July 1st and some exiting competition news to announce – I have just heard that I have been longlisted for REFLEX FICTION’S international summer 2021 flash fiction competition. Out of 521 entries, 48 have been longlisted and all will be published on REFLEX FICTION’S website – one every day between 23rd August and 30th September...
Next week sees the beginning of a blog tour for MILLER STREET SW22. My novel will be featured and reviewed by different book bloggers over a couple of weeks and their reviews and views shared on blogs and no doubt social media over this time span. This is a new venture for me and I...
Recent lockdowns have led many people to turn against the present to find relief in the past. Our personal pasts, that is. Knowledge of grandparents is usually sound, but trawling back further can be fascinating – for acquiring a bit of family history as well as learning a little about domestic and social history. What...
I am taking you back to the month of May 1991. No doubt unless you experienced something significant in that month 30 years ago you won’t have a particularly strong memory of it. But I have. And do you know what? The weather in May 1991 was terrible. Cold, wet, unseasonal. (which is a foolish...
The other day, sorting out my study and endeavouring to relieve it of unnecessary papers and files and random photographs cluttering drawers, shelves and boxes, I came across a yellowing few pages of a broadsheet newspaper – The Daily Express – for Monday February 25th 1974. Eagerly, I turned the enormous pages (how did people...
Online book buying has become so second nature to many people that no doubt they never consider actually making a purchase in a real live shop. Just as high street shopping now has to compete with online retail, so bookshops lose customers seeking not only the convenience of buying from home, but also the satisfaction...
P.G.Wells, Winchester’s independent bookshop, is now stocking copies of MILLER STREET SW22. If you are local to Winchester, please make this the place you purchase your copy – with the wonderful cover image from local artist, Josephine Chisholm, I am sure it will do justice to your bookcase! Independent bookshops are a rare breed and...
Of course it’s happened before. It’s not the first time theatres have been closed, you know, Voices – some sounding suitably sanctimonious – have reminded us. What about in Shakespeare’s time? There was the plague then, after all. Even as one of Shakespeare’s greatest devotees, I don’t find the parallel at all comforting. I mean...
A perhaps hand – or so ee cummings said in his poem – he of the absence of capital letters and punctuation school of thought. And this year, this particular spring, his poem seems more pertinent than ever before. We seem to have lived with Perhaps for the past 12 months, after all. Perhaps we’ll...
When you start thinking about it, there are an awful lot of absent mothers in literature. So many heroines in classic novels seem to be without a mother which is not surprising given the mortality rate during childbirth in the 19th century. Let alone the lack of prenatal and antenatal care around in the days...
