Blog Archive

Time for a creative change?

I seem to have been writing and diving into nothing but wordage for months now. But lately I’ve started to notice that a stitch is creeping into my mind. Not the sort of stitch that causes pain, but the threading of a needle with soft, lustred thread and then pulling it through crisp silk fabric.

Read More

Gisborne…

Just a note to say that I #amwriting hard in order to place a chapter a day on Mesmered during the FanstRAvaganza. Because this demands a large wordcount, I’ve decided not to upload any chapters between now and the 14th of March. That’s only eleven days away so I do hope you’ll forgive me.

Read More

The inside of a writer’s head…

Today I was catching up with Twitter and came across the most gloriously humorous tweets from kaytsukel about things she’s learned by  being a writer. I related to most and laughed a lot and thought that writers are all in a common place. So whilst I walked the dogs, I tried to think if there were any idiosyncratic points peculiar to me … and decided nope, there were none.

Read More

Hunting a poem’s history:

When I was a wee thing, a tiny toddler who loved stories read and had parents willing to oblige, my mother used to recite a short little poem to me at night. This same poem that we call Lady Moon was told to her by her mother. My mum is 85 and we must be talking about a poem that is at least 80 known years old but might go back even further to my grandmother’s childhood. I’ve used this poem in A Thousand Glass Flowers and in fact the Lady Moon is a defined character both in that manuscript and in the novel The Last Stitch.

Read More

Piracy… the downside of e-books.

There is a great commentary on the evils of becoming e-book published on c-net

One would like to think that no one would be as dishonest as this implies, but there are always some.

And it wouldn’t be hard to forward a title downloaded onto a computer to your nearest friends or loved ones, would it? I guess it’s pointless asking people to remember that every book has taken hours, even years of one person’s time to write, edit and then place in the public eye. Surely they deserve the financial rewards, big or small, for that. We can but hope!

Stunning…

Pat Sweet continues to have a direct line to my imagination as she reads my books and creates not just the characters but the infamous garment itself. You’ll remember she designed the robe and I revealed it last week and now she has now conceived a proper dressmaker’s pattern.

Read More

Tweeting Austen: a trans-global collaboration…

Over the last couple of weeks the most outrageously daring phenomenon has been occurring on Twitter. An Austenesque novel is being written. Many aficionados are contributing and it’s with great interest that I read each week’s outcomes. The idea came from UK author Lynn Shepherd and American IT specialist Adam Spunberg.

Read More

The Stumpwork Robe…

This is the magnificent design of the eldritch robe from the book The Stumpwork Robe.

Pat Sweet has been itching to design the robe ever since she read the book almost two years ago, claiming that as a former costume designer, it fired her imagination. The woman modelling the gown is Ana, who you would know well from reading the book.

Read More

Gisborne cont’d

With that, he turned and walked away

'With that he turned and walked away...'

and the Sister’s hand pulled hard on my sleeve so that I had little choice but to follow. Any disquiet at Guy’s reticence would have to be shelved in the back of my mind as the door in the wall closed behind me. A dulcet quiet drifted over us – bees, birds, water trickling somewhere and silence. Whilst Guy had ensconced me in a number of religious houses, this one felt different. There were similarities to be sure, but the preciously small nature of this place made me feel as if Mary had taken me upon Her palm and lifted me to some place beyond strife. The thought I could become a religieuse floated through my mind once again.

Read More

Pimping and whoring…

I love the name of that infamous blog Pimp My Novel. It encapsulates everything that we writers do. We pimp, we sell, we market, we whore – all in the name of securing an agent, publication, sales or even just notice.

Read More