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WATCH OUT ROSEWELL, HERE WE COME
Friday, 25 October, two days before British Summertime Ends when the clocks go back, and me and Wen will appear at the Rosewell Book Festival. We’re filled with a mix of excitement, nerves, and anticipation. We’ve attended book festivals before, but never spoken at...
POLAR OPPOSITES WRITING AS A NEURO-CONNECTED COLLABORATIVE
In 2022, with my writing partner Wen, I started penning Deadly Dough, our debut feature-length book in The Windy & Darling Mystery Series. Now we're working on Horrid Herbs, the third book in the series due for release in 2025. Any creative collaboration can be a...
A PRODUCT, NOT A BABY
Finding success as an author’s a tough gig. The advent of self-publishing, vanity/hybrid publishers, and independent/traditional publishers all churning out books, equates to an oversaturated market in every genre. In 2023, over 3 million books hit Amazon, the biggest...
HORRID HERBS: WHEN SAGE MEETS STAGE
And so it begins ... again. Our second WinDarl cosy released and ready for promos, and now onto the third in the series. Horrid Herbs: When Sage Meets Stage, sees our amateur sleuths hamming it up as part of Treeton Am-Dram Society and re-enacting medieval punishments...
THE LOVABLE CLICHE
Not a bitter pill to swallow I’m an advocate in the belief that humour is wonderful medicine. While me and medication aren’t BFFs, the best things in life are free, so when under the weather, I’m happy to swallow a healthy dollop of laughter, giggles, and guffaws to...
THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH BUILDING A BRAND
Where do we start? Where does any company start? Even mega brands had to build a reputation from scratch. First, a fundamental question. What is a brand? Contrary to popular belief, not a logo, identity, or product. So, what? A brand is a non-tangible concept that...
PASTORAL PARADISE
Creating characters is vital to any story, as is building the locations and places they frequent. Characters must live, work, eat, and breathe, otherwise they’ll perish in literary purgatory and never come alive. Thankfully, in the WinDarl cosy mysteries, there’s a...
CANNY CHARACTERS
When creating a jumble of characters and their peculiarities, I often base the entity and traits on self, or people/personalities I’ve had the pleasure—or not—of meeting while navigating life’s many tributaries. Friends. Family. Acquaintances. Animals. I adore this...
AND I GUESS THAT’S WHY I CALL IT THE BLUES!
January’s here once again and I stare out of the window at bare trees and a pale blue sky. For me, January is to months what Monday is to days. What seems like thousands of seagulls squawk and every fifty minutes, the sound of familiar, cacophonous chimes, so loud...