Apologies to everyone who tried to access this blog in the past week. I ran into a technical problem and my Web Master was a little bit busy during the run up to the election!
Those of you who have followed this page will know this is the first time I have posted since last year – a long silence indeed. The reason for this is that I took on an extremely intense writing schedule – 1,000 a day. Not as many as NaNoRiMo you may be thinking but it went on for longer. Five months longer to be exact, following on from six weeks of intense and detailed planning. I have to say there was huge satisfaction in achieving it – but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone and I certainly wouldn’t do it again! Now I’ve finished that stage of my new project I can take time to bring you up to date and share the bits of last winter that were not involved in the writing.
A birth in the family
Some of you may know I had puppies last year. Well, not me personally but one of my dogs. After some weeks we kept one of them, a happy and lively little boy called Charlie. Well, Charlie was one last month and here is his birthday picture with his grannie Chloe on the left and his mother Cynthia on the right. Hurrah for puppies – without them I would probably not have left my keyboard for days on end and a pale, flacid figure resembling Jabba the Hut would be typing this now.
My guilty pleasure
One thing that did stir me from my trance-like state was a cycle race. We were lucky enough to be on the route for the East Cleveland Klondike, a professional race with a peleton of over a hundred riders. Watching them fly down the hill in the distance, fight their way up the Bank, a 25% gradient, and then whip off though the town was a breathtaking experience and worth losing half a day’s writing for. Yes – that is how you end up thinking if you are serious about meeting a deadline!
Four book give away
And finally, although I’ve been absorbed in other stuff the fine folk at Impress have not. They helped me put together an interview with the wonderful Love Books Group who have a giveaway of all the Alex Hastings books on Twitter at https://twitter.com/LoveBooksGroup. So thank you to Love Books and Impress and good luck if you enter the draw.
I hope I have learnt my lesson and won’t set such a tight shedule next time and I promise my long silence will be much, much shorter in future.