Another week has slipped by and I remain unemployed. The wheels of publishing grind slow. March. Normally by now I would be well into the first draft of a book. But we must enjoy what we’re given, not moither over what may be. I’m actually having fun making a pantomime cow. So what to offer…

    So here’s my morning so far. I walked to the post office to pick up a parcel which I eagerly anticipated was the cow hooves I’ve ordered from Texas. Whoa! I’m not importing animal parts. I’m not setting up a glue factory. These are  foam hooves for a cow costume. Yes, the panto wheels are creaking…

Next Wednesday we have the read-through of my script for The Dress Circle. The read-through is a kind of Waterloo for the script writer or at least, the night before Agincourt. The moment when you hear an actor speak the lines and sometimes, inevitably, think, ‘Well that’ll have to go.’ I always attend the read-through.…

   I just realised there’s something missing from my life. I don’t have a mission statement.  Yikes. How did I overlook that? My attention was drawn to this  piece of 21st century bumfluff  communication jargon by the website for Derry  – City of Culture 2013. I’ve never been to Derry and thought this would be the…

I love Bucket Lists. All human life and folly is in them. A recent report I read suggested that the reasons most people realise only 10 percent of their ambitions are lack of time and fear of injury. To which I give the following soberly considered reply. BS. Boil down any bucket list and you end up with two categories:…

     Well, my revisions are done and back in my editor’s in-tray, so this week I turned my attention to… what next? I already have a bit of an idea, but a bit of an idea does not a novel make. One of the things I do is to make wild research forays around the topic…

 Christopher Sansom has recently published his latest novel, Dominion, which envisions a post-war Britain run by a Government of actual named politicians transformed into Nazi placemen. I must begin by saying I haven’t read the novel. But the  several reviews I’ve read touched a nerve, partly because I sometimes populate my own fiction with real people who once…