First of all, the very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to anyone reading this. Thank you as well to anyone who has sampled any of my books. I hope there will be more of them during 2018 for your amusement. I recently asked for opinions on Facebook about a cover for the …
Things to do in December
As usual, there is plenty to do in December, and not really enough energy on my part left to do it. Now that NaNoWriMo is over, and we have even had the TGIO party to prove it, I am left with two full length novels cluttering up my computer, and no idea which of them …
Plotting and Planning
Thanks to everyone who has bought ‘Promenade with Death’. I am pleased with the good start it has had, though I feel quite disloyal to it now that I have jumped straight back into writing another novel. Although my plans don’t always come to fruition, and certainly not as quickly as I would like, I …
Not really the end!
I have, just minutes ago, typed 'The End' on my draft of Pitkirtly XIV. Of course this isn't really the end as every novel always needs quite a bit more work even once this stage has been reached. But there is no doubt that writing the first draft - making something out of nothing - …
Progress
This afternoon I've just passed the 20,000 word mark in my first draft of 'Pitkirtly XIV' - it now has an almost definite title but I had better not reveal it until it's 100% definite. Originally it was supposed to have the word 'witch' somewhere in it, because I hope to release it round about …
Planning Ahead
I was going to illustrate this post with a picture of my plan for the month, which now includes a mini-plan for the rest of the year as well, but I realised just in time that I'd scrawled an idea for Pitkirtly XIV on the corner of the page in my planning notebook. Some people …
Pitkirtly XIII comes out of the shadows
I started work on the first draft of 'Pitkirtly XIII' on the 1st of April, and I have just written 'The End' today. There is still some more to be done in terms of tidying up and making sure it makes sense. One of the last lines in the draft is this: ‘It all makes sense!’ …
Berlin Background
I was just wondering whether to share some of my background research for 'A Quest in Berlin' when I suddenly remembered my Pinterest board. I am never quite sure about Pinterest as I've struggled to find a use for it in the past and my first few boards had clunky titles like 'Places where I …
Hello again, Berlin!
I've spent the past few weeks, or at least the parts of them that haven't been taken up with going for therapeutic walks followed by even more therapeutic lie-downs, finding excuses to go out to lunch, and emergency vet's appointments, editing 'A Quest in Berlin', the next novel in the Quest series. Today, to the …
A Little Light Writing
Before plunging back into the dark world of Berlin in the 1950s to finish my November novel 'A Quest in Berlin', I decided to work on something a bit lighter, and 'Pitkirtly on Tour', now published on Amazon and Smashwords (and eventually destined to reach Kobo, iBooks, B&N and so on), is the result. It's …