My virtual book tour, Walk the White Road: flash, fiction and science, has now officially begun, and the first stop is at Clare Dudman's excellent Keeper of the Snails blog. She asked me questions about, among other things, my love for science, so I thought I would make a little confession here. Every now and then I pop into a blog called Cosmic Variance. It contains sentences such as this one:

The week before last, I spent several delightful days at the Causality, Analyticity, and Superluminal Propagation Workshop at the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics in Ann Arbor.

And I noticed that when I read the above sentence, I got a thrill. The kind of thrill I imagine some people may get from porn, or from gourmet chocolate, or from finding a great bargain, or buying a pair of really expensive shoes.

Read Full Post

So the question just begs to be asked - what went wrong? What happened? Oh I could of course (and actually did, too, if I am not mistaken) blame any number of external distractions. I wasn't well. Hubby wasn't well. Cat wasn't well. Mother was in hospital. Gay Friend's parents' house was burgled. The weather was too hot, cold, wet, bright, overcast, windy. The country is sliding into economic chaos. The world is on the brink of depression. I got stung by some stinging nettles. I had to sit and watch A Touch of Frost, or Merlin or a DVD. I had a headache, an earache, a toothache, a brain-ache. I hated writing. I loved writing. I was a writer. I wasn't a writer. I was a bloody pain in the arse!


Read Full Post

Woke up with the doom-laden Monday morning feeling today – is it the change in the hour? Maybe what with it being lighter in the mornings, I already feel I’m an hour behind my own life and I’ll never catch up again. Though, to be honest, I should be used to that by now …

Anyway, at work, poor Ruth is still not very well, and the office seems very empty – the boss is away, and both Andrea and Chaplaincy Ruth are on half-term with their children. Mind you, at least the roads were clear and I got to work about 5 minutes before I actually started out. As it were. Okay, that might be exaggeration for poetic effect, but you know what I mean ...


Read Full Post

Rosy Barnes has tagged me with this rather useful little meme. Basically it's this: you get tagged by someone who's mentioned, on their blog, three to five books they think should be given more attention. Then you post something on your blog, mentioning these, along with three to five of your own.

Rosy's are:

Wisdom of Whores by Elisabeth Pisani
Prince Rupert’s Teardrop. Lisa Glass
Borderliners by Peter Hoeg

and mine are:

Love that Dog, by Sharon Creech
Willful Creatures, by Aimee Bender
Taking Comfort, by Roger Morris

I'm not going to

Read Full Post

I have to confess to being a little disappointed that the first few comments on The White Road up on NewScientist.com berated me for my lack of adequate grammar. It seemed as though they had confused writer with character; perhaps because they are unused to reading fiction, or at least fiction in any unfamiliar setting, a popular science magazine, they didn't grasp that this is a story in the first person, and the voice, the grammatical quirks, belong to my main character, Mags. That's how she speaks. .....

Read Full Post

This is the entire email sent by an old girlfriend-of-sorts from university eleven years ago. We haven’t communicated for seven years. On that occasion, in a trough of heartbroken despair, I sent her a sprawling, drunken email, not in an effort to get back together, just for confirmation that she was unhappier than me. She wasn’t.

I met my wife shortly afterwards.

After reading this sparse information several times I realise that this girl, Linda (blonde), appears to be under the illusion that one of the characters in my novel is a thinly disguised version of her. This is slightly unnerving because the only character she can possibly be thinking of was modelled on Myra Hindley.

Nevertheless I reply out of courtesy and somehow end up with a lunch date at some Italian restaurant in Piccadilly. Mostly I am flattered because she is the only person not paid to do so who has intimated that she has read the book.

Read Full Post

A lazy day today, hurrah. Lord H and I wandered around Winkworth in the rain for a while and admired the autumn colours. Which are lovely but not, I think, as spectacular as last year's display. We also spotted a couple of wrens, a great tit, long-tailed tits, jackdaws and a robin or two. Honestly, robins have no fear. And they'll always turn up and parade themselves in front of your nose if they think you're paying too much attention to another type of bird. They are indeed the supermodels of the bird world. The rain was also good as I could try out my new Country Innovation Ladies' rainwear coat, which is great and comes complete with a hood, so I am snug and dry whilst all around me people are cold and wet. Aha! Lord H is slightly envious and I suspect will get one of his own before too long. Then we'll have (sadly) matching jackets and can rename ourselves Howard & Hilda. Though I think I will stop at sewing on name tags ...


Read Full Post

Rosy has invented a new tag based on the Spread the Word idea as mentioned in my last post. The idea is to create some word-of-mouth buzz for books that aren’t likely to hit the review pages or get a ton of hype.

Here are the rules...


Read Full Post

Lord H and I have spent a truly wonderful day today with the Egypt Group, to whom Maloney's Law is dedicated. In fact I couldn't have written the scenes where Paul stays in the Cairo hotel without Mike & Miriam, as they'd stayed in the particular hotel I wanted to use, and Lord H & I hadn't so I needed to pick their brains. For which, thank you, both! We met Mike & Miriam, and Chris & Mike when we were on our Nile cruise about five years ago and we just clicked instantly. They're fantastic people and, even if we haven't seen them for a while, we just click back into instant ease the moment we meet. It's fabulous ...


Read Full Post

Goodness me - the sleepy town of Godalming has this week woken up and joined the modern age. Well, as much as we in the shires can, of course. We've had our first murder since ... well, probably somewhere around 1853 or some such year (which is probably nearly supper-time in this digital age). Which is horrific news for the victim and loved ones, of course, but great news for the Godalming edition of the Surrey Advertiser, who are obviously hugely excited about it. BIG front-page spread, and all that jazz. The poor victim was killed at home, but at least they've arrested somebody for it. Anyway, it's the first time the local Surrey Ad have had any decent news since the infamous Rabbit Woman of Godalming (see full post for link) episode, Gawd bless 'er. Naturally they are making the most of it ...


Read Full Post