprise as I’d been struggling for years and I’d finally reached a point...

A couple of weeks ago I finished the second draft of the novel that I’ve been working on since last summer.  It finally reached the stage where I needed to give it to somebody else as I had completely lost any objectivity I might have once had.  So, as usual, I passed...

I find deciding on names for my characters to be a complex business.  Main characters tend to already have their own names when they appear in my mind.  Alfie from my second novel, Fracture, was never going to be called anything else even though I’m not entirely sure w...

I’d like to start this blog post by saying a huge thank you to everybody who has read one of my books and then taken the time to write a review and post it online. Reviews are important as they get books noticed and encourage more people to give them a try (or not!).

I’...

Yesterday somebody from my local newspaper phoned me up to ask about my latest book.  It was a bit out of the blue as they’d expressed an interest in late October when ‘Fracture’ was released but I hadn’t heard anything since.  I’d just got back from a very wet dog wal...

An author colleague posted recently on Facebook that she’d been for a walk and it had helped her to sort through her ideas for a new novel.  I’m a great believer in walking as a way to stimulate thought and many of my days begin with an hour of walking through the park...

On April 30th this year I was a nervous wreck.  My debut novel, ‘Forgotten’ was due to be released the following day.  I’d spent most of the previous three or four weeks fluctuating between excitement and anxiety.  I was worried that nobody would read it, that people w...

When I moved to Carlisle, more than twenty years ago, I was surprised to find that it was lacking some of the cultural venues that might be expected of a city.  The cinema dated from the 1930s and, while charming, offered a diet of mainstream Hollywood blockbusters; th...