Back to work

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Hard at work researching in Serifos

I’m finally at my desk for the first time in six weeks. It’s a bit depressing that the summer’s nearly over, but I’m also very excited at working on my notes for novel #3 (promised for this week by Editor Leah) and starting on novel #4.

I’ve been away almost all that time, mostly in Greece, where I was researching my new novel – parts will be set there in the early 1980s, where my (British) main character is backpacking alone in her gap year.… read more

About Paperback Publication

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Scene of the Every Vow You Breakmass market paperback launch party

Every Vow You Break is now available in mass market paperback. Up until now it has only been published as a trade paperback.

Trade paperback is the larger format, shorter run, more expensive paperback – the type that is difficult to fit into normal bookshelves – that many publishers produce several months earlier than mass market. There has also been a Kindle edition of Every Vow You Break, but current practice is to keep the price rather high to match the more expensive trade paperback.… read more

Strangeness on a Train

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I’m writing this the night before I appear on the Radio 4 Today Programme to talk about my writer-in-residence-on-a-train gig. I’m scheduling the post to publish just after I have finished. You will know, dear reader, if I have made a tit of myself, talked garbage, or forgotten what I was saying mid-spout. I have that yet to discover.

Strangeness on a Train is the short story that resulted from my East Coast London-Harrogate-London writer-in-residence tenure.… read more

Writer on a Train

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This article first appeared on Behind the Headlines on May 16, 2012.

As a full time writer working from the home I share with three men, I can find plenty to distract me from my daily 2000 words. Before you get excited about this in a 50 Shades sort of way, the three men I live with are one husband and two sons (the daughter is largely away at Uni), and the distractions are of the domestic kind – exciting things like washing crispy sheets, scraping crud off floors and searching for all the forks which have mysteriously disappeared.… read more

Neurotic

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Last night I sent novel #3 to Agent Simon.

I am already obsessively checking emails for his reaction, although I tell myself not to be so cocky – if he’s read it so quickly, it must be quite literally unputdownable. And he clearly hasn’t read it because he hasn’t emailed me yet, so it must be putdownable.

Or worse. Unreadable.

He probably thinks it’s unreadable.

But then again, he probably hasn’t even looked at it yet.… read more

Going Dutch

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I’m just lifting my head from the final stages of editing the first draft of novel #3 to tell you this:

My author’s copies of Verbroken Belofte, the Dutch translation of Every Vow You Break arrived today. Aren’t they chillingly lovely? They’re published by the very classy Bezige Bij. I love all my covers, but these are just so haunting.

I’ll now get back to it. Normal service should be resumed in about one week, when I will have handed novel #3 in.… read more

Too Much to Do!

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Jamie Harrison interviewing me at Crawley Wordfest. I might look a bit miffed, but that's my thinking face, honest.

I have had an extremely busy week with my Every Vow You Break launch party on Tuesday and the Cuckoo One Town One Book event as the finale of Crawley Wordfest.

‘But surely,’ I hear you say. ‘That’s only two things to do in a whole week? Most people have to do at least thirty things a day to make their living?’… read more