Winner winner chicken dinner: CampNaNo 2017

Phew! August 1 (how did that happen?) and I'm very pleased to report that Camp NaNoWriMo is done and the sequel to Murder At The Playgroup is in full draft! Here's the graph: My target was 50,000 words for the month, and in the end I wrote just over 53K to finish Murder In The Choir. The …

The Monster Under The Bed

So Camp NaNoWriMo is over for another year. I achieved my modest target of 25,000 words on April 25 (how apt!), finishing Something Blue the next day with just over 28,000 words. Here's the graph: I was aiming for between 25 and 30K, so I'll take that. Once I got started, the writing was fairly easy, …

In praise of laziness

It's been a shockingly long time since I wrote a proper blog post. Apologies, but I'm not quite sure where March and most of April went! I think the last time I mentioned my NaNoWriMo draft from November 2016, Murder At The Playgroup, was when I'd done a read-through preliminary to beginning THE EDIT (I finally …

January sale! A House Of Mirrors Kindle Countdown Deal!

First things first - Happy New Year! Here's to a great 2017 for all of us. 2016 was a nice year for me personally, but rubbish in terms of politics and also in losing so many cultural icons. So to celebrate the demise of 2016, my latest book and first full-length novel, A House Of Mirrors, is …

Mwahaha! The Case of the Snow-White Lady is released!

Look, it's nearly Halloween, cut me some slack here! This story wasn't supposed to happen at all. I was planning to write a nice modern mystery, and in preparation I went to an excellent lecture by Kathryn Harkup called 'A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie', part of the Daresbury Laboratory Talking Science series (there's …

What’s A Jar of Thursday and how can I get one?

I'm very happy to announce that, slightly earlier than anticipated, A Jar of Thursday is available to pre-order as an ebook on Amazon, and launches on Thursday 29 September! What's a jar of Thursday? Well, of course you'll have to read the book to find out, but it's a novella, a sequel to one of the stories …

Camp NaNoWriMo and everything else: a progress update

Please forgive the radio silence on the blog for the last week and a half; it's been a bit busy! As of 30 June *wipes brow* the draft of #SecretSequel is finished! It turned out a little more serious than I intended, but I'm cautiously pleased with it. I took the risk of letting my …

Take a free bite of Bitesize!

I'm delighted to say that Bitesize, my new collection of 68 flash fiction stories, is now available to pre-order from Amazon at an introductory price of 99p/99c! Launch day (box-opening day?!) is Saturday 25 June, UK National Flash Fiction Day. To celebrate, I've decided to try something new. I've created a little 4-story sampler, one from each …

Now in paperback too! The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes

I'm very happy to announce that The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes is now available in paperback! It seems to have taken ages, but we got there in the end. It's available from the same Amazon link as the ebook - myBook.to/NotebookSH - priced at £4.99/$7.99. Here are some pictures (spot the proud mum). I have to say I'm …

Cover reveal! The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes is available for pre-order!

Please forgive the exclamation marks (it's my first time). Yesterday, after a great deal of writing, editing, tweaking, checking and fretting, I pushed the button to submit The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes to Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing, to be precise). And today, it's available for pre-order before the publication date of April 1! So I guess …