All posts in category The Drowners

A lovely morning in Guisborough

Well, I spent a really nice couple of hours at Guisborough Bookshop yesterday (Saturday). They’d put up a display of the two books and a disturbingly large copy of the “gazing moodily out to sea” picture and I set up my stall, more books, pen and a heap of bookmarks. People were very friendly – […]

Starlings!

The Somerset Levels, and Shapwick in particular, are probably most famous for the extraordinary displays of birds. During the winter, and into spring, huge flocks of starlings gather at dusk and dawn and seem to perform astonishing aerial displays. This wonderful sight has been captured by photographers and film makers for those of us who […]

What goes around…

Listening to the budget yesterday, I was struck by how familiar much of it seemed. After a depressing hour or so I returned to “The Drowners“, and realized why this might be. The world around us is much closer to the decade of greed in the 80s than many would admit. The characters from “Death […]

A really good week

Yes, last week was remarkably good on the writing front. I discovered I had sold my first copies of “Death of the Elver Man” in the USA, on the Kindle platform. Then I was asked to speak at the Middlesbrough Literary Festival in June. Watch this space for details of date and time closer to […]

Time for some housekeeping

I’m getting to the end of my latest student group and it is time to peer with bleary eyes over the mounds of papers, course books and forms and wonder where my writing space has gone. I am horribly untidy unless I keep a very tight grip on things – possibly something to do with […]

Still juggling

My Achilles heel strikes again – issues with the time line. So many threads running through this new book and I’ve gone back to lay them out properly in a plan. This, of course, I should have done (and meant to do) right at the very start. Well, it’s fairly well sorted now and suddenly […]

That time of year again…

It’s the middle of February, unseasonally warm up here and I find myself back at my computer after I’ve already finished my words for the day, after all my research is done and printed, waiting for tomorrow – here I am. Suddenly the story grabs me and I can’t leave it. Not tonight, not just […]

Squibbing

The Carnival (always with a capital letter in Somerset) and squibbing are both major events in the town of Bridgwater and really do have to be seen to be believed. Anyone curious about squibbing might like to watch this video: for a taste of what it is like. The noise of the crowd and the […]

Moving on…

Poor old Alex is having a bit of a hard time…. Strange goings-on out on the Levels are unsettling her friends and clients and seem connected to new problems amongst the young men “with their hard eyes and crude letters tattooed on their knuckles, their suspicions and the scorn with which they treated this, their […]

News of the second book

The sequel to “Death of the Elver Man” is progressing nicely. Provisionally titled “The Drowners“, it takes up the story six weeks after the ending of “Death of the Elver Man”. Once more set in the unique landscape of the Somerset Levels and surrounding area, it features many familiar characters and a few new ones […]