Locking Up Part 1

With Halloween fast approaching I’m working on a new book of short stories appropriate for the season. Whether I’ll meet the deadline or not remains to be seen, but it was great fun looking through my half-finished collection, and discovering other stories I can use for my blog. This was one of the more recent …

Beetroot blood

It’s been a while since we’ve had a short story but I couldn’t resist writing this one. It was inspired when a book blogger mentioned domestic disasters, and one of the group responded with their true story. There might have been a tiny bit of embellishment to protect the innocent, but I’ll leave you to …

Turn the Tables – Steph Warren

Book bloggers are invaluable to authors and help to get our books known, make recommendations for future reading and are generally supportive without any compensation except our heartfelt thanks. They often feature authors on their blogs and it suddenly occurred to me, it might be nice to 'turn the tables' and actually feature book bloggers …

Book Fair – finale

What have Eurovision, a psychiatrist, children’s story time, an ancient house, losing your job, stables, a pub that wasn’t a pub, a ceremonial chain and a hairdresser’s in Penge got in common? The answer is the book event I organised at the end of August, which was a great success. The weather stayed dry and …

Alderslay birthday and Beckenham Book Fair

Facebook has just reminded me my last book ‘Alderslay’ has a first birthday due. Where does the time go? Actually it’s older than that as I wrote the original draft some five years ago. At that time it was under a different name, but once it had been edited, I made some amendments and then …

The Murder of John Smith Part 3

The final part of my short story. I hope you enjoyed it. It didn’t take Pam long to realise she had made the worst mistake of her life. At first she thought it was because she was used to being on her own, and she only needed time to adapt to being half of a …

The Murder of John Smith. Part 2

I thought it would be a quick short story to fill in a gap while I was working on my next book and organising the local book fair, but it seems to have taken on a mind of its own, so don’t be surprised if it ends up as part of a book. It’s actually …

Beckenham book event and The Murder of John Smith

Most of this week has been taken up with organising a book fair for the end of the month in our local area of South London. I assumed once the venue and authors were in place it would be a case of sending out regular generic updates to keep everyone informed, and turning up on …

Coincidences, Luck and Memories

I like to try and keep my blog posts fresh, which includes switching and changing from short stories, a bit of marketing, and general waffle about anything which catches my attention during the week. Normally I would have posts prepared a week or so in advance, but I’ve been going demented the past week or …

Are you there, Paula? ‘Spirit of Technology.’

I thought I had something scheduled for this week, but when it didn’t appear I realised the recent connection problems had disturbed my usual routine, so had to dig something out of the archives. Apologies if it’s later than usual but I was attending a wedding in Bali, and thought the delay in the start …