I’m pausing my very serious book posts to reveal an amazing fact about myself: I am Madonna. Many of you who know me through my day job or through writing will probably think that I am the furthest from Madonna that you could imagine – serious, studious and sober. But ask the people who have […]
While Perfect Ten is a psychological thriller, it also has a serious core where the main character Caroline is the victim of abuse. At the centre of this is her isolation because no one believes her. I wanted to write about this being believed, which has become a prominent part of the #metoo campaign and […]
What are The Pigeonhole offering? The Pigeonhole are offering Perfect Ten FREE to the first 100 hundred readers who sign up! It will be an interactive experience as I will be reading alongside and answering question about the book and my writing. I am so looking forward to this – sign up and join me […]
Perfect Ten has a theme of revenge, and while that is not the only theme of the story, a series of revenge songs are scattered through the story; in fact, Caroline Atkinson makes her own ‘Cheating Bastard Playlist’! And here it is: I think it would be fair to say that Caroline Atkinson is angry. […]
I went to see the Rolling Stones last week at Old Trafford Football Stadium. I have been a huge fan of them since childhood when my father gave me a record player and some old records. Amongst them was Little Red Rooster and my introduction to blues and rock. It s no secret that I […]
Last week I was lucky enough to visit the Tate Modern in London to see the Pablo Picasso exhibition ‘1932 – LOVE, FAME, TRAGEDY’ I knew a little about Picasso’s life but this visit was a real education about who he was, not least how he divided his time between his wife Olga and his […]
There are a lot of questions lately about where all the working class writers are; I am here. I was born in a deprived area to parents who worked in factory and trade jobs and who had not attended university. They lived with relatives in the 1960s and saved for a house deposit. When I […]
Life is stressful for lots of people at the moment. The endless gloomy weather we have had in the UK has underpinned a general feeling of dissatisfaction, if the news headlines and social networking sites are anything to go by. In my own life, I am emerging from a bittersweet year when I got my […]
To celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8th, from today until the end of March I’ll be writing articles about ‘flawed’ women in fiction. As a psychologist and as a woman, I have never warmed to passive women in fiction. I see them as a foil to the ‘bad man’ and isn’t that too easy? […]
So what does Adele’s song ‘Hello’ have to do with writing a novel? Apart from the fact that her music is fabulous and that she collected her MBE two people in front of me, I don’t know much about her. What I do know is that her song ‘Hello’ achieves what all writers want to do: identify […]