I’m currently reading Sylvain Tesson’s Consolations of the Forest. Tesson is a French travel writer who spent six months living alone in the Siberian taiga, five hours walk from his nearest neighbour. Among the items he took with him (including eighteen bottles of Super Hot ketchup, ten boxes of paracetomol for vodka hangovers and a French…

    The recruitment office is now closed. Thanks to everyone who volunteered. I have a great team of advance readers lined up, doing their warm-ups. Damn, I should have ordered T shirts. I have a lot of projects on the go at the moment  –  proof-reading, novel-writing, non-fiction proposals, bonus material preparation, ironing, sink…

I am now recruiting a crack battalion of readers and reviewers to receive advance proof copies of The Early Birds some time next month. Unfortunately Amazon’s terms of business mean that a review only counts in their ratings if you’ve purchased the book from them, so if you want to help my sales you’d still…

Transcribing The Man for the Job in preparation for publishing it as an e-book has brought back memories of how we used to write books. I used a typewriter, and Tippex. Lots of Tippex. Maybe I even used carbon paper. Remember carbon paper? I hope you didn’t have shares.  I can’t recall which book was…

Here is my (not so terribly) cunning plan for 2017. The accountants are sharpening their knives. I need more readers, dear readers. So I have decided to put a free e-book out there in the ether, to try and reel in some new fans. But what to use? All my rights are tied up, mouldering …

It’s almost a year since our last house move and the merciless cull of possessions which that involved. I’ve lived for a year with fewer chairs, fewer coats and the big one, fewer books. Have I missed any of the discarded ones? No. Have I re-read any of the ones I clung to? Nope. More…

A sharp rap on the knuckles from the Bassano del’Grappa chapter of my fan club. Too long between blog posts. Quite right, of course. It’s just that my life is narcotically repetitive. Get up, write words, throw 50 percent of them in the trash can, go to bed. But anyway, here I am, just in…

I’m going to jump.  And why, on this fresh but sunny November afternoon? I just got the proposed jacket design for The Early Birds, that’s why. I’m not going to display it yet because I live in feeble hope that they’ll come up with something better. They won’t though. The aim, apparently, was to give…

After several dispiriting weeks of casting upon publishing waters and failing to tempt my publisher with any of my ideas I finally got a nibble. Which book in my backlist do readers seem to remember most fondly? Perfect Meringues. I’ve alway felt it to be a weak book, so much so that I could never bring…