Category: Uncategorized

  • Rising Tides

    Release blitz: Rising Tides My new YA novel, Rising Tides, came out on Friday, so there’s no chance I’ll be able to focus on anything else at present. Read on for more information – and a giveaway! About the book: The truth won’t stay submerged forever City is the last civilised place left on a drowned Earth,…

  • Free reading challenge: but that doesn’t count!

    I’ve bought four books this week, which sounds like a lot for someone who isn’t buying books at the moment, but wait, your honour, I can explain… One for me… I have bought a book for myself this week, but it was non-fiction and an excellent reference book for self-publishing (it’s Format it Yourself by Jo…

  • Free reading challenge: When FREE isn’t free

    So, I’ve now been satisfying my reading urges with only free books for two weeks. Philippa Fusspot My chief learning point for the past fourteen days is what a very fussy reader I am (actually, I already knew that; this exercise has just confirmed the fact). I often find it hard to discover books I…

  • An experiment in free reading

    I read a lot of YA fiction and review a lot, too, on the Paisley Piranha blog. Recently, I signed up as a blog tour host/reviewer with YA Bound Book Tours. As a result, I’ve been reading a lot of review books (and discovering lots of new, fabulous authors). I joined YA Bound deliberately to…

  • Cover reveal

    Rising Tides My new YA novel, Rising Tides, will be published on Amazon (ebook and paperback) on June 24th. Today is my cover reveal. Designer Jane Dixon-Smith has created another beauty. I hope you like it half as much as I do! City is the last civilised place left on a drowned Earth, a floating…

  • 3 reasons I love my library

    Libraries are a hot topic in the UK at the moment, with the government and councils seeming to view them as pointless moneypits which can easily be dispensed with without any derogation to life or culture. I’m not going to add anything dramatic to the debate, but I wanted to articulate why libraries full of…

  • Is this writer’s block?

    I don’t hold with the concept of writer’s block. There isn’t a special flu that only writers get which stops us writing. If you’re a writer, you write and (in my view) that’s an end to it. There are good days and bad days, but saying you have writer’s block is akin to getting a…

  • 5 ways to get more words written

    I’ve been making a deliberate effort to increase my productivity lately. I’m now a self-published writer looking to increase the audience for my fiction. One of the sure-fire ways to do this is to write more books (everything I’ve read about self-publishing says the key is to write more and get more books out if…

  • Words are magic, that’s why it’s called spelling

    Wide-range reading I’ve been reading out of my genre this week – Longbourn caught my eye (and who wouldn’t want a chance to escape back into the Pride and Prejudice universe?) and I’ve absolutely loved it. As well as the story (it’s Pride and Prejudice seen from the servants’ point of view), I’ve loved the…

  • Queen of Rubies

    I’m manically busy at the moment. My next-next book winged its way to the RNA’s New Writer’s Scheme this week, I’ve written 21k words of the one to follow that since the start of the month, while simultaneously revising something from long ago which I hope might be the start of a series. This leaves me…