Blog

I’m a walker who writes. In my childhood years, as one of five children, ‘I’m a walker’ wasn’t something you needed to explain. It was a given. We even had our own chant. ‘I left (start with left foot) my wife with forty-four children and don’t you think I was (skip) right, right, right. I…
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Dear friends, I realise that you have all been absolutely bombarded with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) madness in the past month or so. With tomorrow’s deadline looming, you will no doubt be bombarded with ‘No, this really is your very last chance to stay in touch’  emails. You may have received an email from…
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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Kendra Olson to Virtual Book Club, my interview series which gives authors the opportunity to pitch their novels to your book club. Kendra is the author of the coming-of-age, historical, folk novel The Forest King’s Daughter. She enjoys writing historical and literary fiction as well as creative non-fiction. She also…
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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Cynthia Adina Kirkwood to Virtual Book Club, my interview series which gives authors the opportunity to pitch their novels to your book club. Cynthia, born and raised in New York City, often acted as cultural translator for her parents, who had met there after emigrating from Belize, formerly British Honduras. …
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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Margarita Morris back to Virtual Book Club, my interview series which gives authors the opportunity to pitch their novels to your book club. Margarita Morris is the author of five novels. Her bestselling Oranges for Christmas tells the story of a family trying to escape from communist East Berlin in…
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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Rohan Quine to Virtual Book Club, my interview series which gives authors the opportunity to pitch their novels to your book club. Rohan is an author of literary fiction with a touch of magical realism and a dusting of horror. He grew up in South London, spent a couple of…
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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Ali Bacon to Virtual Book Club, my interview series which gives authors the opportunity to pitch their novels to your book club. After graduating from St Andrews University, Ali worked in Oxford’s Bodleian Library where she found a cache of famous Victorian photographs, sparking a life-long interest in early photographers….
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We’re nearing the finish line. Now we turn to the book’s interior. What is it going to look like? And how will that add to (or detract from) the way that the reader experiences the book? From Wiki: Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored…
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This week we come to the copy edit. The structure is in place. The beta readers have had their say. It’s getting interesting.  I first approached John Hudspith when I was working on My Counterfeit Self because I felt that I needed to be challenged a little more. He steered my writing in subtle ways to…
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In this week’s blog, I focus on the structural edit. It includes a contribution from my structural editor, Dan Holloway, the person Stephen Fry might have had in mind when he said, “We are not nouns, we are verbs.” “I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who…
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