Branching out. It’s been a funny old year. In a good way, I mean. I started 2015 with the familiar writer-inbox staring game familiar to anyone who has both a Labrador and a biscuit tin. And then, as if by magic (because it was certainly magical at the time) I had a book deal for …
Tag: Joffe Books
Triple Crown
Any port in a storm. You have to imagine me smiling to myself as I write this post. Not one of those ‘I’m the bee’s knees’ smug grins, but a gentle ‘groovy’ crescent on my lips. (I am making it a personal campaign to get groovy back in our everyday vocabulary.) Three novels published in …
Writing and backgammon
We’ve recently learned how to play backgammon, so now we can finally use the set that we bought in Turkey about 15 years ago. (I said we’d get there in the end.) Like all dice games there is a great deal of luck in the game, although strategy and ‘reading the game’ play their parts …
Leave me out of it!
Magnificat! One of the toughest challenges for an author is letting your characters (your literary children) grow up and gain their independence. It’s a curious and somewhat dissociative process to enter into a dialogue with a character you’ve created, as far as you’re aware, and find that they not only answer you back they also …
Writer as Gardener
Autumn is a time of harvest. As a former ‘green living’ columnist* the environment and the page are inextricably linked for me. Whether it’s planning for the season to come, falling in with the rhythms of the year, or taking careful note of what’s developing, the metaphor of garden as creativity was – and is – …
A Numbers Game
Safety in numbers? I love the poetry of numbers, and the certainty. Two minuses added together (or multiplied) result in a positive number. Prime numbers conform to agreed rules – although I have read fierce debates over the inclusion of 1 and 2. And that ‘adding up to 9’ rule is very handy when it …
Line of Sight – now available on Kindle
Line of Sight is published by Joffe Books There’s a certain irony in my absence from my writing blog. That’s right – I’ve been busy writing. Plus some editing too. And a few rewrites. And several sentence fragments. Like that one.My second thriller (can you have a debut sequel if it’s part of a series?), …
Authority
Making waves and creating a splash. Hello there. I’m writing this in advance, so this may only be accurate at the time of typing (on 22/04). My debut thriller, Standpoint, is doing well. I know it’s not a very British thing to say, and I’ll come back to British things later, but there it is. …
Standpoint – Glossary of British Slang Terms
It’s always struck me as slightly strange that we refer to this language as English when it’s really an amalgamation of many languages that have changed and enriched it over the centuries. Back in the day (the late 80s, in case you were wondering) I spent a year in the US and soon realised that their …
Standpoint – when characters come to life
The first time I thought my Brit thriller, Standpoint, might have legs was when I had an argument with the main character in a car. Yes, I know how ridiculous that looks on a screen, but it’s what happened. It was during a novel writing summer school tutored by Jane Pollard at University College Falmouth. …