It’s ten weeks until my novel Perfect Ten is released so I wanted to talk about how I came to write it and why I chose revenge as the theme. When I tell people that the theme of the novel is revenge there are raised eyebrows and curiosity as to what Caroline, the main character […]
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 […]
I’m not the first to write about this subject and I won’t be the last, but watching Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro debate genre fiction piqued my interest in genre boundaries. They both noted during the interview that they felt that genre boundaries are disappearing and are outdated. Recently an author on Twitter or Facebook […]
This week will see the second volume of the charity anthology Stories for Homes released. It does pretty much what it says on the tin – or cover – tells stories about homes. Or, more importantly, housing poverty and homelessness. The first volume raised over three thousand pounds for charity and my story, Brick Heart, […]
Writing can be an isolating experience. The writing process is rarely collaborative at draft stage, yet this is a time when input can be invaluable. But where can writers get the kind of experienced input that will improve their work? Workshops There are many kinds of writing workshops offering a range of experiences: the learning […]