Some people who like to see and hold a printed copy, and that is what you can provide at a book launch or a literary festival talk. And meeting people is fun, even if you don’t break even when you have factored in your time and the refreshments. I have arranged two launches for my ... Read More
Here’s another piece of flash fiction. I’m a new member of the Romantic Novelists Association and I wanted to show you that we can be unromantic too. Squint: ‘A condition in which the visual axes of each eye are not directed simultaneously at the same fixation point (i.e. each eye is not pointing at the ... Read More
I don’t remember any buzz around my non-fiction books. Rather expensive lunches with my old-established publishers and a smart party with no books for sale certainly did nothing much for promotion. There were some reviews in the journals, and they appeared in bookshops and libraries, and that was the extent of it. Now I have ... Read More
In my late teens I exchanged one dream, to marry a vicar, for another: to inspire great poetry. My favourite poet was Goethe, who wrote several series of beautiful poems inspired by his long line of beautiful mistresses. (Odd, looking back, that I didn’t dream of writing my own material and finding a handsome chap ... Read More
When I first moved to Oxford in 1975 I was amused when my elderly neighbours called me ‘my duck.’ I haven’t heard that recently. I love these regional variations and I’m sorry they are dying out. My parents lived in Cornwall and a colleague who visited there was so delighted with the Cornish habit of ... Read More
When I was a social worker listening closely was a big part of my job and I’m sure that has helped me to write believable dialogue. What one deduces from what other people say is another matter, I think. Some of my musings on this have informed my novel ‘Timed Out’. In the passage quoted ... Read More
Jane Lambert in Timed Out , my first novel, does internet dating. But there the resemblance ends. Brief Encounter 2012 From Click to Click: Tales of Internet Dating, ed Barbara Lorna Hudson, Kindle e-book, 2012. A railway station isn’t like an airport. A few meeters and greeters, but not so much exuberance, fewer demonstrations of ... Read More
